Quick Pitch: A new date in your city every day.
Genius Idea: Flipping the daily deals model to daily dates.
Most online dating sites are all variations of the same basic idea: Dater A fills out a profile, Dater B likes what he sees and sends a wink or nudge to start the courtship. Some sites throw in matching algorithms or even friend vetting, but they're all essentially different shades of gray.
InboxCupid is anything but gray. The fresh-faced dating site offers a quirky twist on the daily deals model -- instead of offering email subscribers a daily deal per city, InboxCupid serves up a featured dater per city.
Co-founder Kareem Ahmed likens the InboxCupid to an online speed dating network. "You can get exposed to a lot of people with doing a minimal amount of work," he says.
Here's how it works: Would-be online daters subscribe to InboxCupid in their city and specify who they're interested in dating -- a man interested in women, for instance. Users can then simply sit back and wait for InboxCupid to fill their inboxes with daily featured dates. If users like what they see, they can hit the "Inbox Me" button to message the featured date and see if there's a match. To make the connection, InboxCupid charges the interested dater $1.
For those who want to be the featured daily date -- and 15% of all subscribers do, Ahmed says -- all that's required is creating a profile and selecting and answering five questions. Wannabe featured dates can choose to answer innocent and innocuous questions such as "What is the worst date you have ever been on?" or the more provocative ones like, "Is sexual compatibility important to you?"
When the profile is complete, the user is added to a first-come-first-serve city queue and will receive a notification prior to being featured. Should the dater get featured, an email blast will go out to the city's subscriber pool and interested dates are then required to answer the same five questions and pony up the $1 connection fee.
Right now, the just-launched startup is currently only live in Minneapolis, but it's accepting sign-ups in cities across the U.S. and will open up as soon as supply meets demand, which Ahmed defines as 1,000 subscribers per city.
InboxCupid went from idea to actual site in about one month's time. Ever the idea man, Ahmed would often think around unique applications of the daily deals trend until the daily date idea struck him as something that's never been done before.
"We thought it would be crazy to put actual people up as potential dating candidates," says Ahmed of the two-man team that includes his developer co-founder David Dellanave.
The pair still have day jobs but believe that InboxCupid has a novelty quality that will spark courtesy. "We live in a voyeuristic culture where everyone is so interested with everyone else is doing," Ahmed says.
Whether InboxCupid can graduate from being just another novel idea to a viable business is for you, the online daters of the world, to decide.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Vanessa Pike-Russell
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
