Why do dating companies find it so hard to get funding from mainstream Silicon Valley investors?
That is the question entrepreneur, investor and author of widely-read tech blog Andrew Chen asks in his latest article.
The piece was inspired by listening to the podcast Startup, the second season of which follows matchmaking startup Dating Ring, and the trials and tribulations of building a new company in a crowded dating market.
As Chen says, it is notoriously difficult for dating products to get funded by well-known Silicon Valley investors, and “there’s a large swath of angels/funds who categorically refuse to invest in the dating category in the same way that many refuse to invest in games, hardware, gambling, etc.”
Chen identifies a number of reasons why this is, which include online dating’s built-in churn, the fact that it has a shelf life, paid acquisition channels are expensive, and city-by-city expansion is tough.
These factors mean investors often judge dating as a whole category, but as Chen says in his excellent blog, dismissing an entire category by pattern-matching can often be a mistake, and could well prove the case with online dating.
Read the blog here.