The founder of Match.com experienced a bitter irony when his own girlfriend left him for someone she met on his dating platform.
Gary Kremen, a California entrepreneur, launched Match.com in April 1995, revolutionising how people find love online.
The site began as an email-based hub of scanned pictures of singles and rapidly grew to become one of the world’s most successful dating platforms.
By December 1996, it had attracted more than 100,000 users.
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Today, Match.com boasts over 39 million users worldwide, primarily singles in the 30-40 age range.
Kremen is responsible for millions of relationships, marriages and babies throughout the world.
Kremen deliberately designed the platform with women in mind, recognising they were the key to success.
“You have to design the whole system for women, not men,” he told the Financial Times.
“Who cares what men think? So things like security and anonymity were important. And little things, like talking about body types, not pounds. Never ask a woman her weight.”
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This female-focused approach was revolutionary in the early 1990s internet landscape, where women represented just 10 per cent of web users.
Fran Maier, Match.com co-founder, helped create this female-friendly environment, developing safety guidelines and rejecting cold approaches to personal details.
“We wanted it to be a clean, well-lit space for people to have safe, anonymous fun,” Maier explained.
Despite his careful planning, Kremen fell victim to his own success in an unexpected way.
In the early days, he had everyone in the company, along with friends and family, create profiles on the site to boost user numbers.
This included his girlfriend at the time.
The strategy worked for growing the platform but came at a personal cost.
His girlfriend discovered another man on Match.com and left Kremen for him.
Kremen’s dating website idea was born in 1993, when the then 30-year-old Stanford graduate was searching for love himself.
“I find the best ideas I come up with, I’m solving the problems that I want to understand,” he told MailOnline.
At that time, dating options were limited to newspaper ads or expensive 900-number phone services.
The spark came when he received an email from a female customer whilst working at an e-commerce company.
This rare occurrence planted the idea of connecting potential dates online.
Kremen took his concept seriously, interviewing more than 100 women to understand their needs.
“I would literally go to women in the street,” Kremen recalled.
Starting with just $1.7million in angel investment, Match.com quickly proved its worth.
The platform initially operated via email, as few users had home computers or web access.
Kremen insisted on committing to the web rather than other service providers, following his instinct about the future of connectivity.
“I saw that communications were getting quicker,” he explained.
His vision paid off as the site’s growth accelerated, sometimes by up to 4 per cent daily.
Despite his romantic setback, Kremen eventually found his own happy ending.
He married in 2008 and went on to have two sons with his wife.
