# Tawkify

Tawkify brings the personalization of matchmaking to the masses.

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/tawkify
- Entity ID: wefunder:company:8836
- Last updated: 2023-10-23T21:14:24Z
- Generated at: 2026-06-10T02:28:50Z

## Quick facts
- $125K monthly revenue. $1.5M annual-recurring-revenue.
- Increased Q3 sales 90% year-over-year.
- $1,500 customer LTV. $200 marketing CAC.
- Traditional matchmakers cost $10k - $500k. Tawkify: $500.
- Founder sold previous dating app with 6M users.
- 49 Million Americans use ineffective online dating services.
- Investors include: Stanford-StartX Fund & Scott Banister.

## Story
E. Jean Carroll writes the Ask E. Jean column in Elle magazine. Incredibly it's the longest, currently-running advice column in American publishing. She has six million readers. E. Jean was a writer for Saturday Night Live, a contributing editor to Esquire, Outside, and Playboy. Her TV show on MSNBC was called—what else?—Ask E. Jean. She founded, with her sister, Cande Carroll, the breakthrough dating site, GreatBoyfriends.com (where women recommend their ex-boyfriends to each other) and which has been profiled in The New York Times, Newsweek, Men's Health, etc., and seen on The Today Show, Oprah, CNN, etc. After two glasses of wine, E. Jean estimates that with her experience, book, Mr. Right, Right Now, coaching site, Dating: E. Jean, and YouTube Channel, she has helped more people find enticing mates than any advice columnist in history. Kenneth Shaw was most recently the principal imagineer at One Kings Lane. He began his career at Microsoft, and moved on to become the bashful firebrand who created My Purity Test, one of the most popular Facebook apps of all time. He also created the Elle magazine Facebook App and Homeslyce.com. He graduated from Stanford in '07—he's a geek, a black belt in Hapkido, and possesses such a sunny disposition he makes a basket of puppies look depressed.

## FAQ
1. **Love it! Can you give a little more details about the $200 CAC (i.e. how are you acquiring customers now)? If the average customer lifetime is 3 months, how many percent of them stop using the service because they already got a good date and how many percent just churned? Thanks.**
   - Thanks Siak! In regards to the $200 CAC, 25% of sales comes from Facebook Ads, Google PPC, and Word of Mouth. The remaining is broken up between Bing, Email Marketing, Pinterest, Press, and recruiting. From what we know of the folks who have stopped using the service, 23% were because of a successful relationship, 26% have asked us to check back with them for renewal in the future due to work, travel, etc., 19% went on to explore other options, and 32% are folks who we should not have worked ...
2. **What are your immediate plans for growth? When will V2 be ready and how will you turn it on after that?**
   - Great question, Will. We plan to capitalize on several attractive avenues for growth. 1) We currently operate in NYC and SF, which have high concentration of high-earning singles. There is significant opportunity to continue to accelerate our growth here. With a few hundred paying clients in these two locations already, we're past $1.5M in ARR. We're far from hitting capacity. A couple thousand paying clients is definitely doable in these two cities and at that point, we'd already be in the t...
3. **What cities are lined up for "launch" over the next 12 months?**
   - Kevin, we've currently prioritized cities based on the density of high-earning singles as well as the organic user growth we're seeing in these cities. Our roadmap right now is to launch Boston and Chicago in Q2, LA, DC and Seattle in Q3, and Miami, Houston, Austin and Dallas in Q4.
4. **I presume that the matchmakers are finding matches primarily based on who they can find on dating sites, correct? If this is the case, aren't the matchmakers at risk of getting booted from these sites for having a commercial interest that is competitive to the websites where t...**
   - As far as the sourcing goes, Steve, there are many resources for finding potential matches. Dating sites are just one of them - there are professional sites like Linkedin, meetups / events, etc. We're seeing network effects with our growing team of matchmakers and clients through referrals. We are also growing these resources through partnerships, affiliates and targeted marketing, and measuring the cost of a match on date. At some point, it may make sense to evaluate acquiring dating apps to...
5. **How is Tawkify different from DatingRing, a YCombinator startup which was not able to grow and scale?**
   - We're growing quickly and as a result scaled our matchmakers significantly. Right now, we're pre-selling experiences at a later start date in order to onboard more matchmakers. We will have to accelerate the hiring as we launch new cities in Q2.

## Team
- E. Jean Carroll (President)
- Patrick Shih (Founding Engineer)
- Susan Huang (Founding Designer)
- Kenneth Shaw (CEO)
- Valerie Presley (Marketing Communications Special)
- Julia Armet  (Director of Operations)
- Eve Blazo (Director of Recruiting)
- Angie Lee (Client Success Manager)
- Eric Hsu (Software Engineer)
- Michele Presley (VP of Sales and Marketing)

