Sarah Press

Hi Andrew, Thanks for doing this AMA! You are my favorite Chicago founder (the title is current location agnostic) and it's great to see what you're up to now. My questions: 1) What made you land on this particular startup concept. 2) Your original The Point idea was very grounded in social activism. Do you think you'll ever get back to those roots? I likely have more but those seem as...

Fantastic idea, excited to give it a shot!

Sounds like someone's potentially a bit scared about public perception after the whole failing in China thing and is now trying to buy market share in America to compensate. Is my opinion. As an average consumer, I would probably snap that up. As a driver, I would switch to Lyft instantly. As an investor, I'd be worried. If this was a public company, I'd be shorting it right now. As for...

Hi everyone! Sarah from PokeDates (www.gopokedates.com) here. For a bit of background, a few years ago I founded a dating startup called Project Fixup. We set up thousands of dates, went through Techstars, got some PH love (https://www.producthunt.com/tech/project-fixup), but never quite became the next Tinder and had more or less accepted that we'd go quietly into that good startup night....

Very cool! I just signed up. For one small bit of feedback, some of the Facebook analysis content could use a little tweaking - the assessment that "After analyzing your Facebook account, we found: You don't have many friends" seemed a little harsh :).

Big fan of this concept - I definitely call into the "I need this" category for important paperwork and have had pretty much all the close calls you described. But they are pretty few and far between. @nadav_na in the long term do you envision more frequent or even daily uses cases for phone document search or is the app more for the occasional but high impact essential document needs?

7) The speed of which daters are connected can vary a bit based on scheduling constraints, demographic preferences, and other matching factors. Many of our members get fixed up on a date within 3 days of signing up. Once they receive a fixup, they have 2 days to confirm and the date will happen 3-14 days out. Convenience is a huge part of our value proposition and we are moving towards...

6) We have a pay per date revenue model - each side pays $20 and we make $40 in revenue for every date we organize. There are two main per date costs: the fixup specialist’s time approving the date and providing customer support, and the payment processing fees. Our initial calculations based on the cost of that time and the number of fixups one specialist can support give us a per-fixup...

5) It’s actually a bit easier than you might think. All we need to do from a technology perspective is create a new dating market geofence in our system and identify the best first-date venues in that city by leveraging Foursquare and Yelp data. Our fixup specialist reviews the list of venues, refines, and uploads the venues into our system. From there, it’s all about getting new members...

4) Our initial customers have on average booked a little over 3 dates each (3.11 to be precise). The mode is technically 1 date, but the majority of our daters are repeat customers, there is just a lot of diversity for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 repeat daters:). And that number will continue to go up over time.

3) We see the dating market as having three main waves. The first one, the traditional online dating website space, has been dominated by Match.com, no question. For a long time that was the only game in town, but then there was the second wave - online dating apps with less detailed profiles and more lightweight back-and forth texting when there’s a mutual match. This space has been dominated...

For 2) We believe that chemistry happens in person. All that back-and-forth messaging on other dating sites, while occasionally entertaining, is also time-consuming and inefficient and doesn’t increase the likelihood of actually hitting it off with the person when you meet. To be honest, I think many dating sites probably secretly believe this as well, but their business model is based on...

@frumpy Great questions! I’ll share my answers as I write them. For 1) The way our process works is that members fill out a questionnaire that tells us who they are, the type of people they’d like to meet, and their interests. Their answers go through a streamlined, proprietary digital matchmaking process that takes into account demographic information, mutual interests weighted by...

Love this idea - sounds awesome! Best of luck on the campaign.

Project Fixup is bringing the human element back into dating by helping people connect the right way - by meeting in person and seeing if there’s a spark. Our platform matches people with similar interests and selects a great location and convenient time for the two to meet. There is no browsing through profiles or back-and-forth messaging - members just click to confirm and show up to meet...

Hi all! I didn't fully introduce myself earlier but I'm Sarah, the co-founder and CEO of Project Fixup. Happy to answer any questions you all have - feel free to post here or email me at sarah@projectfixup.com anytime. Thanks @sarahbuhr for sharing our site on Product Hunt!