ho w do you test the market for a dating site?

[constantinesavva]

Hi all
glad to be here! I hope it works out well.
I have an online dating site that specializes in bringing Greeks abroad together (but it is open to others too!). It has been free all along for many years as I believed that there was no money in this as there were too many free sites around at the time. However, I am considering giving it a face lift and upgrade it with a view to start charging members. I believe there is potential because it comes on first page with any search engine and I believe it's a niche (despite of being certain about the existence of demand, the problem is I am not sure whether people would pay for this. However, I know other sites that do charge for membership, so if they do it, why not me too?)

As Tim says: "businesses do not succeed on intuition or experience alone". The critical question is: how do you test the market to ascertain if there is interest for the product before investing? I don't want to spend money down the drain. You can't just use PPC to direct people to as site which is not fully ready yet and before committing to some serious expenditure to convert it into a paid site (better facilities, tools etc). You can't say to people "hey, would you like to pay for such a service? Let me know and if you are interested I will give it to you!" I am not sure if this makes sense to you. Many thanks anyway.

[storm33229]

Hi all
glad to be here! I hope it works out well.
I have an online dating site that specializes in bringing Greeks abroad together (but it is open to others too!). It has been free all along for many years as I believed that there was no money in this as there were too many free sites around at the time. However, I am considering giving it a face lift and upgrade it with a view to start charging members. I believe there is potential because it comes on first page with any search engine and I believe it's a niche (despite of being certain about the existence of demand, the problem is I am not sure whether people would pay for this. However, I know other sites that do charge for membership, so if they do it, why not me too?)

As Tim says: "businesses do not succeed on intuition or experience alone". The critical question is: how do you test the market to ascertain if there is interest for the product before investing? I don't want to spend money down the drain. You can't just use PPC to direct people to as site which is not fully ready yet and before committing to some serious expenditure to convert it into a paid site (better facilities, tools etc). You can't say to people "hey, would you like to pay for such a service? Let me know and if you are interested I will give it to you!" I am not sure if this makes sense to you. Many thanks anyway.
How many people use your site? Just a thought though before you get too deep into this, you have quite a lot of competition in this field.

[Sven]

Do a search on "plentyoffish" on this forum, "free" brings someone a huge amount of money! It's a good idea to do something with the top ranking spot in natural search!

[Dan]

Hello there :)

You could try getting a mock-up done of your sites front page, with numerous links to featured profiles, search tools etc. If anyone follows these links, they'd then be shown a log in page. The log in page wouldn't work, as there's no site yet, but would contain a form allowing people to begin the sign-up if they are interested.

If you capture their e-mail address for later use, and then show them a page which says we're not available at the moment, or coming soon etc, you would then be able to work out an idea of what sort of use you'd get, and it probably could be set up for under $100 if you outsourced it.

Depending on how you worded the sign-up form, would depend on how you could judge the information. If you had a price on there, you could expect that maybe 80% of those that filled it in would have bought for example.

Hope that helps!

Dan