Yesterday Jason (http://fetchfood.com) and I finished setting up the server, and I'm more or less satisfied it won't crash tomorrow. :) Now it's time to promote.

Dating sites are a tough industry since there is a lot of competition, and when you start out you have a traditional chicken and egg problem; you can't easily get new users when there aren't any on the site already to tempt them in. Yet a cursory look online reveals that every dating site has many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of users. How do they manage to do it?

The major sites (match, yahoo, eharmony, maybe lavalife) advertise on many media, so it isn't hard to see how they have pulled it off. There are a number of smaller sites (udate, american singles) which advertise exclusively online. The rising trend seems to be tie-ins with existing sites. (F***edCompany.com uses such a service, and I recently saw that the Washington City Paper uses one as well) This is generally a good idea since these sites don't need to appeal to end users directly, which is costly and something of an imperfect art. Outside of this are the niche sites that appeal to particular demographics, such as jdate. They are able to get good word of mouth within those communities.

We certainly have some work to do to establish ourselves and overcome that initial "chicken and egg" dilemma, but we're confident that it will be done.

But hey, we're just kids after all; what is there to lose? :)