Introducing Ponder — Taking the Misery Out of Dating
Dating in today’s world sucks. Admit it, it’s a miserable experience. If you happen upon someone that you are truly compatible with and an honest relationship starts, you are ecstatic. Why? Because it is so rare to experience. It’s like winning the lottery.
Ponder aims to change this. We aim to take the misery out of dating.
Before I explain how Ponder works and why we believe it is such a better experience, let’s quickly look at the evolution of dating and why current ways of meeting someone are so flawed.
Pre-Internet Era: The Age of Rejection and Shame
From the age of the cave to roughly the year 2000, there were two primary ways of meeting someone to date: you were either “set up” by a mutual acquaintance or you broached the dating subject with someone you already had a reason to meet (like someone at school, work, etc.).
These approaches carried the human race for a long time and their successes were reliant on human intuition and its ability to determine compatibility. Fundamentally, being able to determine what makes one specific person compatible with another specific person is really important and if you can utilize it to make initial introductions it goes a long way towards making the experience enjoyable. Unfortunately it suffered from a scale problem.
Until the age of the Internet, we all tended to swim in relatively small pools of potentially compatible people. This forced us or our designated matchmakers to often compromise on compatibility. And what happens when one person compromises more than the other? Rejection. And what happens when you get rejected by someone that you either have a mutual acquaintance with or you tend to see often because you share an environment? Shame.
Rejection and shame are devastating emotions. The fear alone of possibly experiencing them tends to hold people back from even trying to date. It’s no wonder that the phrase “set up” has such a negative connotation.
Online Dating Era: Ripoffs & Expanding Expectations
The advent of online dating (Match and JDate were some of the earliest dating sites that are still around today) aimed to solve this “small pool” problem. In some ways it did. Dating websites allow people to search or be matched to others they never would have met without the scale of the Internet. In addition, because initial interactions are online, and relatively anonymous, the misery of rejection and shame diminishes. However, these websites, as businesses, need to charge people to swim in the pool, and they do so using a subscription model.
The issue with such a model is that it forces people to pay on the faith that they will meet someone. Given this, people react in two ways. Either they approach it passively and wait from someone to contact them. When this doesn’t happen, they leave the site feeling ripped off (another form of misery). Alternatively they take a very active approach (to get their money’s worth) and they either spam the rest of the community (creating misery for others) or take dates with every suggested match, which in turn gives rise to the “grass must be greener with the next date” syndrome and yet another, new form of misery.
Mobile App Dating Era: Power Creeps
In 2014, there began to appear a flurry of new dating platforms built for mobile devices that have taken a slightly different approach, helping to eliminate some of the misery-inducing aspects of dating, but like their predecessors, creating new forms of misery in the process. With the integration of mutual match, where both parties have to agree to communicate (a technology brought to the market by Tinder but actually originally developed by JDate) these dating apps are able to reduce both the spamming and initial rejection problems. They also have done away with the traditional subscription revenue model and instead have adopted a ‘freemium’ model. By allowing users to enter the pool for free they not only have developed a much bigger pool but they’ve developed an experience where if you never find a date, you at least don’t feel ripped off.
Unfortunately, the ‘freemium’ models’ paid features tend to cater toward power users and as a result the platforms end up focusing their attention towards these types of people. But if you, as a single, are looking for a committed relationship, and you have to spend your time on a platform that is incentivized to please serial daters, you are jumping into a pool where compatibility is naturally compromised. In this case however, it is not rejection and shame that you tend to experience but distrust and heartache.
The Ponder Era: Bringing Community and Performance to Dating
Recognizing this evolution in dating and the various forms of misery it has generated, we sought to create something completely different. Our aim is to:
- Bring human intuition and interaction back into the introduction phase of dating to help generate intuitive, compatibility-driven matches but do so at scale.
- Maintain a sense of anonymity so that feelings of rejection and shame are all but eliminated.
- Build a revenue model that allows users to only pay when they succeed in meeting someone they actually want to meet, thus eliminating spam, creeps and aligning the platform’s incentives with those of the entire user base.
- Create an environment where people are not just in it for themselves but where they can contribute to other members’ success, thus developing a positively reinforcing community.
And thus Ponder was born.
Every match on Ponder is generated by another human being. This means as a single person you are able to match other members of the community together. Alternatively, you don’t even need to be single to be on the platform and you can simply take part in the community as a matchmaker.
Once two people are identified as a match, they get a notification. In order to initiate contact with each other, both parties are asked to pay. If both members do not want to pay then the match doesn’t happen. If they do both agree to pay, not only can they start to communicate and set up their date, but the original matchmaker who suggested the match receives a portion of the payment as a reward. And, if it turns out that the couple ends up getting married, the matchmaker gets a bonus up to $1,000. The entire model is structured to incentivize positive behavior and successful matchmaking.
But Wait! There’s More
As we launched Ponder into beta in mid-2017 and experienced immediate positive reaction from the initial community we began to wonder — ponder if you will — how this performance-driven matchmaking could be used for more than just dating. Perhaps this wasn’t simply a mobile application, but could be a more fundamental platform.
We also quickly recognized that this decentralized matchmaking process that required deep trust, yet pseudo-anonymity as well as contracts between the matchmaker and the matches appeared to be a perfect candidate for blockchain technology.
More to come. Stay tuned…
Michael Egan is Ponder’s Chairman of the Board
Michael has over 25 years of strategy, operational and board experience with a range of blue chip companies. Previously he was Chief Executive Officer and Board Director of Spark Networks (NYSE: LOV) the owner of two of the largest dating brands — ChristianMingle and JDate.
