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| Where Do You Meet Someone Nice These Days? |
November 10, 2003 |
By Andy Pedersen
It doesn’t look like much from the highway. It’s an unassuming, pale, plain office building on the outskirts of Toronto. Inside, though, is one of the continent’s most vibrant singles clubs. It’s called Lavalife, and with 850,000 active, paying members, it’s also one of Canada’s brightest Internet success stories.
It certainly led to a success story for Laura, a 31-year-old teacher from Toronto, who met a guy online last year.
“We just got engaged the other day!” she said. “I really liked his profile online, it was quite cute and funny. He had a picture, too, and I thought he was really cute.”
Laura got turned on to Lavalife the same way many of its thousands of other users do: her friends put her up to it. “I’d been single for a couple of years and had gone on my share of blind dates,” she said. “A couple of friends had tried Internet dating and had met some nice people, so they encouraged me to try it, too.”
And now Laura’s returning the favour. She might not need Lavalife anymore — her wedding is set for next spring—but she’s spreading the gospel.
“A couple of women I work with are on there now,” she said, laughing. “They’re having a blast.”
That’s music to Bruce Croxon’s ears. The University ofWestern Ontario grad started the business with three friends back in the late ’80s and has watched it grow into an enterprise that last year pulled in more than $100 million in revenue.
“We’ve got a heck of a lot of word of mouth happening for us,” he said. “People spend a lot of time talking about their love lives, and that means they’re often talking about us.”
But how does the Lavalife staff deal with the inevitable stigma that surrounds dating services, whether online or in-person like singles dances at the local Legion? As more people talk about online dating, he said, the less strange and mysterious and even frightening it seems to people.
“There was definitely a stigma about these kinds of dating services in the first few years that we were going,” he said. “But it’s firmly established in the mainstream now. Our numbers tell us that 25 per cent of the singles population in North America has used a site like ours.
“Of course there are some initial butterflies. But it’s the same kind of butterflies you get when you walk into a party and don’t really know many people.”
BLINDED BY LOVE
Like the pleasant surprise of an unexpected romance, Croxon and his partners didn’t originally intend to get into business to run a dating service, but they certainly got swept away by their early successes.
“We were monkeying around with what we were calling ‘interactive voice response,’” he recalled. “This was back before voice mail came along. We were trying to sell systems that would allow people to call a number to get entertainment listings or to enter a contest that a radio station had on.”
What they didn’t foresee was the incredible popularity of an option that allowed users to leave messages for one another.
“We just sort of stumbled upon this application and realized that, far and away, a lot more people were interested in using it to hook up rather than finding out who was playing at [a club] that night.”
Within a couple of years, Croxon and co. had set up a phonebased dating service called Telepersonals. “We realized we had a pretty scalable business, so we just went crazy with it,” he said.
When the Internet started going crazy, too, they saw obvious crossover potential. In 1996, they bought a company called Web Personals from some New York entrepreneurs and took their love train online.
Two years ago they brought their two services together under one name—Lavalife. It’s not as big as the market’s major player, Match.com, yet. But it’s a bit racier and Croxon is hoping its unique interaction model will keep it growing more quickly than its main competitor.
CLICK ON YOUR TERMS
Here’s how it works: Log on to Lavalife.com and, without spending any money, browse through the pictures and profiles of people from around the world. You don’t have to use your real name and you don’t have to show your picture to anybody unless you want to.
You can search for people in three broad categories: those who are looking for dates, relationships or the steamier “intimate encounters.” You can also narrow a search further to non-smokers, say, or people who live within 100 miles.
If you find someone you want to contact—by sending an email or, if he or she is online, using Lavalife’s embedded messaging tool to chat—you buy “credits.” Thirty of these credits cost about US$10, or buy in bulk to get discounts. Each e-mail or 20-minute chat session costs five credits.
Then the whole process borrows a page from the traditional ladies nights some bars still run. That’s because on Lavalife if somebody contacts you by e-mail or chat, you don’t have to pay anything to reply, so men, who are generally more willing to make the first move, are drawn to the site because there are lots of women, and women are drawn because they don’t have to spend anything if they don’t want to.
“We’ve tried to make Lavalife different,” Croxon said.
“Match.com is pretty conservative, and seems to be very much for the people who have a particular end in mind: a walk down the aisle.
“Lavalife is a bit lighter in spirit. It’s for people who want all kinds of different things.”
But don’t think just because they’re trying to create a more casual environment online that Croxon and his colleagues are casual about the business.
“Our strategy is very aggressive,” he said. “Our future is about going deeper and deeper into the social-interaction space.
Mobile is very high on the list of technologies we’re exploring.
“And we’re constantly trying to think of ways to encourage people to stay connected to us.”
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