Dating Startups Don’t Stand a Chance Against This Corporate Matchmaker

Aaron Schildkrout and I were sitting in the bar of the Gansevoort Hotel in New York City when I asked him whether he planned on selling his dating site, HowAboutWe, to the giant of the online match-making business, InterActiveCorp, aka IAC. A deal would make good sense, after all. IAC runs a near monopoly in this market, fueled by popular properties like Match.com, OkCupid, and Tinder. Competing with all of that seemed like a nearly insurmountable task for HowAboutWe, an 85-employee startup Schildkrout founded with his friend Brian Schechter.

Still, Schildkrout rejected the idea. “Our road will be really obvious,” he answered, “and not the one you just described.” He was a little vague at first, but he went on to lay out his vision for how the company would expand far beyond the dating space. It had already launched a media vertical called HowAboutWe Media, a local deal site for people in relationships called HowAboutWe for Couples, and, most recently, a couples messaging app called You&Me. Just as Nike built the all-purpose brand for fitness, Schildkrout said, he wanted HowAboutWe to be the all-purpose brand for love.

It was a deliberate strategy, he explained, that would prevent HowAboutWe from competing exclusively in the dating space, a market that IAC effectively owns. “Dating is going to be capped at something like a $200 million revenue business even if it goes really well,” he said. “We want to build something much bigger.”

But this week, just two months after our conversation, HowAboutWe announced that it is indeed selling off its dating and media properties to IAC’s Match Group for an undisclosed amount, leaving the fate of its fledgling couples platforms and the rest of the founders’ long-term plans in limbo. The deal is further proof of what Schildkrout and Schechter seem to have known all along: for dating startups, resistance against IAC is futile. That’s a big problem for innovation in this space. And, yes, online dating needs innovation—just like any other internet market.

With the notable exception of Tinder, the wildly successful mobile dating app launched out of IAC’s Hatch Labs, the brands under IAC’s Match Group just aren’t in tune with their younger audience. The companies it acquires tend to stay the same. Schildkrout himself described them as “weird” and “not aligned with the millennial spirit.” “It’s like early 2000s, even late 90s design, and getting trapped in an endless upgrade,” he said this spring, back when IAC was still a competitor. “I was single, and I was like: ‘I would never use this.’”

by Issie Lapowsky, Wired |  Read more:

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