“… Ultimately, eHarmony’s matching mechanism might be useful for other problems …”

Andrew Chen, writing about people-centered startups, writes:

eHarmony’s matching mechanism is a selective black box
Compare this with eHarmony’s model, where the selection criteria is based on a black box. You go and take a long quiz about your interests, personality, and interpersonal style. Then you sit back and wait for matches. You might not even get matches immediately, but rather, you get matches over time, once a couple days.

Then once you’re matched, you go through a very long funnel process where you start by asking each other quiz questions, then more open ended questions, and finally you have unstructured discussion. I think this is a 5 or 6 step process, which is amazing.

This mechanism caters to a different crowd, and it’s marketed as such:
First off, the high qualification bar means only serious daters get involved
The low number of matches means that each match will be highly considered
More qualitative information is conveyed through the lengthier process, which means less opportunities for bad first dates

Where else might it work?
Ultimately, it seems that eHarmony’s matching mechanism might be useful for other problems… Read the rest of his post