FORBES - Aug 27 - In 1999, Andrew Weinreich sold Six Degrees for $125M. In the following years, he went on to sell three other companies including one to IBM and another (mobile dating app MeetMoi) to Match.com. The one commonality was that in each case, his team knew his eventual buyers long before they made an acquisition offer. "Develop relationships with acquirers long before you want to sell", he said in BuiltToSell interview.
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The Truth About Who Will Buy Your Company
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Snap Interactive Appoints Alex Harrington As CEO
ACCESSWIRE - Oct 14 - Founder and former CEO Clifford Lerner steps down to head mobile dating app, 'The Grade'. As President of The Grade, Mr. Lerner's primary responsibilities will be to scale The Grade's user base, oversee its growth and drive market penetration. Alex Harrington joined SNAP in 2014 as COO and CFO. Previously, Mr. Harrington served as CEO of MeetMoi, a pioneer in the mobile dating industry, which was sold to Match.com.
See full article at Baystreet.ca
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Andrew Weinreich Launches Intensive Startup Bootcamp
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 22 - Weinreich, the founder of dating app MeetMoi, is joining the ranks of business schools, serial entrepreneurs and even national foundations offering startup entrepreneurs a compressed education in how to succeed in (starting up) a business. Rather than charge hefty fees to participants, Weinreich is partnering with service professionals like the law firm Goodwin Procter and others to defray the cost of the two-day program Weinreich calls "Roadmaps To Entrepreneurship".
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Former MeetMoi CEO Joins Snap Interactive As COO
PR NEWSWIRE - Mar 5 - Snap Interactive, a company behind social discovery platform AYI.com, appointed Alex Harrington as COO. Mr. Harrington previously served as CEO of MeetMoi, a social dating mobile platform, prior to the sale to Match.com. In addition, SNAP announced the resignation of Jon Pedersen as CFO.
See full article at PR Newswire
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MeetMoi CEO To Speak At iDate On June 5-7, 2013
WEBWIRE - Apr 23 - Alexander Harrington, CEO of MeetMoi will debate with other CEOs and the press on a panel that covers established versus startup mobile dating business strategies. Joining him will be executives from eHarmony and Courtland Brooks. The panel will be moderated by Sharon Jayson, reporter at USA Today.
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Love In The Time Of GPS
CHICAGO TRIBUNE - Feb 27 - 25.3M people accessed personals sites through mobile devices in Dec, versus 21.3M through a fixed computer, according to comScore. Location-based dating apps have been wildly successful in the gay community (Grindr - 4M users) but slower to catch on among heterosexual daters, likely because women are more wary of announcing their location. SinglesAroundMe, which features a map with drop pins showing where nearby singles are, recently launched an "approximate location" option that lets users displace their coordinates by 1 to 2 miles. Tinder scours a user's Facebook connections to see which friends of friends are single and nearby. MeetMoi sends members a push notification if a match is in the vicinity, getting no more exact than "within .2 miles," and only if both parties agree to chat does the app allow a connection. The app has 3.7M users. Of the 4M active users on OkCupid, half of whom access the site through their mobile phones, 1M have the Locals app. OkCupid also recently launched the mobile app Crazy Blind Date, which sets up a blind date — no photos, no profiles. As with online dating, mobile dating started off catering to people looking for casual relationships, but as it becomes mainstream more serious relationship-seekers are using it as well, said Mark Brooks, an analyst and consultant to the Internet dating industry. "It's more natural, you're out and about," said Brooks, who predicts that dating via mobile phone will change the game profoundly because apps can gather instantaneous feedback about how a date went, resulting in better matches. "People don't really know what they want, so the best way to match people is to look at their behaviors," Brooks said. "Your phone is going to get to know you, it is going to get to know your buying behavior."
by Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz
See full article at Chicago Tribune
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MeetMoi Has Quietly Reached 3 Million Users
BUSINESS INSIDER - Oct 24 - MeetMoi is a location-based dating app that started in 2007. Today, the company has finally crossed three million users. MeetMoi has also a big app update coming today with iPhone 5 compatibility and Facebook Connect. The following is an interview with Alex Harrington, MeetMoi's CEO:
Q: What would you say the success rate of finding someone, connecting, and going on a date is?
A: Every introduction we make is a live connection. Our response rate is currently at 70%.
Q: eHarmony CEO, Dr. Neil Warren, commented that, "a lot of other dating services aren't research based," dubbing them online bars, how do you feel about this?
A: It is a place where people can mingle and meet each other in a low-pressure. I'm ok with the term online bar.
Q: Are people using MeetMoi to date, hook up, or find relationships?
A: People use MeetMoi for any reason but by in large its for dating.
Q: What do you do to protect users privacy?
A: We never share a user's location with any other user or any third party under any circumstances. Users permission us to use their location data to find location based relevant matches, but we don't place them on a map and we don't disclose their exact location.
