How Match.com changed the world of dating.
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It is not a truth universally acknowledged, but a single man in possession of no fortune may still be in want of a wife. At least that was the case for Gary Kremen, the founder of the online dating service Match.com. It was the early '90s, and the 31-year-old Chicago native and Stanford Business School graduate could barely afford the $300 in rent for his San Francisco apartment. Still, Kremen was looking for love. In fact, he says he was trying to marry "the best woman in the world."
In his quest for a wife (and, perhaps, a small fortune), Kremen practically invented online dating. The idea came to him when he saw how much money local newspapers were making from personal ads, including his own. Suspecting that a similar ad system would work online, Kremen founded Electric Classifieds Inc., the first company to bring classified advertising to the Internet, in 1993. After raising $200,000 from investors, the company launched its first vertical--Match.com--in April 1995.
Initially, Match only allowed users to exchange personal messages and photographs via e-mail or fax. But that was enough. Within six months, 100,000 people had registered for the free service. Today, Match has more than 1.7 million paid subscribers, with Web sites in 30 countries and in eight different languages. Indeed, Match has ushered in an era in which one in five relationships and one in six marriages are between people who met through an online dating site. Searching for potential partners on the Internet has become so commonplace that, according to one study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, roughly 74 percent of the 10 million Web users who are single and looking for a partner have turned to the Internet to find someone. The number of ways to meet a potential love interest online has also spiked. Hitwise.com estimates that more than 850 services currently make up the multi-billion-dollar dating industry. Match consistently comes in among the top five based on traffic.
Kremen says the "relentless" work ethic at Match helped distinguish his site from the first flock of online dating services. In the early days, Kremen worked out of a cramped, one-bedroom apartment that he shared with two roommates. Often while still in his pajamas, he sat glued to his Sun workstation, designing Match's Web site and developing marketing strategies. The schedule became even more grueling after Kremen received $1.5 million in venture capital, allowing him to hire a handful of employees. "With investors, we were under a huge amount of pressure to [grow the company]," he says.
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