Category: IQElite

IQ Elite Looks for Partner/Merger

Posted on March 31, 2019

Iqelite iconOPW INTERVIEW – 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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This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.com

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Monetize Your Dating Site With Groupon

Posted on May 3, 2011

Intelligentelite logoIDEA – May 2 – Dr Eike Post, founder of Intelligent Elite, a matchmaking dating site, came up with an idea to monetize his dating platform with Groupon, the daily deals site. Intelligent Elite is already talking to Groupon and other group buying platforms and negotiating 59-70% commission. They are going to sell discounted deals from Groupon that are related to group activities. What are your thoughts?

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Dr. Eike Post, co-Founder Of Intelligent Elite

Posted on November 29, 2010

Eike Berend Post Intelligent Elite OPW INTERVIEW – Nov 29 – One million users and counting, with a near zero marketing budget. This can happen. Intelligent Elite has made marketing magic happen. Here’s my interview with the co-founder, Dr. Eike Post. – Mark Brooks

You have a rather unusual site. You offer an IQ test, an emotional quotient test and a personality test. So I’m most intrigued with the personality test. Could you tell us a bit more about what kind of scientific basis that it is based on and how it works?
The personality test is based on the personality types proposed by Carl Gustav Jung and the Meyers Briggs typology. We have 4 dimensions that we measure with two extremes resulting in 16 different personality types.

How do you match based on those?
We currently use two dimensions for matching, sensing/intuition and thinking/feeling. The more similar, the better the match. For the other dimensions there are some researchers who say that opposites attract each other, and others who say it is better if you have similar personality types.

Matchmaking is generally regarded as being useful for more serious dating relationships but you disagree. Tell us more.
We think that matchmaking has many advantages over dating. The main advantages are saving time, better matching because we have information that the user doesn’t have or doesn’t focus on, providing the users a hook to contact the potential partner and some balance that everybody gets a chance to be contacted.

And we think all 4 advantages apply not only to the older demographic who are looking for a long term relationship but also to younger demographics who are not necessarily looking for a long term relationship. For example, we have many people on our site who are what we call passive date seekers. They don’t actively go on the site to look for people but if we offer them matches they wouldn’t refuse them. So dating is not attractive but matchmaking is.

People can log in through Facebook Connect. You have over a million users at this stage. How much do you think the Facebook Connect is responsible for that growth? And how much have you spent on marketing so far?
We spend very little on marketing because we got 95% of our users by word of mouth mostly via Facebook. However, it’s not so much Facebook Connect but more the Facebook application, which is responsible for viral growth. We have tried other viral channels such as Bebo, Hi5, and MySpace, however, it has become clear in the last year that Facebook is really the only way to go.

I heard that you spent less than 100 Euro in total on marketing for a million users. That’s quite the landmark achievement. What are your plans moving forward?
Our plan is to improve the matching algorithm further and maintain our leadership in what we call the new space of social matchmaking.

How do you define social matchmaking?
It is the combination of matchmaking like eHarmony on the one hand and social dating like Zoosk on the other.

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