Isaac Hawley // isaachawley@gmail.com
Online dating is annoying. Twenty-nine degrees of compatibility. Endless quizzes. Describe yourself in at least 300 characters. Does any of this stuff even help? Does it actually make me more likely to get a date?
It can also be horrifying. Women get creepy messages, online stalkers, and sometimes offline stalkers. They are driven away from internet dating and from the internet in general.
Men have to deal with fake profiles, spam, and putting in huge amounts of effort for no response.
Shallow Coffee will have no messaging, no profile descriptions, not even titles if we can avoid it. Users will look at photos of each other, and invite each other out on dates. That's it.
Women can't get creepy messages, because there are no messages. Men don't have to spend an hour crafting a message that only goes ignored. Spammers don't use the site, because there is no profit in scamming it. There are no messages.
They only see photos of another user, and decide if they will meet them for coffee. Yes, or no.
Online dating is now acceptable, but not saturated. Competitors still focus on having more and more features. The answer is not more, it's less.
The market for online dating is huge. It already supports many paid-subscription sites, and several free sites. There is plenty of room for a small, differentiated competitor.
Isaac Hawley // isaachawley@gmail.com
Shallow Coffee is a web site. It is designed to run on Google's App Engine platform. It is suitable for viewing on mobile devices.
A user creates an account and uploads photos. No profile text, very few preferences. Just photos.
Users view other users in their area. They have only one action: ask out. Then they choose from a list of venues local to both users, and dates and times of availability.
The other user receives the invitation, and may accept the invitation, reject it, or suggest another time or venue.
Then they go and have a date.
Freemium features:
Users might pay extra to be allowed a greater number of outstanding invitations, or to see which other users viewed their photos.
Local affiliate relationships:
Since we provide the list of available venues for dates, we could make a deal with a coffee chain so that only their restaurants are shown in the list of venues.
Isaac Hawley // isaachawley@gmail.com
Isaac Hawley
Founder: Intelligence Integrated, LLC
5+ Years professional software experience
Operating costs are very low. Google App Engine is the platform, which offers excellent scalability at very low cost. Shallow Coffee should be exceptionally cheap to run.
Full-time, uninterrupted work is all that I need for Shallow Coffee to reach a Minimum Viable Product. Then I'll have to decide what to do next.