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GPS Dating Is Getting More Popular
ABC LOCAL - Oct 5 - Finding love the smartphone way is a trend that is definitely taking off. SinglesAroundMe says ~20K singles install the app each week. OkCupid reports 1M of its 3M users utilize the GPS feature. And HowAboutWe estimates that 1 in 4 of its online daters are now incorporating location based dating into their search for a soul mate. One of the biggest problems with GPS dating is the immediacy of it. MeetMoi, which sends profiles of people in your general location, says they never share a user's exact location. SinglesAroundMe has privacy options that allow users to turn off their location GPS or to hide their profile.
by Leslie Sykes
See full article at ABC Local
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Interview With Alexander Harrington, CEO Of MeetMoi
OPW INTERVIEW - Aug 28 - MeetMoi is a hallmark mobile dating brand. A great app, built by a notable founding team. Here’s our interview with the CEO, Alex Harrington. - Mark Brooks
How did you come to start MeetMoi?
I'm not the founder. I was brought in three years ago. The company was founded by Andrew Weinreich and Jeremy Levy in 2007. Andrew notably wrote the original patents for social networking, which is presently held by Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman of Zynga and LinkedIn, respectively. He saw social networking coming a long time ago and also saw the disruptive nature of mobile. He sort of foresaw back in 2007 that mobile was going to create opportunities for disruption in all types of industries. He saw dating as a field that could benefit consumer and potentially disrupt the status quo in the business landscape.
Wasn't he also the fellow behind Six Degrees?
That's correct. He founded the first social network of scale called Six Degrees.
How did it evolve up until the point you took over?
The mobile landscape has been reinvented probably four or five times since the company was conceived. When Andrew first started off, he envisioned it as a sort of a texting based interface. They quickly realized the opportunity was really on the mobile web. We launched our mobile web service in 2008. That's still going strong. More recently we have built out our service on app.
How would you categorize MeetMoi? It is not internet dating; what is it?
We use the online dating category as our touchstone. We've referred to ourselves as a mobile matchmaker, but it's an ongoing process to define what exactly our category is. Social discovery is also a good label as an industry term, but not particularly helpful when you're talking to consumers.
How is MeetMoi doing now?
We're doing great. We're in expansion mode. We're well capitalized. This summer is going to be a big rebirth of the company in terms of creating a higher profile and getting a significantly larger audience.
What platforms are you on now? You've got Android and iPhone?
That's correct.
Is there a dedicated iPad app?
There isn't a dedicated iPad app, no.
Are you on Blackberry?
No, we serve Blackberry users by having a capable mobile web platform.
Was it developed entirely in-house? Or how are you splitting the in-house versus outsourcing at this stage?
We do use outsource development help to extend our capabilities, but pretty much everything has been built in-house.
Where are you finding new members? How do you market out to them?
We acquire users principally through mobile.
How would you describe MeetMoi as differentiated from the competitors?
There are a number of people that have taken an approach to mobile which are natively online services that build quite nice mobile apps. Though they may build in features that are specifically geared to mobile, like location sensitivity, to the extent that it's not the main platform which their users have been habituated to use. The way we've always thought about it is that if it's natively mobile, your location is tracked in real time so that we can provide the best possible location sensitive matches. If you don't know your users' location information in real time, then is worse than useless because it's misleading. A lot of competitors haven't quite got that.
Have you dealt with women differently than guys or is it the same for everybody when it comes to geo-location?
I think for us, like most dating services, you design the service to be sensitive to the concerns of your female users. We have a lot of focus groups for women to determine just how to tailor the product to their needs.
How's the wing-man feature working out for you?
It's great. One of the challenges that dating sites have is that traditionally people don’t want to invite their friends. One of our objectives was to make dating more social. We wanted to map our product to support the ways people interact in the real world. If I'm in a group of guys looking to meet a group of girls, just meeting one isn't going to do it. I want to be introduced to another group of girls. That's the product benefit.
How are you monetizing at this stage?
We've always had a paywall since the inception of the service. If you want to send an email to another user and you're not both in the same place at the same time through the introductions that we make, then you have to become a premium member. On our iPhone and Android apps, that's a $20 a month.
Are you finding that people are sticking around for the typical three months, or how's the behavior a little different than internet dating?
I think we're doing better than that. The way our product works is that we're making introductions to you and you don't have to do a whole lot other than view the introductions and make a decision on whether or not you want to act on them, or ignore them.
How does the matchmaking work? What are you matching on? Are you going into personality profiling in the future, do you think?
We keep our profiles short and sweet, so our goal is to introduce people to quality matches and learn people’s preferences as they give us feedback. Right now, because it's on mobile and people originate their profiles on mobile, we don't want to give people elaborate personality tests.
Have you seen much difference in the behavior between people across different platforms? So iPhone to iPhone users, Android to Andoird users. Do people behave differently?
