EU STARTUPS - May 6 - Frankfurt-based startup Go Crush is a dating app that allows people to meet in groups. Dr. Jost Schwaner, the ex-CEO of Elitepartner, has just invested a mid-five-figure sum in Go Crush. The team plans to raise another €500K in September, after raising €250K last year. Founded in 2017, Go Crush so far has ~50k registered users in Germany.
by Mary Loritz
See full article at EU Startups
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PR NEWSWIRE - Apr 16 - Atari, one of the world's most iconic consumer brands, announced today an additional investment in LGBT Qutie. Since its launch last May, Qutie has seen ~400% growth in monthly user acquisition. "This new larger investment from Atari will allow us to scale our growth," said Jordan Weiss and Rachel Kimelman, Co-Founder's of Qutie.
See full article at PR Newswire
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OPW INTERVIEW - Apr 7 - Hal Oppenheimer is a Harvard and Yale grad and an accomplished investment banker and he wasn't very impressed with his Internet dating experience. Hal is the CEO/Founder of Dating Service Network (DSN). His frustrations with Internet dating led to the creation of DSN, his dating site aggregator. What's most interesting is, unlike former dating site aggregators, the service is actually good for dating apps (Match, POF, etc) because all members must have paid memberships. Full Disclosure: DSN is a client of Courtland Brooks.
What is Dating Service Network?
We're not a dating site or swipe app. We're a 3rd party outsource service for active online daters and professional matchmakers. Basically, our customers don't want to hassle with online dating on their own so they hire us. For that reason we are building a network of what I call Online Matchmakers.
What needs do you address?
A recent Consumer Reports survey found that online dating had "the worst satisfaction scores in the history of Consumer Reports". Earlier this month, the New York Times sited a 2018 Match.com survey where 54% said it was a time-consuming hassle. It's what Lisa Clampitt (founder of the Matchmakers Institute of NYC) calls "online dating fatigue syndrome" and it's now an epidemic.
Our Online Concierge Service offers these fed up online daters a hybrid combination of the personal service of a traditional matchmaker and our proprietary online dating platform. However, our service is $800 per month, not $5,000 to $10,000.
Who are your target users exactly?
35 to 60 year old busy divorced singles. Within that group we target the busiest most active online daters. The top 13% most attractive, best educated and highest income users.
What will you do for offline matchmakers?
They can license our middleware platform to add online dating services to their existing offline business models. This give them a totally new opportunity to cash-in on the growing migration of frustrated online daters, willing to pay for convenience.
How does it work from the customer perspective?
We're part of a rapidly growing list of 3rd party services that help users construct their dating site profiles. Then, with their permission, we use those profiles to do a lot of legwork for them. Virtual Dating Assistants, and Personal Dating Assistants (PDA) are two other examples. PDA charges as much as $1,700 per week. Our business model is much different, but we're all 3rd party services using our customer's profiles.
What are you able to do for them?
Everything we do are things any user could do on their own. But, we're ~30X faster and at a labor cost well below what our customer's time is worth. To start with, our customers must have paid subscriptions to all the dating sites they want us to search for them. Once that's taken care of, what we do is pretty simple. We review female online daters everyday across all the major sites, pre-filter for our customer's basic demographic criteria, and pre-filter for the top 35% most attractive. Then we create a personalized online dating library for that customer. Finally, the customer, or their matchmaker, can then use our proprietary filtering system to pick the customer's top priorities, in seconds.
What are your plans for 2019?
We're looking for seed capital to complete a full-scale market test. After the test we'll look for later stage financing to begin our national rollout in 2020.
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IDI - Mar 31 - Dr Eike Post founded IQ Elite, a dating site for smart folks, in 2010. I interviewed him to find out where IQ Elite is going now. - Mark Brooks
What is the USP of IQ Elite?
IQ Elite was established in 2010 as a matchmaking site that uses as the main matchmaking criterion not a personality test but an intelligence test.
Thus, we together with the SRH University Heidelberg developed an online IQ test to match users based on IQ. Our matchmaking is complemented by other psychometric tests, such as personality, emotional intelligence and love style test.
What is the track record of IQ Elite?
Since its inception in 2010 over 20 million people have taken psychometric tests on IQ Elite and over 8 million people have joined the site.
During this time many couples have told us about the love they found on IQ Elite, including getting married and forming a family.
What does a typical IQ Elite user look like?
The concept of IQ Elite seems to resonate more with the older generation, and thus our active users are mostly above 35.
In terms of geography users are primarily from France, Italy, Poland, Romania and Latin America.
Are you profitable?
Yes, we are profitable but at a low level. However, over the last 10 years around 1 million euro have been earned.
Unfortunately, revenue is slowly declining. This has to do with the fact that we do not have a comparable density of users as similar sites such as eharmony, eDarling and Parship.
Why do you want to sell to or partner with a larger player?
To be honest, after working on the company for almost 10 years, the team members would like to move on. Also, in order to become profitable we reduced our IT development team four years ago, and stopped improving the product. That means that our dating product, that is build on Python and React is not optimized, buggy and not mobile friendly.
Thus currently we are faced with the tough decision to either invest substantially into the product or merge with another player who already has an attractive product.
What sales prices are you looking to get?
It is hard to say: On the one hand we have over 8 million registered users, almost 150,000 monthly visitors and are profitable, so we were hoping to sell for at least half a million.
