Thursday, September 24, 2020
Interview with Constance Curtis, The List
In a world of Tinder, Match, and dozens of other online dating applications, is there room for another approach to dating? Constance Curtis, the Founder and CEO of The List (www.getthelistapp.com), thinks so, and tells us about her startup's efforts to bring the world of matchmaking to the modern world—and how her own frustration with online dating let to her startup.
What is The List?
Constance Curtis: The list is a modern matchmaking company. We are bridging the gap between casual, self service dating apps, and traditional matchmaking, and doing it for business professionals in the dating market. Right now, there are no real efficient products in the dating market. With dating apps and dating websites like Tinder or Match.com, it's all completely self service. A user has to search through those services themselves, chat online with potential matches, and set up their own dates. The user has to do everything, which is really time consuming, especially for business professionals where their time is limited, and there's an opportunity cost. The average user spends twenty hours a week, or 80 hours a month on online dating, which can be very daunting. It's exhausting to spend that much time online, especially if you're a successful business professional.
The other option in the dating space was to hire a traditional, matchmaking company. Matchmaking has been around a long time, and if you've seen the popular “Indian Matchmaking” show on Netflix, you'll see it's been around for awhile. With matchmaking, you hire someone to do everything for you, setting you up for dates. If you do this, you can spend anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 a year for membership. That's expensive. There are not a lot of people who are willing to spend $14,000, $15,000, or $25,000 a year for a matchmaker. With The List, what we're doing is tapping into that white space, for business professionals. We have a reasonable monthly subscription, and no huge, upfront cost. All of our clients get a dedicated matchmaker. When someone on our application likes another user on our application, and that user likes them back, we actually vet those users, to make sure they're not lying about their age, or who they are, and how they represent themselves. Then, we actually facilitate setting up a date between the users. We schedule the date, make the reservations, and all of that on behalf of our clients, saving our clients about 80 percent of the time they'd be spending to do it online. We've taken matchmaking onto a mobile application, as a modern matchmaking company.
How did you start the company?
Constance Curtis: I have been a successful entrepreneur for the past thirteen years. Before this, I had an event planning company. I had been working from home, not working in an office, because as an event manager you are all remote. That meant I was not at an office, not going out with my coworkers. I spent ten years as a consumer in the online dating space. As I became more and more successful in business, I realized, dating apps are just not the best use of my time. I can't believe how much time I was spending chatting online, and then after three weeks, suddenly getting ghosted. You spend all that time trying to get to know someone, and then you just get deleted. I also got very frustrated showing up on dates, and people did not look like their photos, and they were lying about all kinds of silly things. That might be something as small as their height, to not properly representing themselves online. Through my own frustration, I decided, in 2017, the heck with this, and decided to hire a traditional matchmaker. At that time, I didn't know it would cost me $14,000 to hire my own personal matchmaker, and leaving my first meeting when I learned that, and being an entrepreneur, I realized I had identified a huge problem. It was either, get back on the dating apps, or pay $14,000 for a matchmaker. It was really incredible to me, that there was such a white space in the market. As I was driving home from that meeting, I decided to work from there, and ended up writing a business plan and fundraising from family and friends. We launched our application officially in February of 2019, and we've now been in Southern California for 18 months. We plan on expanding to other markets in 2021. We're watching the pandemic and everything else going on, and hopefully we won't have to push that out, and we're still determining what markets those are going to be. Anyway, that's how the whole idea came to light, from my own, personal frustration with online dating.
With individual matchmakers for all your clients, how do you scale a business like this?
Constance Curtis: Our competitors in this spare are the traditional matchmaking companies, not the apps. Those matchmakers are offline, and old school. They are inefficient. We believe with The List, people know what they want. We don't partner up with family counselors, marriage counselors, psychologists, and that—instead, we are strong believers that people know what they want, and we are empowering them by giving them the tools. We have integrated technology to allow our matchmakers to work more efficiently, so we can scale very well. One of the things we have is a freemium model, where not everyone on our app is a client. Anyone can download the app, and become part of the database, because bigger is better. However, to be featured, you have to upgrade to an elite membership, where you get your own personal match maker. As an elite member, you have access to the entire pool of people on the app, both clients and our larger pool of general app users. As soon as an elite member likes anyone in the database, and automated message is sent from that client's matchmaker to the person they like. That's different from a traditional matchmaker, where they spend hours and hours searching for someone they think their client might like. Our clients know what they like, and are liking users in our application, and we're using that data to provide even more matches. More matches are then sent as suggestions to our clients using data driven algorithms, based on the preferences they've entered into the application themselves. That saves our matchmakers 80 percent of the time they'd otherwise be spending searching for potential matches for our clients. We're innovating with technology, creating a more scalable and efficient way for matchmakers to work. Instead of a match maker handling just 20 clients, by the time we build in all this automation, they will be able to manage twice as many, 40. There are also other features we haven't launched yet, which will make it an even more seamless experience for our members.
How has the pandemic impacted your business?
Constance Curtis: If there's anything we've learned during this pandemic, is that people crave and need human interaction. It's really irreplacable. In March and April, when everyone started working from home in L.A., all of the companies in our industry saw a decline in revenues. People were unsure what was going to happen. What we saw that was really interesting, was in mid-May, we started seeing lots of emails and phone calls for membership. The reason why, is because professionals weren't tied up as much at work, were not at work events, and weren't able to go out with coworkers to happy hour, and because they couldn't go to a restaurant or meet people at bars, they were turning to online services. That's when we started to see our revenues increase, and we've been able to grow our revenues from April to August by 45 percent. We've been fortunate to survive this pandemic and to be there for everyone. It's a very interesting time, especially for dating. Obviously, we didn't want to be sending people on dates when they were supposed to stay at home, but because we knew people wanted to connect, we did a bit of a full pivot and started helping arrange virtual dates. We've been setting up our clients on Facetime, and hosted virtually happy hours, which ends up is a really great way for them to connect with other clients. They met at happy hour, and if they wanted to connect one-on-one, we let them exchange information, either through the app or a phone number. As restaurants and patios are opening back up, we've again been able to set up real dates in person.
What's the biggest lesson you've learned, as an entrepreneur?
Constance Curtis: There are so many. It's really, really hard to solve this problem You have to be resilient, and persistent, and keep on going even when you feel maybe beaten down a little. Being an entrepreneur means you have lots of highs, and lots of lows, you just have to get through it all. Another big thing that I've learned, which is really useful, is about acquiring customers. Having a business that can generate revenues from the beginning is a lot easier than trying to figure out how to raise money before you have revenue. Have a business that generates revenues from the beginning, and know how you are going to acquire your customers. Know what your customer looks like, what their demographic is, and where they are—are they on Facebook, are they on LinkedIn? What are they reading? Make sure you can find them, acquire them, and know your customer acquisition costs. That's things that investors want to know. Most companies in the tech industry have to go out and raise money, and these are the kinds of things thing you can't pay someone else to figure out for you. As CEO and an entrepreneur, you have to know that yourself.
Finally, what's next for you, and what should we be watching from you?
Constance Curtis: We just opened up our $2M seed funding round, which just opened last week. We are now meeting with investors, and further optimizing the products and services for The List to create a better experience. The plan is to launch in three other markets by 2021, although which markets those will be are still to be determined. We're finalizing our research on which markets they are going to be. We're also really excited as we continue to expand in Southern California. It will be interesting to see how people date in other cities, and we're excited to collect that data as we launch, as we foresee this market is very different in Charleston versus Los Angeles, and we're excited to learn more about that.
Thanks!