Monday, February 26, 2007

Dressing up the business

Awhile back, I share an article that I read. In the article, a photo showed the founder of Linx Dating taking one of her male clients to a store to update his dating wardrobe.

Interestingly, I was at a gathering where I met a woman who had first-hand experience with the dating service highlighted in the article. It was a gathering of people I had never met, including Racy. As I learned, Racy is this attractive, intelligent, Harvard educated, outgoing woman who has been trying one of the online sites. She has a history or dating European transplants which people tease her about. My friend had struck up a conversation with some gals and inquired how Racy's dating adventures were coming along.

I shared some of my stories and joked about how one of the candidates I'd come across was quoted in the news article. Racy remembered the article and commented that she found the founder's quote about girls with "Junior League pedigrees and Pilates-sculpted bodies" quite insulting. The funny thing to me was that, based on my initial impressions, she was exactly the kind of woman the founder is looking to recruit. Moreoever, I think Racy didn't like the way women were being casted in the description because there more to them than just some sorority image. She said that she had been solicited to join that service. A friend of hers has joined and provided Racy's name as a possible referral.

Racy considered the service and did some research into it since she is interested in dating. Her assessment - at the $500 level, you don't get much. Basically, you pay $500, must provide 12 referrals, and have no guarantee that you'll be set up with any men. When I asked her what she meant by referrals, Racy explained that she would have to provide the service with the names of 12 female friends who would be candidates for joining. Can you believe that you have to pay $500 AND provide your friends' names with no promise of any return? Gee, that sound *real* appealing to me. As the article mentions, there are higher levels of the service, but that's not generally what the average person is willing to pay.

She was invited to attend a mixer sponsored by the service. What Racy saw at the mixer sealed her decision not to join. First, the ratio of men to women highly favored the men. Second, one of the men she chatted with turned out to be a friend of the founder. He was simply doing a favor by attending the event. On top of that, he was gay! It was a huge turnoff to think that the event had been stacked with fillers.

Naturally, since the business of just getting off the ground, the founder is trying to make the service look as appealing as possible to gain clients. I can see why she felt she needed to fill the room with warm bodies. However, tactics like this will turn off people who are smart enough to do their homework and see the flaws in the business. If the founder was smart, she'd offer a discount early on to encourage women to join rather than make empty promises and charge full price.

2 comments:

zerodoll said...

who has 12 people to refer anyway??!

shan said...

yeah, sounds pretty fishy to me. someone recently told me about pyramid schemes, where the main job of anyone joining is to get other people to join. not exactly the same, but this one sounds pretty thinly disguised