On the other hand, looking at other M&A transactions it seems that the price to revenue ratio in the dating industry is low. For example, eharmony, with a cumulative revenue of over 1 billion USD was apparently acquired for only 85 million USD. Also, our users and revenue have been declining.
For those reason, in an outright sale we would want to get just 250k euro so that we could pay back our investors, while in a partnership, we would be Ok with 100k euro upfront and an earn-out that depends on the future revenue. Interested parties can contact us at office@intelligentelite.com.
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PR NEWSWIRE - Mar 22 - Spark Networks today announced its entry into a definitive agreement to acquire Zoosk. With the addition of Zoosk, Spark will more than double in size and the combined business will be considerably more valuable than the two stand-alone entities. In 2020, Spark expects Adjusted EBITDA to exceed $50M. Approximately two-thirds of the combined company's revenue will be generated in North America. Spark will acquire 100% of Zoosk's shares with a combination of cash and stock valuing the company at ~$255M based on the closing price of Spark Networks stock on March 20, 2019. The transaction is expected to close early in Q3 2019.
See full article at PR Newswire
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BUSINESSWIRE - Mar 6 - For Q4 2018 revenue was $52.5M, up 31% YOY. GAAP net income was $4.3M, compared to a net loss of $68.1M the prior year Q4. The prior year Q4 included a non-cash asset impairment charge of $56.4M and a deferred tax charge of $7.7M. Adjusted EBITDA was $10.6M, compared to $10.5M in the prior Q4. In 2018 revenue was $178.6M, up from $123.8M in 2017. "In addition to reporting a strong quarter, I'm excited to announce the acquisition of Growlr, which provides a meaningful step into the large same-sex dating market and expands the base of users to whom we can deliver our live video product," said Geoff Cook, CEO of The Meet Group. "Video transformed our business in 2018," continued Cook. "Our goal is to build the best place to meet new people through video. We increased the average monetization per daily active video user to 18c, up from 14c in the Q3, 2018." The Meet Group acquired Growlr for $11.8M, using $4.8M in cash and $7M from its existing line of credit, plus an earnout of $2M to be paid in annual $1M installments over the next two years if certain revenue metrics are achieved in each year. The Growlr app has ~200K global DAU, who exchange millions of messages each day.
See full article at The Meet Group website
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IDI - Mar 4 - Relationship A.I. is a subscription app which helps improve the way daters make relationship decisions. It was a finalist for the iDate Awards, "Best New Technology in Dating 2019." Dating app users are managing multiple dating apps at a time and investing many hours a week maintaining their accounts. Relationship A.I. helps dating app users track and process their love life from the first message through to a long-term relationship. It can compliment dating app platforms that are seeking to create greater LTV. They're in an active seed round. Contact the CEO Karinna Karsten directly to learn more at info@relationship-ai.com.
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OPW INTERVIEW - Feb 18 - Rumpur is billed as the first dating app for ethic gay men, a relationship focused service 'without the restraints of discrimination based on race.' Here's what the CEO/Founder Garfield Wright had to say about the app.
Why Rumpur?
At Rumpur we recognize that ethnic gay men are faced with racism, discrimination and bigotry on many dating apps and websites. These men are left feeling rejected and debased as human beings. Rumpur was created to level the online dating field for ethnic gay men.
What's your USP
Rumpur is the first American based gay dating app to offer live video chat where users can authenticate each other and talk in real time.
How many daily active users do you have at this stage?
As of this writing, we have a total of 11,904 users. 7953 of such are active users and 5,340 are daily active users.
What funding have you had to date?
To date we haven't sought any funding because we wanted to gain traction before we approach any investors. Now we are gaining traction and growing our user base. We believe now is the right time to seek funding.
What are you plans for the app?
Our plan for the app is to make it the number one app for ethnic gay people in the LGBTQ community throughout the world. Although we started out targeting ethnic gay men we will eventually open up our app to accommodate the entire LGBTQ community such as lesbians, non binaries, etc.
Whats next?
We are gaining traction every day with new users entering our platform. However, we lack the necessary funding to drive growth. We are seeking a seed round in financing to take Rumpur to the next level. The funding will be used to hire a product manager, hire a marketing expert, increase our advertising budget and optimize our app store presence.
What kind of money are you looking for ideally?
We are seeking a seed round of $400,000 to $500,000 for 10% of our company. We understand our target audience and our market and are a very resilient team that can weather the ups and downs of running a startup.
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TECH CRUNCH - Feb 7 - Last year, Match Group acquired a 51% stake in Hinge. The company has now confirmed that it fully bought out Hinge in the past quarter, and today owns 100%. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Match believes Hinge can offer an alternative to those who aren't interested in using casual apps, like Tinder. As Match explained in November, it plans to double-down on marketing that focuses on Tinder's more casual nature and use by young singles, while positioning Hinge as the alternative for those looking for serious relationships. The company said it would also increase its investment in Hinge going forward, in order to grow its user base. "Hinge downloads are now 2.5 times more than the next largest app, and 40% of Bumble downloads," said Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg.
by Sarah Perez
See full article at Tech Crunch
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GLOBE NEWSWIRE - Feb 4 - PeerStream has completed a sale of its non-core dating assets to The Dating Company LLC, a private U.S.-based company. The dating assets consist principally of the FirstMet dating service, which was founded in 2007. Alex Harrington, CEO of PeerStream, commented: "as we shifted our corporate strategy it became clear that the dating assets were non-core and suffered from lack of management attention, resulting in underperformance in 2018, including a significant revenue decline and negative cash flow."
See full article at Globe Newswire
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