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Interview with Sam Yagan of OKCupid.com

www.okcupid.com

Interview with Sam Yagan from OKCupid.com

by Anthony Cohn, People Search News

PSN: Please describe your professional background…..

SY: I've started three companies -- my first one in my dorm room during my senior year of college with two of my best friends from school. The first company was SparkNotes.com, now the leading brand of study guides for high school and college students. After selling SparkNotes to Barnes & Noble, I ran eDonkey, a P2P file-sharing application that we grew to being the most popular software of its kind. While in business school, I started OkCupid.com with my SparkNotes co-founders.

PSN: What sets your site apart from other online dating sites?

SY: Most online dating sites are identical: same business model, same stock photos, and same disregard for trying to determine compatibility. I believe that any online dating site should meet three simple criteria:

Free
Fun
Effective

To the best of my knowledge, no other online dating site meets more than one of these three criteria.

Free. The vast majority of all content and services consumed on the web are free. Nobody pays for email, instant messaging, social networking, news, or searching the web. It’s all ad-supported – just like most offline, media, too. Television, radio, newspapers, and even movies are ad-supported. Eventually, all online dating sites will be free, and we’ll look back and wonder why it was that so many people signed up for subscriptions.

Fun. Dating is supposed to be fun! In the offline world, dating takes place in a fun, social environment. People meet at parties, go out to a museum, or get know each other over coffee. Now compare those activities to online dating. Most online dating sites feel sterile and transactional – there’s nothing else to do on these sites other than “go fishing.” OkCupid puts dating in a fun, social environment. There’s plenty to do on the site, even if you don’t find a great date. Imagine going to a bar to meet a potential date – except the bar didn’t bother to serve any drinks. That’s how dating feels on the other dating sites.

Effective. Most dating sites don’t really make much of an effort to determine compatibility among users and recommend good matches. The few sites that claim to match users together rely on sketchy algorithms designed by psychiatrists. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I want a shrink setting me up on blind dates. So we approached the problem of determining compatibility by asking ourselves how blind dates work in the offline world.

Before letting a friend set them up on a blind date, most people have a set of a questions they ask about the potential date (Does she smoke? Does he still live with his mom?). Our algorithm simulates that same process online. OkCupid users have suggested thousands of questions that they want us to ask potential dates on their behalves. So, after joining OkCupid, users can start answering some of these match questions. For each question, a user answers truthfully for themselves, tells us how their ideal match would answer the question, and finally weights it on a 5-point scale, from irrelevant to mandatory. Every question a user answers allows us to match her up that much better. We’ve had over 200,000,000 of these questions answered.

PSN: How did you come up with the idea for OkCupid?

www.okcupid.com

SY: We dabbled in online dating in 2000, briefly launching a site called SparkMatch, which we shut down after deciding o focus on SparkNotes. Even back then, we knew we’d eventually start another online dating site.

PSN: How many current members do you have?

SY: I’m so glad you asked this question. Online dating sites – perhaps like online daters – sometimes exaggerate their statistics. I am shocked when I see other sites claim “15 million profiles” – since it’s well known that there aren’t even 15 million people dating online at any given time. The most important statistic that dating sites should report is how many active, participating members they have. On a subscription site, for example, only paying members matter, since those who don’t pay can’t communicate. And what good is that.

So, rather than quoting how many millions of profiles we have, I’ll say that we’ve had about 500,000 people login in the last eight weeks.

PSN: What steps does OkCupid take to prevent dating fraud?

SY: Unlike our competitors that charge subscription fees and create a sterile, transactional environment, OkCupid.com fosters a community environment. We rely on our community to monitor itself. Members can flag other users’ profiles, pictures, or journals.

PSN: How do your personality tests work?

SY: OkCupid features over 25,000 user-written tests on topics from dating to pop culture and sex to personality assessment. Our personality tests provide a lot of fun to our users and, while the tests aren’t necessarily scientifically approved, they do provide valuable information in a dating environment.

A quick anecdote illustrates how the tests can help people come together. A member contacted me a few months ago to tell me that she had just gotten engaged to another OkCupid user. She had been on the site taking the Caffeine Addiction Test. While taking the test, we showed her other users who were taking the test simultaneously. She clicked on his profile and they immediately started chatting – about coffee, of course. One thing led to another, and sure enough, they’re now married!

PSN: How can someone sign up or get more information on OkCupid?

SY: Signing up takes less than 60 seconds at www.okcupid.com. I’m also happy to answer any question from readers who want information before signing up. I can be reached at sam@okcupid.com.

May 24, 2007

SB replied on Aug 01, 2007

Hey sparkmatch worked for me. It was funny and pretty low-key. Met my girlfriend there in Feb. 2001... moved to Amsterdam and have one 2-year-old son and a daughter due in November...

Trent replied on May 24, 2007

This is the best interview yet. I love PSN! You guys can only get better. Please keep updating on a regular basis.