Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Coupling: The Business of Social Circles
My wife and I have recently been talking about the best way to establish a social circle here in Chicago. Most of my friends are in San Francisco, while most of hers are in New York. I haven’t really found a set of people from work to hang out with socially yet, and besides that, we’ve decided that we’d like to become part of a group of young, professional Indian couples in the city that get together a few times a month.
Interestingly, Chicago though a big city, is less transitory than San Francisco and New York. People here seem to have these established cliques that are hard to penetrate.
In our first couple of weeks, we took to smiling at other Indian couples at random places in the city. We’d assess a couple based on how they were dressed and what they seemed to be like, and try and catch their eye; the idea was that if there seemed to have a similar interest, we’d approach them and ask them out. We were looking for couples to date.
This, of course, led to a few interesting situations.
Like this very hip and trendy couple we saw at Room & Board, also presumably looking for furniture. We followed them around a bit at first, trying to catch parts of their conversation to assess how much of an accent they had, and place them on the FOB-ABCD continuum. When they seemed worthy of an approach, we debated on the best tactic to use. Would a line work best, or a straightforward “Hey, how are ya?” But try as we might, we couldn’t maintain eye contact with them. We literally followed them around the store for ten minutes, but they had no interest in us. We might have even made them uncomfortable because I could have sworn they started walking faster through the building.
Basically, we’re trying to date all over again.
Finally, we decided to place an ad on the Internet. Our initial thought was to use Craigslist, but in my experience, the community sections aren’t really read by a lot of couples looking for other couples to hang out with. So, we decided on placing the ad on a message board primarily read by Indians in Chicago. We got a couple of responses, and just this weekend, had out first couples date. It went well, we thought, and the four of us had a great time. But two responses doesn’t give us much of a choice, and is poor marketing.
Which, of course, got me thinking.
The online dating business is a very successful business model both in the US and internationally. There are sites that cater to just about every romantic, demographic, ethnographic and Freudian need on the planet. You have your traditional meet and greet through sites like match.com and true.com. You have sites geared towards intellectuals, and sites for people with alternative lifestyles. There are even sites for specific ethnicities.
And yet, there’s not a single resource that focuses on matching couples with couples (in a social and platonic sense, anyway.) I’d pay for a resource like that.
So, enterprising people, here’s your business plan summary:
- Create a brand and property that focuses on taking information from couples, and matches them with other couples with similar interests and needs.
- Instead of profiles, there’d be cofiles.
- Browsing through cofiles could be done by interests, geography, ethnicity, and age range.
- The property could host their couples’ version of Dinner at 8, where couples are brought together in groups of four for dinner in specific cities.
- Provide “moving specials” as incentives for new couples to sign up.
- Call the business Coupling. I’m sure Victaulic would sell you coupling.com. They don’t really use it.
In the meanwhile, we continue to search for our social circle. We know you’re out there. We’ll find you.
Postscript on 7/21: My wife came up with a brilliant alternative to a new business: for match.com to offer a service that continues their exisiting relationship with successfully matched couples: she calls it aftermatch.com.