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23.How did you get your first 30,000 dating site members?
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It's a 50 million dollar question for anyone looking to launch any online community across the board. How / where do you achieve critical mass? You can't really open a dating site w/ no members, how do you get people to join.
There are a few ways you can go about this, the first and most publicly discussed is to start off as a free site, possibly also offering a "get in on the ground level" incentive. This isn't a bad way to go about it, but it is something that does take time and is time away from generating revenue.
The way we chose to build our base quickly and effectively was to buy databases from smaller dating sites that didn't quite make it (these sites aren't as few and far between as one might think with the growing popularity of out of the box dating software). We stuck to sites in the adult space so the profile content would match our service, and also make the service offering palatable for a successful migration. Employees scrubbed the imported photos and data to meet our community standards (one example would be as I've touched on in other threads proactively scanning for and removing images of frequently abused starlets), and simultaneously launched fresh inbound traffic campaigns with mailers sent to the imported users to instantly create an active community- new users interracting with migrated users.