Online Dating Blog

Recently I posted my two part interview with Chloe, the CEO of the new online dating service HelloJackieJoe. You can find this interview in the following posts:

Interview Part 1
Interview Part 2

I wanted to take an opportunity to talk a little bit more about this service. The first thing that I’ll say is that in talking with Chloe, I was given the very strong impression that she really does care about providing a great service to singles.

Second, I also believe that this service has some really great ideas. As someone who frequently pushes for greater acceptance of online dating, I am excited to see a service that encourages social interaction with your friends as you use it. Services like this, in my opinion, are the next step between yesteryear’s rejection of online dating and tomorrow’s online dating becomes the norm.

Members, Members, Members
Still, good ideas will only get you so far. While HelloJackieJoe brings great ideas to the table, such as incentives to get your friends to join and at the same time earning yourself free time on the service, when many people use the site they may not sign up because of the newness of the service or because there are very few members where they live.

To that, I would suggest that if you like what the service has to offer, that you sign up regardless of the number of people in your area. I recommend this because new online dating services frequently find themselves caught in a Catch-22: having low membership discourages many people from joining which keeps the membership low. If you sign up and convince a few of your friends to do the same, the next time someone in your area visits the website they may find themselves compelled to try it where they otherwise would have passed it by. You can still have a primary dating service that you use that has huge membership. At the same time, there is no harm in creating your account here and seeing what happens. If more people took this approach, I believe there are a lot of great, yet small, online dating services that could find their membership rolls growing.

And just to be clear for any cynics out there, this really is my opinion. No money is changing hands here, I really just feel that the service is run by people who care about their customers and who have some genuinely interesting ideas.