Under New Leadership, Zoosk Cut Workforce

Following a leadership shakeup and the decision to ditch IPO plans, Zoosk have cut their staff by 15%.

The dating service, which was founded in 2007, confirmed to TechCrunch that they had made cut backs in a number of areas.

This comes after the company announced in December that former CFO Kelly Steckelberg would be the new CEO, with co-founder Shayan Zadeh stepping aside.

Zoosk’s other founder, Alex Mehr, also vacated his position as President.

With this move, the company also cancelled their plan to IPO.

The site filed last April, looking to raise $100m in its initial public offering, and trading under the symbol ZSK.

Steckelberg said this was because the market conditions around comparable companies had not been good – with subscription businesses suffering.

And now the company has cut its workforce by 15% – around 25 people losing their jobs.

In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Zoosk said:

“In an effort to speed Zoosk’s path to becoming a self-sustaining, profitable company, we’ve lowered our expenses in many areas. We also had to make the difficult decision to reduce our headcount by 15%. We respect and support our Zoosk colleagues who were affected by this reduction.”

In their filing statement, Zoosk revealed they had 26m members, with 650,000 subscribers in over 80 countries.

This increased from 18m members and 483,000 subscribers the year before.

In 2013, their revenue rose 63% to $178.2m, up from $109.1m the year before.

Their paying subscribers contributed $153.8m of this revenue, but 13% came from their virtual currency business.

However, the company is still operating at a loss — last year reducing losses by 87% to $2.6m, down from $20.7m the year before.