CEO Greg Waldorf gives the Wall Street Journal a casual interview. They talked about finding love on the Internet, eHarmony’s daring beginnings and how, no matter how fast technology changes, people care about relationships.
The Matchmaker
… The vision behind the company is not simply to create marriages, but to create happy marriages by using scientific research to unite compatible individuals. “I know it sounds corny when I’m talking about this,” Mr. Waldorf says, but, “if you can lower the divorce rate by 1%, it could affect a million people in a generation. I don’t know if that’s an exact number, but it gives you a sense of how many people’s lives are impacted.”
The popularity and financial success of sites like eHarmony underscores what perhaps should have been obvious: People care about relationships. “I can not tell you how many businesspeople I meet who tell me that the first thing they read in the Sunday Times is the vows column,” he says. And the evidence hardly ends there: “I used to spend a lot of time in Manhattan. Years ago, way before I ever even thought about eHarmony, whenever you’d pass people on a run, particularly women, what were they talking about? Relationships!”
People’s willingness to pay for eHarmony would seem to support his point. Consumers, Mr. Waldorf explains, are far more disposed to pay for goods rather than services on the Internet. “People expect things on the Internet to be free,” he says. “So how have we built a business that will have nearly $200 million in revenue this year? We grew our subscriber base by about a third from 2005 to 2006. How? Because this is something that people care a lot about.” … Read the full article, dated 10 February 2007
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