## Q&A
- Q: How is Tawkify different from DatingRing, a YCombinator startup which was not able to grow and scale?
  - A: We're growing quickly and as a result scaled our matchmakers significantly. Right now, we're pre-selling experiences at a later start date in order to onboard more matchmakers. We will have to accelerate the hiring as we launch new cities in Q2.
- Q: The core attraction to tawkify seems to me to be the curated dating experience and a lower price point then current personal matchmaker services in the marketplace today. That puts a lot of weight on tawkify to find matchmakers who can deliver and deliver consistently. Any comments on the 3 star and lower reviews on yelp for the services provided by tawkify? How do you ensure quality among your matchmakers?
  - A: The key to success as with any human-powered business is to have strong feedback mechanisms to ensure quality as you scale. Similar to how drivers must maintain at least 4.7 star rating to continue with Uber, we have metrics in place for our matchmakers to meet to continue with us. What I can say about Yelp is that the few poor reviews we have come about when expectations are not aligned. Finding loved ones is very important to people and thus, we have to constantly iterate and improve our product to make sure expectations are set well from the very beginning and across all matchmakers so that we are able to follow through on one of core tenets: delight the customer. As we complete V2, we should continue to see the reviews improve as a result of our consistency in quality and experience.
- Q: I presume that the matchmakers are finding matches primarily based on who they can find on dating sites, correct? If this is the case, aren't the matchmakers at risk of getting booted from these sites for having a commercial interest that is competitive to the websites where they are looking for resources? And how many clients will one matchmaker have? I presume that the extent to which the experience feels curated depends on how much time a matchmaker has to spend on each person.
  - A: As far as the sourcing goes, Steve, there are many resources for finding potential matches. Dating sites are just one of them - there are professional sites like Linkedin, meetups / events, etc. We're seeing network effects with our growing team of matchmakers and clients through referrals. We are also growing these resources through partnerships, affiliates and targeted marketing, and measuring the cost of a match on date. At some point, it may make sense to evaluate acquiring dating apps to continue to decrease cost and increase margins. If you have additional thoughts on this, email me at kenneth@tawkify.com. I always love to strategize. Our platform allows for both matchmakers who want a part-time load or a full-time load. For the matchmakers with a full-time load, they can easily handle 25 clients. That's 50 matches a month and 600 matches over the course of the year, which is already 3x more efficient than traditional matchmakers. Of course, we know we can continue to be more efficient by replacing certain pieces with tech and decoupling the process like what Instacart did with shoppers and drivers. And that's the right way of thinking of this Steve - where the experience can be negatively affected if the matchmaker has too much to handle and cannot prioritize and meet the expectations of each client. By adding more tech, operational processes, and decoupling the process, we're working towards having matchmaker focus on what's most important: their relationship with client, screening potential matches, and feedback / advice - which is also what matchmakers enjoy doing most. This level of specialization along with our feedback loops will help ensure that we continue to improve the customer experience, decrease the time to onboard for matchmakers, increase retention for both sides, and increase gross margins.
- Q: What cities are lined up for "launch" over the next 12 months?
  - A: Kevin, we've currently prioritized cities based on the density of high-earning singles as well as the organic user growth we're seeing in these cities. Our roadmap right now is to launch Boston and Chicago in Q2, LA, DC and Seattle in Q3, and Miami, Houston, Austin and Dallas in Q4.
- Q: What are your immediate plans for growth? When will V2 be ready and how will you turn it on after that?
  - A: Great question, Will. We plan to capitalize on several attractive avenues for growth. 1) We currently operate in NYC and SF, which have high concentration of high-earning singles. There is significant opportunity to continue to accelerate our growth here. With a few hundred paying clients in these two locations already, we're past $1.5M in ARR. We're far from hitting capacity. A couple thousand paying clients is definitely doable in these two cities and at that point, we'd already be in the tens of millions in ARR. 2) We've started to see folks convert from non-paying searchable memberships and recruits to client experiences. It's an area we'd like to focus on more to increase the conversion and decrease our CAC significantly. 3) Affiliate agreements with low-cost dating sites to offer a premium matchmaking option. As we're decoupling the date assistant role, we should be able to provide new product offerings for both singles and couples with date activities / planning and address both sides of the market and successful churn. This is probably more in the future as we're focused on matchmaking right now. 4) Expansion to New Cities. We plan to expand to 12 new cities through the country over 2016. We're currently working on V2. The recruiting and date assistant pieces of the assembly line is currently rolled out to a few matchmakers. The tech team is prototyping the whole product pipeline right now. With this, we will be able to scale and launch new cities and have the oversight to decrease any bottlenecks and ensure dates are happening efficiently and at the high level of quality we expect. We are targeting a few iterations in Q1 in preparation to launch in Boston and Chicago in Q2. This will also allow us to handle operationally the significant increase in clients as Q1 is typically the biggest time for the dating industry with people's new year's resolution.
- Q: Love it! Can you give a little more details about the $200 CAC (i.e. how are you acquiring customers now)? If the average customer lifetime is 3 months, how many percent of them stop using the service because they already got a good date and how many percent just churned? Thanks.
  - A: Thanks Siak! In regards to the $200 CAC, 25% of sales comes from Facebook Ads, Google PPC, and Word of Mouth. The remaining is broken up between Bing, Email Marketing, Pinterest, Press, and recruiting. From what we know of the folks who have stopped using the service, 23% were because of a successful relationship, 26% have asked us to check back with them for renewal in the future due to work, travel, etc., 19% went on to explore other options, and 32% are folks who we should not have worked with to begin with due to demographic concerns, readiness to date, etc. We have since tweaked our initial client assessments and our marketing to better identify our target customers and increase their customer satisfaction. One of the ways we've begun addressing monthly churn is by introducing multi-month packages, which helps set better expectations from the get go that dating is not going to be an overnight success. Our team is focused on building lasting relationship with our clients that gets them to stick with us until we find them success. I'm happy to go into further detail. Feel free to reach out to me at kenneth@tawkify.com