Friday, January 4, 2008
If your looking at at web 2.0 speed dating site and it seems like Deja Vu, you'd be right, we reviewed Woome exactly one month ago. So what about SpeedDate? Well first of all, they are not based in Southern California, however the cofounder of SpeedDate, Simon Tisminezky, is from San Diego so we figured it was relevant enough to profile how SpeedDate compares to local favorite Woome.
The Good
The two cofounders of SpeedDate are from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and we know those guys have produced some pretty successful entrepreneurs. Simon and Dan have picked a good business where instead of being just another metoo social networking video site, they focus specifically on connecting people to date fast. Besides Woome there's no other major competitors in this space, so no matter what, they are in pretty good shape. They also recently received a patent for certain aspects of online speed dating, that while I doubt makes their intellectual property highly defensible, it does show that they are working with a mindset of trying to innovate in the dating industry. Lastly, I feel pretty confident that the SpeedDate team have some good marketing tricks up their sleeve to help spur user growth, considering that they received some good coverage with their creative PR stunt hooking up bloggers for a public speed dating session (which was fairly entertaining).
The Bad
I'm not a big fan of Woome, but I definitely like it better than SpeedDate. Woome looks and feels cooler, and when were talking about speed dating, cool matters. Of course, this stuff is highly subjective, but something about SpeedDate just feels less polished. Also because Woome comparisons will abound with SpeedDate, I'm highly interested in what they think can differentiate SpeedDate from Woome, because at this point they are running second in both user traffic and general media opinion. In fact, I asked pointblank for the differentiator in my correspondence with the team, and never really received a solid answer.
Conclusion
I wasn't a fan of web 2.0 speed dating when I reviewed Woome and I'm still not. Either way though I recognize there's a market for it, and even if Speeddate runs second to Woome, both companies seem in good position to capitalize.
Website: http://www.speeddate.com
Screenshot