Late one night in 2002, Sam Yagan got a call from a former Harvard buddy with an idea for their next big company. What if they made a website with a button you could press to set up a blind date?
Yagan told him to call back when he was sober. Then he thought about the concept. In order to set people up on random dates successfully, you would need an enormous database of people and their preferences. You would need a system that could pick a place to meet that was close to both people.
Yagan and his friend, Chris Coyne, didn’t move to develop that idea, but later that year they joined with others to create OKCupid, a free dating site that matches users through mathematical algorithms based on answers to questions about their tastes. While OKCupid expanded its active user base to 3.8 million and became one of the most popular dating sites for young singles, Coyne’s original idea continued to percolate.
On Jan. 15, he will get his wish with the launch of OKCupid’s Crazy Blind Date app. The free app for iPhones and Android phones is intended to eliminate the effort it takes to set up a date. If you’re free for an hour at 7 p.m. on a Wednesday, you can fill the slot with a date. You select a local bar or coffee shop to meet from the app’s recommendations, then choose among four people suggested by the company’s algorithm and who are also free at that time. The dates are not utterly blind—you can see names, ages, and faces—but the photos have been scrambled. You meet, and afterward the app asks how it went. The better it was, the more you pay, from nothing up to $3.
“If it were a perfect world, I would charge by success,” says Yagan, a 36-year-old who has been married for nine years. “If you could start a dating site where you just got paid for marriage or sex, that’d be pretty cool. This is the closest we can come.”
OKCupid was acquired by IAC/InterActive, media mogul Barry Diller’s holding company, in 2011. Last October, Yagan took over its portfolio of dating sites, which had $518 million in revenue in 2011, up 23 percent from the prior year. The company’s other sites include Match.com, for people looking for serious relationships, and OurTime, for daters over the age of 50. Most of the sites either ask for a monthly subscription fee, as Match does, or charge users to send messages. OKCupid, aimed at users between the ages of 18 and 34, makes money mainly through advertising.
OKCupid attempted to launch a Web-based version of Crazy Blind Date in 2007, but not enough users then had smartphones, the company says. Now the industry is shifting to mobile, with more people in 2011 using apps rather than websites for dating for the first time, according to an IBISWorld report. OKCupid says its mobile app and website are receiving 20 times as much activity as in January 2012.