its not true that i wouldnt want to use a dating site with only 20 users, if those twenty users were all relevant. give me 20 really great potential partners and im set for life ten times over.

i dont want to use a dating site with only 20 profiles that im not interested in, but i dont want to use a dating site with 2 million uninteresting profiles either.

its a common misconception that there needs to be quantity. give me 3, or really just 1, thing that i really want, and ill use your product.

how do you solve that? provide what im looking for. chicken and egg in dating is apocryphal.

same with job sites or freelance sites btw. im a member in 3 highly curated, high-end contractor "marketplaces". at any given time, they usually only feature 3-4 active open projects. but each of them is really desirable. i visit them every day. those are amazing lifestyle businesses for the operators and enable me to run my own amazing lifestyle business.

a dating site certainly doesnt need quantity. it needs quality. the problem in dating is that for the general population, quality is just about average (by definition) - and we all want to do better than average. id say that in dating, youd do a lot better if you ran an actual curated list - and then charge a lot of money. id probably pay for that if i was still looking.

the problem in dating is that a dating site is really just a site where people who are boring in real life try to fake being slightly less boring on the internet. finding interesting people is what makes dating difficult. not finding people per se. unless you are socially awkward, you can just step outside and find people. they are everywhere. screening for quality (or really just relevance) is the bottleneck. i cant have 1000 engaging 30 minute conversations with potential mates per day, or even per month, to screen for what i want out of a longterm relationship, due to time constraints.

the other problem is that so far, there is no gauge for "relevance" in dating. most people dont even know what theyd find attractive. they cant verbalize is, and when they can, its often a lie that they, or the media, convinced themselves of. solve those problems. not the "chicken and egg" one.

i can tell you how to find the "girls who really just want to be loved". but you need an open mind and get rid of all the political correctness first, and im certainly not going to post that in a public place, because its just going to incite hate.

edit: to make this more clear: the solution to dating is not a marketplace. the perfect "marketplace" for dating is a club, or more generally, the real world. thats the quintessential example of something where technology makes the task harder rather than easier. if you want to "solve dating", you need to do the opposite of a marketplace. funnel quality leads. and start with some nonobvious group of people. its easy to find hot young women. it may not be easy to approach them or whatever, because society, but its easy to find them. start with an obscure set of potential couples, like: "guys who like obese women and obese women". those people exist. they are socially marginalized for various reasons and they are probably both at least somewhat desperate. find leads for those guys. i mean, you should really be solving the obesity issue here, but if you want to do dating, do the dating first. once youve "conquered that market", try to figure out how to extrapolate your processes to bigger sets of groups of users.