Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Stanford Podcasts - eHarmony - Greg Waldorf

I was just pointed to a set of great podcasts done by Stanford B-School and particularly, I just listed to the podcast by eHarmony's Greg Waldorf.

Having been involved with eHarmony from it's founding days as an acting CTO, it was interesting to hear how far they've come. Some items from the pod cast:
  • 100,000 - babies born as a result of relationships started on eHarmony
  • 15M registered
  • 1% of marriages in US this year resulting from eHarmony

I don't know if these are true, but still, the impact of the vision of the original founders Neil Clark Warren and Greg Forgatch is amazing.

A couple of things I should add - Greg didn't mention the technical challenges they had (scalable complex matching algorithm) and the issues they had with an initial developer. He was asked about how you get a network business going - and it was extremely challenging. One of the things that Greg Forgatch (the original CEO) should be credited with was testing many different marketing approaches until he found the ones that worked.

Still it was gratifying to hear the numbers.

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