Internet Dating or a Matchmaker? What should you try?
Every once in awhile, one of my clients will ask about using a matchmaker to find a spouse. Since I have had no personal experience with matchmakers, I’ve been watching and reading to see what I could learn. I wrote about matchmaker Samantha Daniels in an earlier blog entry. Dr. Phil had a show on recently featuring women who self-identified as gold diggers. The segment about KT featured Patti Stanger of the Millionaire’s Club:
Dr. Phil introduces Patti Stanger, the founder and CEO of the Millionaire’s Club, an upscale matchmaking service where millionaires pay anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000 to meet beautiful, single women. “It goes from the low-end millionaires up to the billionaires that you see in the news and hear about daily,” Patti says about her clientele. “They get married and they get into relationships fairly quickly. They’re marriage-minded men. They want to be married.”
As for the women, she says, “We have about 25,000 women on file and we continue to get new ones every single day. Women just log on, fill out an application, send in professional photos and then we screen them.”
The women list for free. It looks good, ladies, until you find out the pesky gender ratios again: Dr. Phil asked how many active male clients the site had, and as I remember, Stanger finally admitted to 200 or so. 200 guys to 25,000 women??? Guys, if you’ve got the money, got for it. But it doesn’t look too good for the women. Stanger’s website is www.millionairesclub123.com
I got a link this morning to a posting on Ryze.com, a networking site where I am a member. Steve Lewis, a professional matchmaker, wrote about the difficulties of starting a matchmaking business. Now, there’s something you rarely see spelled out, so if you are interested at all, I’d advise that you take a look. His point #9 is:
9. The business model offering women free has worked for many. Theses services usually have only a few male clients that pay 5-50K for a membership. You must be in a large area like NYC, Chicago, LA for this to work.
This seems exactly the model of the Millionaire’s Club. And who knows? Maybe True.com too, which is charging men and not women, evidently (see my last posting). Get lots of women to sign up for free, then the few guys who then pay get their choice of a HUGE pool of ladies. And guess what, ladies? If you are not under 30 and magazine cover material, you don’t stand much of a chance.
I just started recruiting women for Patti. The women need to not only look beautiful, they need to have big beautiful grey matter - -Beauty and brains!
Posted by Idelle on 11/23 at 12:31 AM