Online Dating Will Win

Online dating will win, to the cost of the rest of us.

When Ray Kroc bought the McDonald brothers' hamburger stands in the 1950s, he saw the future. He saw the  way to commoditize a fragmented business to tap an underserved market. It's a formula that works time and again, most recently in Silicon Valley.

Don Valentine, one of the most successful venture capitalists in the Valley funds only businesses with the following:

A unique product.

A competitive advantage ie: barriers to entry.

A monster market.


I know I'm bouncing back and forth between burgers and bytes, but they're the same example from different eras. In the fifties and sixties, the concept of fast food fulfilled all of Don Valentine's requirements. After World War II, folks in the US were discovering their appetites. Televisions, refrigerators, air-conditioning, cars - all these things filled the tracts of new suburban America.

Then came the appetites for food. Once your house is full of humming machines and you have a car for all occasions, it's time to look outside. When you no longer have to brown-bag it to work, businesses that provide lunch win.

McDonalds won because it catered to the taste of the country at the right price. What kept it at the top was the ability to precisely replicate the formula; the food, the stores and the service. But lots of other folks noticed the fast-food trend and followed. Once you find a successful concept, subtle changes to individual elements will create something new and different enough to separate yourself from the rest. Add a growing and wealthy population, and riches are yours.This idea still works today: think Chipotle.

So the road to changing a society is well understood; examine the desires of a population and cater to that. If you find a way to reach a giant audience cheaply and then replicate the concept you will win. That's where the confluence of:

Widespread high-speed internet,

Cheap computing and...

Horniness

...have found us, here at the rise of internet dating. In terms of monster markets, there is none bigger.

It's all pretty easy, at least in retrospect. You want to find a special someone - or just a someone - find yourself a dating website. Contact, communicate, meet, and yada yada, whatever you both want. And from the business point of view, there's almost nothing to it. Some servers, a software front end, a back end, and a credit-card processing facility. (Or ads, like Plenty Of Fish.) You don't even need to add content because your users do so. In a way, it's the smartest business model ever - there's infinite supply for a huge demand that finds you.

It must have been like this with the first one hundred McDonalds. Suddenly, the dollars can't be counted fast enough.

But there is a downside. A fast food nation is an obese nation. Unless you exercise a lot, all that fried food will eventually take its toll, because our bodies aren't designed for those processed meals. Notwithstanding, fast food is and will remain hugely popular.

It's the same with internet dating. It's easy, accessible and provides almost instant gratification. Sometimes it might even work to find the love of someone's life. In the long term though, this is not the way we were designed to find people. Just as fast food adds to our waistlines, so internet dating will subtract from our social skills and, in the end, society.


To me, that's not a win.




Bottoms Up, Big Macs.