Interview with Julia Dorofeeva, Pilot Group
Andrey Malygin: Julia, how big is Pilot Group company?
Julia Dorofeeva: We are relatively large company. There are 26 full time employees, as well as some part-time contract workers.
Andrey Malygin: How long have you been in business?
Julia Dorofeeva: More than 7 years.
Andrey Malygin: Do you specialize in dating software solutions or also work in other areas?
Julia Dorofeeva: Dating solutions are among our top priorities. Actually, we started to run the company by introducing dating software to the market.
Andrey Malygin: What’s your role in the company? How long you’ve been working for Pilot Group?
Julia Dorofeeva: It’s my 3rd year in Pilot Group. Started with an entry-level managerial position, I am now Head of Sales and deal with dating, social networking and matchmaking software.
Andrey Malygin: Okay, the first question from daters.ru members is the following. “Сan you advise us on an SMS billing solution for payment processing from EU and North American clients as 2checkout.com don’t work with dating sites anymore?”
Julia Dorofeeva: Pilot Group constantly improves its relations with Russian payment processing operators. As for now [March 2008], we support WebMoney [the largest multifunctional payment processing operator in Russia] and are also partnering with Yandex.Money and RuPay and expect to work with them soon. Regarding SMS billing solutions, we provide SMS Coin and Russian Billing services to all our clients, if required.
Andrey Malygin: So EU and North American clients can pay only with SMS?
Julia Dorofeeva: For clients from these regions I’d recommend using Vodafone services. This company mostly deals with cellular telecommunications and phones, but they also planning to expand into SMS payment processing services. I heard about them at conferences; they will present their services very soon and this is what I’d advise to use.
Andrey Malygin: Do you offer any additional services to your clients?
Julia Dorofeeva: We also offer hosting and customization solutions. If our clients have any ideas to implement on Pilot Group products, or need any customization of the site, or implementing new templates – they get a personal project manager, support from our programming staff, etc.
Andrey Malygin: How to launch a successful dating start-up?
Julia Dorofeeva: To be honest, I believe that it’s very difficult to start a decent dating site right now. There are [already] a lot of niche dating sites around, so it’s quite a challenge to establish your services in some local territory and drive members to your database and keep them active. Niche dating can be categorized into interests or divided into local geographical areas.
Andrey Malygin: Do you mean they’re Russian or foreign geographical areas?
Julia Dorofeeva: Any of them. If in Russia – you can pick an audience from some specific city or region. The main ideas here are that you should either start working mainly offline, communicating and attracting new members, or concentrate in online activities and attract members from specific geographical territories or interested in some common hobbies, etc.
Andrey Malygin: Are you talking about some additional offline services?
Julia Dorofeeva: Exactly. Though not services, but more likely events: you organize some parties, give away flyers, or publish ads with discount coupons in printed media. With that coupon clients come to your site and get 2-3 months of free membership, for example. It’s a good way to start.
Andrey Malygin: Any tips on promoting dating site from a scratch?
Julia Dorofeeva: One of the most common ideas is to hire a SEO Manager, who will work on search engine optimizations, gather relevant keywords, write descriptions, etc, but this is only one side of the story. The other side has much more ways to explore. One can buy members database, hook it up to the site and give appearance that he or she has a lot of members – and attract new profiles by doing so. Others implement very user-oriented features on the site and, as I explained above, advertises the resource in offline media. While third could promote some dating affiliate program and, by doing so, start making first money from the site.
Andrey Malygin: Would you suggest starting a free or paid membership dating site?
Julia Dorofeeva: It depends on some factors. Many webmasters start with a free dating project and then switch to paid memberships. So, as a free site they show some ads and paid banners and earn money with members clicking on these spots. As soon as they succeed in forming a core of members, who are united with some ideas they share, or who have friends on this site, and who have already become accustomed to this resource – then it is time to make some features paid-only, like chat or instant messenger.
Andrey Malygin: For those who seek a fresh start in online dating business – is it better to make your own independent resource or play a stake on dating affiliate programs?