There's certainly differences in the types of users on Android and iPhone. iPhones are expensive, so it tends to be a more for affluent users. The app ecosystem on iPhone is mostly a paid ecosystem whereas on Android, there is a lot of freeware.
How are you accepting payments?
We use carrier billing and credit card.
Do people enter their credit cards, or do they prefer to go through the carrier?
We get a lot lower friction conversion on carrier billing without question. We do see quite a lot of credit card revenue as well. Part of it is, we have some algorithms to sort of determine which payment method suits the user, and if they fail on one we present the other.
Of course you'd rather take the credit card, you wouldn't be paying quite so much. A few years it use to be 50% that the carriers were taking for on-deck apps. What are they taking now?
They're moving in that direction for sure. It still very tentative.
What do you think is reasonable? Are you happy to pay 30% to Apple?
Happy is the wrong word. I think willing is a better word. Seeing revenue shares of 80% is big progress. The reason why I'm willing to pay 30% for iTunes connect is that they've built a community of users that pay and the transaction interface is relatively frictionless. If you look at Google Checkout, by contrast, that takes the same percentage. They haven't yet built in continuity billing, the billing failures are significantly higher than on iTunes. I see Google Checkout as being overpriced, but iTunes can get away with that kind of pricing because they've built the best mobile billing interface out there.
So Google isn't doing month-to-month yet?
No, there's not continuity billing in Google Checkout in the app store. They have it as a mobile web or web-based Google Checkout product, but in Google Play, it's transactional billing.
Do you think Blackberry is going to be on the radar in the future?
I don't have high hopes for it. It feels like it's riding off into the sunset. We don't have any foreseeable intentions of building out for that platform.
What's your vision for the future? Where is MeetMoi going to be in a year's time?
I think we'll be more or less the company we are now. We'd like to have a significantly larger audience concentrated in urban areas. I think in a year's time, we'd like to have a very strong New York audience base. San Francisco, Chicago, L.A., Austin – places like that.
Do you think you'll go into the real world advertising realm?
We've already done some event-based marketing. So there will be some offline marketing, but I'd say the bulk of it will be online.
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Meet In A Bar: The New Dating Technology
NY TIMES - Aug 21 - Both Match.com and OkCupid, which was bought by Match last year but operates independently, are getting behind the offline idea. Match bought commercial time during the Olympics to promote “The Stir,” as it calls its gatherings. Match.com has held a few hundred events each month since May in more than 50 cities. OkCupid has organized ~100 events in New York since early July and plans to bring the idea to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and a few other cities in October. Smaller services are also offering gatherings. MeetMoi has been hosting get-togethers to bring more of its users to the same space at the same time. And Nerve, a sex and dating site based in New York, says it is working on a mobile app that will emphasize nearby events. The move toward real-world meetings follows some well-publicized studies that cast doubt on whether personality tests and data can accurately predict whether two people will be compatible. “We still use our matching algorithms,” said Mandy Ginsberg, president of Match.com. “But maybe it is slightly easier to walk into a room full of people meeting and talking.”
by Jenna Wortham
See full article at NY Times
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Can GPS Find You A Mate?
BOSTON GLOBE - Aug 5 - OkCupid Locals is meant to follow you wherever you go and find you matches along the way. “Mobile dating has created a new promise, an enticing one,” says Aaron Schildkrout, co-founder HowAboutWe. “When you see these people on your phone, you think, ‘This person is real, they’re near me, and I may actually be able to encounter them in the real world". Grindr was the first app of its kind to get traction. By March 2012, Grindr had 4M users in 192 countries. MeetMoi, which came online as an iPhone and Android app in 2010, alerts users when another MeetMoi user is nearby. SinglesAroundMe, also released in 2010, features a singles-locator map of sorts. OkCupid launched its Locals app in 2011. Sam Yagan, founder of OkCupid, says two-thirds of its mobile users activate the GPS-positioning info. Mark Brooks, a consultant to Internet dating sites, points out that men tend to use location-based dating features more than women, and that location-based dating apps are most often used by singles in big cities. What’s more, the singles that use them are using them all the time. “People don’t view as many pages on their mobile dating apps as they do when they’re looking at profiles at home, but they’re logging in as many as eight times a day,” says Brooks. Mark Brooks jokes that one reason location-based dating hasn’t yet gone mainstream is that there are too many men running the sites. Match is the only major dating site run by a woman, and its CEO, Mandy Ginsberg, has said the company won’t rely on location-based tools. Robinne Burrell, the company’s director of mobile product and distribution, says its experts don’t believe the location-based approach puts singles on the path to long-term relationships.
by Brooke Lea Foster
See full article at Boston.com
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Operation Match Version 2012
UNLIMITED MAGAZINE - Mar 6 - In 1965 a group of Harvard students started Operation Match that used questionnaires to identify compatible matches. When the students sold it three years later they had received ~1M responses which resulted in a few marriages. Today North America’s dating sites attracts 22M users a month, says online dating industry analyst Mark Brooks. Online daters have upwards of 1,000 dating sites to choose from, aside from industry giants Match, eHarmony, OKCupid and PlentyofFish. "Starting a dating site is like starting a restaurant," Brooks says. "It’s very attractive but there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye."
