The Creator of the First Online Dating Site Is Still Dating Online
“I had people calling me up and asking ‘Are you the internet?'” the 48-year-old engineer told me. “And we said ‘Yeah,’ and tried to sell them some of our services. We were the only company in the Yellow Pages with the word ‘internet’ in it.”
The internet has changed a lot over the past 25 years, and Conru had a front row seat. In what he calls “being in the right place at the right time,” he started Web Personals in 1993 while doing his de classroom as “the guys from Yahoo and Google.”
Conru first helped work on the website for his small department at Stanford’s Center for Design research, which inspired him to launch Internet Media Services with roughly 10 to 15 employees-all at a time when few people knew what the internet was.
A year later, Conru started Web Personals, arguably the first online dating site ever, which was run by a group of Stanford grad students and one bright-eyed high school kid. “The odds were bad and I had to look elsewhere,” said Conru.
He tried newspaper personals, Tsdates free app which requires making abbreviations to fit into two-inch boxes, and video dating where one would watch VHS videos of people’s profiles and contact them. It was “a very manual process,” Conru recalled.
But Web Personals featured large photos and a whole page of text per profile. “That’s what you see on all the dating sites today, except Tinder,” said Conru. “They went the complete opposite way with only one photo.”