When Mitch Solway first entered the online dating service business in 1993, the "line" his clients used wasn't the Internet, but the telephone.
Teleclassifieds, a phone service, which later became Telepersonals, allowed singles to meet and talk on the phone, and was the predecessor to the highly successful Lavalife online dating service, sold by it's Canadian owners in 2004 for $150 million to U.S.-based Vertrue Inc.
So you might think after 10 years as vice-president of marketing at Lavalife, Solway might think he'd fine-tuned and squeezed as much out of that particular business as possible.
And, in fact, Solway did too.
But as he was pursuing other ventures through his new consulting company Think Mitch Think, he was approached by a friend, Peter Ehrlich, who persuaded him there was another niche to mine in the online dating field: single parents.
"He convinced me the market was huge and parents were disillusioned — that they had such negative feelings about being a single mum or dad that we had to get involved," says Solway. "There was such a compelling need!"
And Ehrlich knew that niche well, because as a single parent he was part of it.
So Single Parent Love Life (www.singleparentlovelife.com) was launched last November and 7,500 clients later, it's proving taking a single slice of a big pie works — when there's the numbers and more importantly, says Solway, "the need."
Becky Reuber, who teaches entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, agrees the main requirements for identifying a niche market are numbers and a "unique" need. And once you've identified that need, the upside is you can specifically target your communications to that, she says. "You don't have to target your offerings or your communications to everybody." The challenge, though, she advises, is learning "what their unique needs are" and "what resonates with them."
Which is exactly what Solway set out to research before launching the company, with Ehrlich, who has expanded his own knowledge of what it's like to be a single dad dating into a virtual business in itself, writing columns on his experiences for the Toronto Star, AskMen.Com, and, of course, SPLL.
What Solway found on the major dating sites, he says, is that single parents were always apologizing. "Hi, I'm a great person but I've got kids," he mimics. And he also knew of a study by a major U.S. online service that found the No. 1 reason people don't contact someone on a site was that they have kids. "As a single parent, you come to these sites, and you know you're second class."
So he knew the need was there.
Solway also knew the second criteria of a credible niche market -- the numbers — was there. One in every four singles has kids, he discovered. "The absolute market size is there."
So Solway set about figuring how to connect with them.
What he found was that other single parent sites were just "cookie cutter" versions of broader dating sites, he said. "What they weren't doing is connecting with single parents and saying: 'We get what it's like to be you.' We wanted to create a space where they could come and feel great about being a single parent, where they're the stars!"
Images on the site include a man with a soccer ball with the line "Soccer dad seeks soccer mum," and a picture of a "dad" camping, with the comment: "I can keep a fire going."
