3 months in & we're making the competition sweat?
We might already be ruffling some feathers in the online dating industry.
Firstly, before launch we wrote a blog post, put up our initial marketing video and got some interest generated via hacker news. A well established dating company contacted us to offer to buy us out before launch. All they’d seen was our promo video and blog post. Hadn’t used the app, just liked the idea. We politely declined.
Fast forward to today and we’re publicising that Date.fm is now the first video chat dating app. We got covered for the first time in the major tech press on GigaOM. No one has ever before integrated live video chat in an app and made it so easy for people to connect and verify who they’re speaking to on the other end. This is revolutionary.
Date.fm also received a review on iTunes today for our current version 1.1.2, from a guy called “Bostonian”, and this is what he said:
“No gay fellas in Boston. Lame.
The design itself is simply alright. The video chat feature is cool, but it’s a paid extra.”
That’s a complete and utter fabrication. Date.fm is free to use, there is no In-App purchase, no cost to download, it’s completely funded via iAds and is completely free to the end user. Not only is it inaccurate with regard to our business model, it also is untrue that there are no gay fellas in Boston on our service. There are!
Maybe a disgruntled competitor doesn’t like what we’ve set out to achieve and are resorting to spreading missinformation through a fake review. Who knows.
Apple doesn’t seem to have an easy way to remedy this other than filing a “Report a Concern” link in iTunes.
We think this review, like our early buy-out offer, is a good indicator we’re on the right track. Watch this space.
