the service evolves before imposing a rigid business model. “In the ‘huge success’ case, imagine that we’re setting up a couple of thousand dates a week. Then we’d be driving serious date-related revenues; I can imagine having bars bidding on where we send people for dates. But we’re not too worried about that right now. Yes, we’re in this to make money—but even more, we like making stuff that people love.”
Of course, once you’ve heard how Crazy Blind Date was built, the idea seems rather obvious. There isn’t any fundamentally new technology behind the site (though it could be argued that the service wouldn’t have worked until text messaging, a required part of the date setup process, became a nearly ubiquitous form of communications a few years ago). So why hasn’t anyone tried it before?
Yagan himself says he’s mystified, though he points out that to make a dating service work, there does need to be a critical mass of people looking for dates in a given geographical area. Because Crazy Blind Date is a spinoff of New York-based OkCupid—one of the Web’s most popular free dating sites—it does happen to have large a pool of singles to dip into. “Without OkCupid we would never have tried this,” says Yagan.
But there is at least one other company, Mix & Meet, exploring the technology of last-minute liaisons. The company’s founder, chairman, and chief operating officer is Bruce Franco, a Cambridge native who says he “worked Match.com like it was a second job” after finding himself single a few years ago. “It was extremely tough,” he says. “It’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of waiting; it builds up your expectations, usually just in time for a huge letdown. And all I really wanted to do was go out and socialize and meet people when my other friends were busy.”
So Franco found a business partner, hired a programmer, and started building Mix & Meet, which “gives you the instant gratification of becoming part of a social group tonight, meeting five other people that you didn’t know yesterday.” In contrast to Crazy Blind Date, Mix & Meet is about “group dates,” small mixers involving people from the user’s chosen age bracket and neighborhood. Members will pay a nominal fee to attend mixers based on the type of venue they’d like to go to; they can hit a mixer at a casual beer bar for free, at a tourist bar or microbrew for $5, or at an upscale cocktail lounge for $20.
Franco thinks the service will be used by young singles looking for social experiences in that gray zone somewhere between a date and a party—a zone that’s difficult to penetrate, if you don’t already have a group of close friends to hang out with in your area. But he also thinks Mix & Meet might also appeal to other demographics. “Moms are the single most active group of users on Meetup,” says Franco. “Say a mom decides at four o’clock that she’s had a tough day and she wants to make a reservation to go out. We not only pick a venue that minimizes her travel distance, and put her in an instant mixer where she can meet with other moms and talk about their mom problems. But the next day we could also form an instant play group for those moms and their kids, by looking at where everybody is located on a map and sending them all to a common park.”
Mix & Meet is registering members, but isn’t yet live—it’s still building toward the membership numbers needed to form spontaneous mixers, which Franco says is about 500 people per age bracket per neighborhood. The company is funded, for now, by a single angel investor. “We’ve talked with three VCs and at least two of them are interested, but they want to see usership, so we’re trying to get critical mass on a fairly tight budget,” Franco says. The company’s big break, he says, could come from licensing the Mix & Meet platform for use inside an organization such as a local professional group, or an existing virtual community such as Eons.
“We’re not a dating site,” Franco emphasizes. “We’re looking to help people make friends, and maybe relationships, that might go somewhere.” And echoing Yagan, Franco points out that participants in instant mixers don’t have much to lose. “Let’s say nobody likes anybody at your table. Wander off and meet some other people! At least you have that instant social credibility of having been with a group.”
Sounds better than cleaning the refrigerator one more time, anyway.
