OPW INTERVIEW - Sep 22 - WhiteLabelDating is celebrating it's 8th year anniversary. Here's our interview with the CEO/co-founder Ross Williams. (FD: WLD is a client of Courtland Brooks) - Mark Brooks
The Futures Company came out with a white paper titled; ‘Is happiness your business?” There are 21,000 books on Amazon on “happiness”. Does this relate to your business?
We have members of the sites that we want to make happy. We’ve also got partners that run the sites. A lot of them have given up their full time job to run their dating site which means they can work where and when they want. In online dating we hope we sell the dream of happiness, we sell the promise. If I asked a single man what would you pay to meet the woman of his dreams he would say ‘anything’. We aim for happiness for consumers, partners and our staff.
I understand recently you had a run rate of about £30 million in revenue a year? What proportion of that is from your partners/white labels?
Around 85-90%. It’s where we focus most of our time.
How many partners do you have at this stage?
It grows each day. There’s 1,000’s in the system. A couple of hundred partners generate decent revenue for us. It’s a long term business. We have partners who are generating tens of thousands of pounds in revenue a month, who weren’t doing anything last year.
You’ve grown considerably. Is it true that the bigger you get the more difficult it is to introduce innovations?
It is. You don’t want to innovate at the expense of existing business. We have over 6,000 sites on our book now and we have to test/check they all work well. We are about to see some exciting developments at our partner conference in October. We spend £1.5 million a year on development. Two thirds of this goes on new features.
You're 8 years old now, right?
We turned 8 last week. In the first 4 years we grew from £0 - £3 million a year, and from 2007 to 2011 we grew to £30 million a year. Exponential growth.
Would you have guessed you would be at this stage 8 years ago, was that your goal?
Yes, we were very confident. We didn’t really come out {with our numbers} until about 4 years ago but that was our intention. You don’t want to shout too loud until you are in a position to manage the growth you’ve got. We’ve gone from UK-only to International.
In what year will you generate £100 million?
I would think by 2013 or 2014 but there are lots of things that could happen before then. There are great opportunities in mobile, social and international.
Match.com is at about £280 million revenue.
We matched Match.com in the UK about 9 months ago. We are a lot larger than them in the UK.
What would be your top 3 pieces of advice that you would give to someone new to the industry, to be successful with WhiteLabelDating?
Marketing, marketing, marketing. You just can’t start a dating site without brand marketing.
