iThinkSoToo.com

For a while now Match.com has featured a TV commercial stating that 1 in 5, or 20%, of all relationships nowadays start online. The stat is also displayed on their website. In order to get this stat, Match.com worked with a research firmed called Chadwick Martin Bailey. Together they conducted 3 series of surveys , the largest had 7,000 participants and the smallest about 2,500. Amongst many of the interesting findings, they discovered that roughly 1 in 5 relationships started online. I have several friends that have met their significant others online so the statistic did not come as a shock to me. What would probably shock me is looking at the amount of money that Match.com probably spent getting this information.

Link to the research document here.

As you can imagine, all of us here at ithinksotoo.com are firm believers in the power of “crowd sourcing” or the “wisdom of the crowds”– two terms that have gained lots of notoriety over the past few years. Putting our thinking hats on, we decided to try and see how powerful ithinksotoo.com and its thousands of users may be at answering a question similar to what Match.com likely paid thousands of dollars for. So we decided to post the following question on our site:

The question, so far, has received 780 answers. While the number is not huge, its sizeable enough for us to drive one interesting insight… 19% of all users answered the “YES” they have met their significant other online. And answer that jives remarkably well with the answer of the professional research firm.

While we understand that there are some big limitations in the amount of information we can get about the specifics about way the users are answering the question, the truth is that many of those limitations are also faced by more complicated and ‘fancy’ anonymous surveys that research firms conduct. The real power behind ithinksotoo.com lies with the quickness with which these questions can be answered, and more importantly, with how much cheaper it was for us to reach the same answer than it must have been for Match.com. In addition, because ithinksotoo.com users answer many (hundreds even) of questions, we can also derive interesting correlations between multiple questions– something that can drive more interesting insights than a one-time study may provide.

After several months of redesign and back end development work, ithinksotoo.com is back up and running. We officially launched the site out of testing January 24th, 2010 (I took us a little longer to get the blog set up and running). We did a quick press release that got picked up by SF Gate. Not a bad start!
In the  article we talked about some of the explosive growth numbers we experienced over the first week since launch. After 5 days of being live we had over 100,000 answers to over 500 questions. And yet, the growth has not slowed down! In the week or so since this release came out we have more than doubled all of our metrics!

The accuracy, fun & relevancy of the ithinksotoo.com experience lies completely in the hands of our many thousands of users. The more questions people answer and the more questions people submit the better the site becomes for all of us that use it. So, don’t be afraid to post your own questions, come back and check how people are reacting to it, and if you are having fun, invite your friends to join our ever growing community!

We are extremely pleased with the reception ithinksotoo.com has received. We also expect to improve the site over the next couple of month based on our user feedback and some ideas we have in the back burner. Thanks to all of our users for all their support!

Link to press release here.