Brian Schechter and Aaron Schildkrout created HowAboutWe.com in 2009. The site is built around going on "awesome dates," with users able to see a list of date proposals in their immediate area. The company has raised ~$19M. Another site Sparkology is invite-only dating site. Other startups include Soul2Match, which links potential dates based on their photos and facial features, and Luv@FirstTweet, which uses Twitter to match singles. At TheJMom.com, matchmaking is left up to parents.
In a report in the Journal of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team looked closely and critically at the online dating industry. The researchers found that while online dating has great potential to improve meeting potential romantic partners, the exclusive matching formulas many online dating sites claim to have are unsubstantiated and likely little more effective than randomly approaching strangers at a bar. Sites and apps can facilitate face-to-face interactions quickly. Mark Brooks agrees. "I don’t think people want to come home and spend hours and hours tappity-tapping on the keyboard. They want to be in front of people," he says. "Computer-mediated communication is not gratifying enough for the human soul." Brooks thinks three trends will define the future of the industry: location-based services, mobile services and behavioral matchmaking. "Dating sites that do well will be serving their users’ interests, which means a little more immediacy, a little more help and going mobile," he says.
That instant face-to-face interaction is what MeetMoi, a location-based mobile dating company led by CEO Alex Harrington, has been facilitating since 2007. Users are matched with one another based on preferences and proximity, through application-based and mobile web-based dating.
by Cailynn Klingbeil
See full article at Unlimited Magazine
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As 20-somethings Take To Online Dating
OREGON LIVE - Feb 12 - More 20-somethings are on online dating sites than ever, and their numbers are growing. Only 8% of users on Match.com are under 30. Free sites like OkCupid and PlentyofFish report much stronger numbers among 20-somethings. In fact, the majority of OkCupid's 8M members are under 30, with the most common age being 24. In the past year, countless more sites have sprung up promising to be the next big thing in online dating for the young adult. They tend to be more tech-savvy, carefree and interactive. There's MeetMoi, a mobile-based site that tracks your location through your phone, allowing you to invite nearby users on a spontaneous date. There's Clique, a site that lets New York City singles meet friends of friends by linking their profile to social networks like Facebook. There's Assisted Serendipity, which uses Foursquare check-in data to monitor a user's favorite hangout spots and notify them when the male-to-female ratio tips in their favor. There's even Spoondate, which lets users plan dates based on a mutual craving for, say, udon noodles.
by Kelly House
See full article at The Oregonian
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5 Location-Based Dating Apps Worthy Of Your Love
MASHABLE - Nov 22 - A study by Skout noted that 69% of people were comfortable meeting up with someone they met on their iPhone, and 40% were using a mobile dating service while out at bars, clubs and restaurants.
1. Brightkite - It isn’t a “dating” app per se, but rather, introduces local users on a basic level.
2. MeetMoi - The company’s goal is to “strip down dating to what’s essential — the introduction.”
3. OkCupid - OKCupid introduced its geo-location app to help users keep watch for local singles in July.
4. Sonar.me - By connecting to Facebook and Twitter, the app lets you see, in real time, how to connect with those physically around you.
5. Skout - With ~1M users, the service hosts one of the largest and most popular location-based dating apps on the iPhone and Android markets.
by Layla Revis
See full article at Mashable
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Location Based Dating: Concerns Over Privacy
BLOOMBERG - May 4 - Meetic is joining start-ups including MeetMoi in offering location-based dating services. Meetic will introduce features this year that let handset users find out real-time who’s around them and interested in meeting, and match potential soulmates who, for example, frequent the same gym, Managing Director Philippe Chainieux said in an interview.The number of European Web users visiting a dating site “almost every day” through their mobile rose 49% between February 2010 and 2011 to 2.8M, according to comScore. The number doing so at least once a week climbed 44%. Convenient mobile services will give dating sites a chance to boost their “conversion rate". Location-based iPhone and Android app FlirtMaps topped 500K downloads last month, with that figure expected to double by the end of the year. Grindr, an app for gays boasts 62K users in London alone. Still, safety concerns may slow the adoption of location- based dating. To ease some of those concerns, FlirtMaps limits geo- localization to a one-kilometer radius. Meetic is considering making only men visible on its pending real-time “flirting” service, keeping women’s locations at a given moment mostly off the map.
by Matthew Campbell
The full article was originally published at Bloomberg, but is no longer available.
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