I know you're not the only person to have that thought today; and given the volume of the readership on this site, I'd pretty much bet money that a LOT of people are thinking about that right now. I'd do it, but I'm too busy with other projects. But I'd be amazed if another PoF / OKCupid style competitor doesn't emerge in short-order.
Maybe one will even go through YCombinator. pg and crew have said they see that as an area they'd fund:
8. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you're going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.
Maybe pushing the OKC is now a big, corporate sellout angle is enough to bootstrap? If you could generate enough hype to get even 1% of active OKC users to signup, you'd be in a good shape.
It's interesting you mention this. I distinctly remember signing up for OKC because it had fun quizzes and stuff -- I wasn't really thinking it was much of a dating site at the time, and that it was more of a social networking site in the days before Facebook :) So finding an interesting angle on that sort of thing could be a way to avoid the chicken/egg thing, and I think that's how OKC did it to start with.
I've started two dating sites (for Russian-speaking users) and never encountered a chicken and egg problem. I was able to get a useful number of active users for under $1000 (if you concentrate only on several big cities).
The real problem for me was: when you stop advertising, the traffic is fading off.
There is some kind of secret how Plenty of Fish or OkCupid are getting visitors without advertisement.
i've had a thought on how to run an online dating site rattle around in my head for a while. always wanted to give it a shot, but i'm still busy working on something else. i even coughed it up on a HN ideas thread a while back, just to see if it would get made.
if i were to suddenly have more free time, i'd probably give it a shot, myself.
It's an interesting space that's for sure. The "chicken and egg" problem is a challenge, but so is the idea (if you buy it) that men and women want fundamentally different things and have different drives and motives when it comes to dating; and different approaches to how they date. Since I started reading a lot of evolutionary psychology stuff, I've reshaped a lot of my views on how dating and relationships work.
Now, granted, EP is a controversial science, and I'm not sure that those guys are spot-on about everything... but I strongly believe that the ideas coming out of that world do reflect some underlying truths about our world. If that's true, then my questions would be "how do you build a dating site that's optimized for both men and women? Or can you? And if you can't, which do you optimize for? Or does that even make sense?"
indeed. beyond that, i think that a dating site that is truly effective inherently means that you're constantly losing good customers as they no longer need the site (though perhaps the natural attrition rate is lower).
its also hard to tell if free sites have come to a weird nash equilibrium, or if their current state is actually optimal and the "best" way to do online dating just sucks. would something more fundamentally different be less successful despite being proven more effective simply because of how it works?
Maybe one will even go through YCombinator. pg and crew have said they see that as an area they'd fund:
(http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html)
8. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you're going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.