OtisNotes

Sunday marked the death of LoveHappens. It is sadly now in the deadpool.

A brief history of LoveHappens. Launched in 2002 as Emode Matchmaking, I was one of 4-5 engineers building the product. Our differentiator was we had a comprehensive personality test (using our know-how from Emode/Tickle) - and believe it or not nobody else had one of those in 2002 (except a then little-known site called eHarmony). We quickly took advantage of the cheap advertising economy and the massive amount of traffic we had on Emode.com to grow the site to a critical mass. When Emode changed its name to Tickle the product became "Tickle Matchmaking".

After Tickle was sold in 2004 the product went without a product manager for a year, and combined with a tougher advertising market, started to languish. We also had made a critical mistake: we had branded it as "Tickle Matchmaking" and put it as a sub-tab on the Tickle site. Now many people either thought Tickle was a dating site, or didn't realize Tickle had a dating site. Lesson learned: only the Yahoo's and Google's can get away with branded sub-products (Yahoo Personals is still doing quite well). Everybody else should launch with their own brand.

So in 2005 I took over the dating site as product manager and decided to re-design and re-brand as "LoveHappens". We changed the positioning from 'a dating site with a personality test' to 'a dating site with matchmakers'. We built scores of tools for regular non-single people to come in and help their friends and others find dates. We were able to turn around the decline in traffic and revenue with the new product, and became a top-10 dating site. One independent study even called us the Darling of the Dating Industry.

I worked for a year and half on LoveHappens with a lot of talented people, and learned a *lot* about making web products from the experience. It's sad to see it go.