Company Profile:FlowMingle
June 2, 2009
Local Entrepreneurs Ben Bryant, Phil Sauerbeck and Ben Vandgrift looked at the online dating ‘market’ at one point or another, and saw serious flaws that needed to be fixed. They liked the idea of helping people find each other online, and moving that relationship offline and so founded Flowmingle. I caught up with them for an interview.
What is the FlowMingle 30 second elevator pitch?
The goal is simple: to help people find a date. It’s a crowded space, and there are a lot of problems with traditional dating methods. We began with the idea of small group dating, then looked at the most common complaints, and the most common reasons people don’t either date online, or date offline, and built our methods around the results.
How does it work?
A person signs up, fills out a very short form about their demographic information, and builds what we call a First Impression page — this is like a tumblog of what they’ve been up to, what books they like, tv shows, activities, what they’re thinking and feeling. It can be as expressive or as terse as they want, can link to other sites, and include images. They pick a portrait, and then they’re ready to go. By matching the handful of criteria most important to most daters according to several surveys, we find a group of 20 local people, a mixture of guys and girls, and introduce them toeach other over the course of a week.
First they rate each other’s First Impressions, and each day, the answer an open-ended question designed to get our members to express themselves, and rate the other members’ answers from the previous day. By the end of the week, we generally know who feels what about whom, and we present the members of the Mingle with a selection page, where they choose the people they want to make a connection with. Those connections hang around for a couple of weeks, the idea being people will exchange messages and make plans offline. At no point do we try to keep people from exchanging information early: the goal is to get people together, not to collect a monthly fee. We don’t use long surveys and a gojillion points of compatibility, and there’s no search feature to return a million results that are impossible to choose from. The small group model makes it disadvantageous for spammers to participate — they’d be immediately exposed, and would only have access to a handful of users.
What are your plans for growth?
The software is functionally complete — there are of course always a few bugs. We’ve built this using Ruby on Rails, keeping as up-to-date as makes sense. We host exactly as much as we need, focusing on making the user experience as natural and intuitive as possible.
We have done almost nothing yet in the way of advertising, but we are hoping to make a large push into a handful of markets soon, to see what the best methods of generating interest are. We’re looking at small business financing, and hoping to attract the attention of an angel or two, but our financial needs are very modest.
What attracted you guys to Entrepreneurship?
Ben Bryant and Phil Sauerbeck are dyed-in-the-wool startup guys and entrepreneurs. I’ve historically been a Company Man, but wanted to do my own thing. We met up on another project (9up3down), got along well, and started bouncing around ideas.
