The problem: The media had more or less ignored the launch. With the exception of some blog mentions and a product placement deal with an Austin radio station, KROX, no media outlets covered CrazyBlindDate.com during the first month. Even the radio ad was a disappointment. Yagan says he paid the station $6,600 with the understanding that Deb O'Keefe, a morning deejay, would go on a blind date and endorse the website. But the station balked, citing an editorial policy that prevented O'Keefe from doing the segment.
What dates there were didn't always go well. Callie Snyder tried out the service, then blogged a review of one date gone comically bad with a young guy who professed a love for poker and pornography. "It's one of those bargain basement things where you just don't know what you're going to get," says Snyder, who tried to use the service two more times before giving up.
Despite the lukewarm trial run, Yagan and Coyne persevered. "There's this idea that you leak something to The New York Times, and it magically appears on the front page," Yagan says, "but that doesn't really happen." He spent $43,000 on radio placements to launch in New York, Boston, and San Francisco in November. This time, the radio stations went along with the plan. In New York, "Goumba Johnny" Sialiano and "Hollywood" Sean Hamilton, hosts of the afternoon rush-hour show on dance station WKTU, repeatedly praised the site, claiming that even their "loser" producer had wrangled a week's worth of blind dates. The lovesick responded, logging on in greater numbers, and the site was organizing 50 dates per night by January.
Finally, the media took notice. From November to March, the site garnered dozens of mentions -- including in the New York Daily News and Boston magazine and on CBS's The Early Show and Fox's The Morning Show. Though OkCupid was not mentioned in the TV segments, many of the newspaper articles and blog entries noted the existence of CrazyBlindDate.com's less crazy parent company. "It's been a real media phenomenon," says Yagan.
That may be a stretch. But OkCupid now attracts two million users a month and 550,000 active daters -- roughly double the numbers of a year ago. Revenue surpassed $1 million in 2007, and Yagan expects it to double in 2008. Thanks to links from blogs, including the popular TechCrunch, OkCupid's rank on Google's results page for the search online dating has jumped from fourth place to first place. Yagan says the attention should make it easier to raise money and hire more engineers. "This project reaffirmed us as the leading innovator in the space," he says.
The buzz hasn't come cheaply. The tab for CrazyBlindDate.com has been about $60,000, not including salaries for three engineers or the more than $100,000 paid to OkCupid's PR firm. Still, Yagan figures the PR payoff has been worth the cost. "At this point, any future growth is going to be driven by where we can get PR," he says. "Ultimately, whatever we pay out has to come back to OkCupid, or we'll shut it down, but it's hard to quantify. The jury's still out."
The Experts Weigh In
Try a live event
I like the way they put a new, slightly off-the-wall spin on blind dating. But I think CrazyBlindDate is more interesting as a product than as a media strategy. When we do guerrilla-marketing campaigns, we absolutely want PR, but the campaign has to live on its own. I would have focused on doing something in front of a lot of people, either by organizing a public event where two people went on a blind date or using social media to document the dates. That way the company wouldn't be dependent on a journalist's writing about it.
Focus on women
A dating site can succeed only if it attracts a lot of women, and that's the problem with CrazyBlindDate. For any dating site, women, not men, are the customers. Women don't want a crazy blind date; they want safety and security, and they don't want to feel embarrassed. I would take the money they're spending on PR and put it toward affiliate marketing to women. Yagan and Coyne are clearly smart guys: They should start thinking about how to lower the cost of customer acquisition and build a differentiated audience.
Get beyond free
They have come up with a novel angle in a truly crowded space. From an investment perspective, spending $100,000 to $200,000 to double your traffic sounds pretty cost effective. But they need to be more creative about monetizing CrazyBlindDate. Free, ad-supported online dating is hard. Instead of thinking of this as a PR stunt, they should look at it as a possible new business model. For instance, they could let people go on online "blind dates" for free and then make them pay five bucks to meet up in person.