Julia Dorofeeva: It might be easier to make a kick-start with affiliate programs. We all know that in real life we sometimes prefer to choose easier ways of doing something. But in a long run I am not sure that it’s going to be more profitable to run an affiliate site. If the whole site belongs to you – it’s completely up to you to grow into some big numbers business and start to compete with big names.
Andrey Malygin: What are the business prospects of social networks in Russian Internet? Does it worth trying to penetrate this market bearing in mind that it’s almost totally dominated with VKontakte.ru [FaceBook.com-like site] and Odnoklassniki.ru [ClassMates.com-like site]?
Julia Dorofeeva: I think that it is promising trend. Russia has just reached that flooding wave of online dating. It started in USA, then reached Europe and now it is very popular in Russia. People start to trust such sites and begin to meet online. Social networks are part of that booming trend. I believe that niche social networks – just like niche dating sites – will be more popular in future. For example, business oriented social networks are gaining more and more attention now.
Andrey Malygin: Regarding the January dating conference in Miami: did you see exhibitors or visitors from Russia there?
Julia Dorofeeva: Yes, in comparison with previous events in Miami, there were a lot of people from Russia. They now pay more attention to this conference and visit it to gain valuable experience. I think that companies from Russia will pay more and more attention to foreign markets.
Andrey Malygin: This is quite interesting. BTW, it reminds me of one question I have for you - I mean this phenomenon about migration of Russian wives abroad. You might know that among members of our Romance-net.com dating banner exchange network there are quite a lot of websites which operate in the business of so called Russian mail-order brides. This whole industry works on the idea that there are a lot of women in Russia and other ex-USSR countries which are willing to marry a foreign guy and relocate. What do you think, how long will this phenomenon last? Is it about to decrease or increase? Some of our partners say that their sales are dropping, while others claim quite the opposite. There are sites which have truly experienced growth; though they started doing business quite recently, today they are very well known, and nobody knows how possibly it can be. Can you do any forecast on this market?
Julia Dorofeeva: It seems to me that such forecast is in direct dependency with state of country’s economical situation. Today women in Russia aren’t in a desperate situation, even single women, and most do pretty decent living and make relatively good money. The only thing they are missing, I think, maybe some communication with men. And thus they go to such dating sites. But not all will be willing to relocate. So, the scheme “marry foreign man – relocate abroad” might just transform into “marry foreign man – live somewhere”, not just abroad, maybe stay in Russia, or move to USA, it doesn’t matter so much now; the key will be the qualities of the man, not what country he lives in. And if dating sites can help people with that – why not?
The dating industry keeps developing as the whole country’s economy keeps developing; people work more, they have less free time to go to meet other people - but they have more money to spend now.
Andrey Malygin: A lot of web sites work in the mail-order bride niche, and many of them have quite impressive turnarounds. I wonder why on such huge events, like the one in Miami, there are so few people operating such sites. I personally know quite successful businessmen of such sites, who can visit such events in online dating industry. Many of them work and live in USA, they won’t even have any troubles with getting visa and buying expensive transatlantic air tickets. But they are reluctant to show up at such conferences. What is the case here, what do you think?
Julia Dorofeeva: The main reason here is that such industry in Russia wasn’t properly represented and known at all. It wasn’t quite an industry at all – people were just meeting each other, got married, relocated abroad but that wasn’t positioned as some global business. Thus, I believe, that event organizers simply even didn’t know about these people who were operating such businesses. In our case, Pilot Group took initiative to participate in Miami event. We contacted them, and they were quite happy to see company from Russian market, and other Russian companies just followed us later. Not too many, but the number is increasing. I also think that Russian owners of prominent dating sites became interested in new trends, and now want to learn more. They just decided to learn from each other’s experiences and also to show their accomplishments – that’s another reason.
Andrey Malygin: Thanks for the answers, Julia.
Julia Dorofeeva: You are welcome!
Interview questions suggested by readers of forum Daters.ru, which is our a branch project for the Russian webmasters and dating site owners. The Russian versions of this and other interviews with the world leading dating experts are posted on Daters.ru. Submit your interview inquiries here.
