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Back in 2004, two Harvard graduates decided to make a dating website with the vision that dating should be free. Since then, OkCupid.com has gained 525,000 active users (meaning active within the last 8 weeks), climbing their way up to the top of the online dating empire, possibly freaking out Match.com, which has an estimated 1.3 million users. In Los Angeles alone, OkCupid has 54,000 registers users (including Tom from MySpace... maybe that's him, maybe not) with about 10,000 to 15,000 who are active within a 50-mile radius of downtown.
Today, OkCupid is still free. But "it's not enough to be free, you have to free and better," Sam Yagan, says CEO and Co-Founder of OkCupid.com and Co-Creator of the new CrazyBlindDate.com, which launched in New York City and other metros in November and just launched in Los Angeles this past Monday.
Yagan and his team wanted to do something fun. Women complain about the amount of time put into online dating and men complain about the lack of spontaneity says Yagan. "If you're single and you want to have a date now and not to be sitting in front of the computer, then here's a site that says 'spend as little time as possible with us.' With CrazyBlindDate, you sign up, go away and CBD will let you know when and if options are available."
Here's how it works: Let's say you're single and would like to meet someone new tonight but don't have time to surf thru an online dating site to find the right person and then email/message them to make a connection.
With CrazyBlindDate.com (CBD), you go to the site, sign up and enter a few important parameters - what date/time you're available, what local neighborhood you'd like to meet in (pre-loaded with favorite local bars & coffee houses depending on your location), and where/when you can be contacted to alert you if you have a date (email or text message to your cell phone) - and CBD will find you a date. It will even offer you the ability to do double dates, either with a friend or another set of online daters.
Once you've been set up on a CBD date, you get a text message or email with descriptive info on your date (blue shirt, looks like Brad Pitt, etc.) and what time & where you'll be meeting, and then you're off to your date. Following the date, you can log back in to CrazyBlindDate.com and rate your date experience and the person you met, with that info being used for any and all future blind dates. It's like eBay, except for dating...
Yagan explains that they understand it's just a blind date. "It's probably not going to work with the probabilities." But he's surprised to see surveys by users saying that 40% of people have found a romantic connection of some sort with their blind date. The advantage of CrazyBlindDate is that you meet up at a bar or coffee shop, have a drink and if it's working 20-minutes later, then you buy another round. If not, then you call it a day.
Over a 1000 people have signed up for CBD since Monday's Los Angeles launch and dates have already happened. In Austin, where it launched in November, there's one woman who has had one date each week for 16-weeks (talk about a serial!). 3000 blind dates have been set up in total nationally and the average evaluation score is a 4.
If you're looking for some spontaneous thrilling excitement or freaky butterflies in your stomach, you might want to try CrazyBlindDate on a whim. Go out and meet LA.
