[MUSIC]
Let's start with a quick poll.
Who here is signal?
That's a shocking amount given that I'm in a room full of really smart and
very attractive people.
We've all seen like pretty woman.
These movies have one message.
That one for you is out there and fate will help you find them, really?
I love love.
Love to me is the most powerful drug in the world.
Love feels like magic.
Love drives some of us a little bit insane, but
let's be real in order to find love, we need to be strategic.
And strategies my thing, I am the definition of a career woman.
When I was 12 years old, I started working as a carpenter.
I made $12 an hour and I felt tremendous.
From there on I was hooked.
I worked my way up into construction industry leading multimillion dollar
projects and my life was only about career.
Money was freedom.
Then one Sunday afternoon, I land in Berlin excited to get back
to work when life decided to throw me a curveball.
I had a missed call from my.
And when I called back, I learned that my pap smear had come back positive.
At age 25, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
When I called the doctor back, she asked me a simple question, Sarah,
do you want to have children?
If not, they will do a one time surgery that removes the cancer forever.
If yes, they had to do a small surgery, with a 20% risk of the cancer coming back.
Confronting this a strong,
independent Korean woman in her mid 20s felt impossible.
I fell into a hole of self reflection, I had money, but I might never have family.
Was there more out there in life than just career?
The good news is that I hold a PhD in Data Science and Engineering and
therefore I decided to not rely on fate when it comes to figure out that question.
So in very much me fashion, I went all in.
In the year, I did real life experiments, and
I ended up going on 100 dates with 100 people.
Yeah, it was a lot of work.
Four years and two serious long and happy relationships.
Later, I have two empirical learnings that I'm going to share with you today.
First, input equals output.
Yes, we've all heard this, it's done for business school, but
it's also very much true when it comes to dating.
Dating is a part time job.
However, since we're little children,
we spend 40 plus hours a week advancing our careers learning from generations of
generations who have done this before, and everything in order to make more money.
However, enough research shows that if you want to live a long, happy, and
fulfilled life, it's not really about how much money you make.
It's all about relationships.
So why do we not focus on what matters most to us?
Why do we not learn about it?
If I had to rewrite my Stanford essay now about what matters most to me and
why, I would probably write about love.
And let's be real, I would probably not be here today with you.
Second big learning.
A long term partner is way more like a business partner and
a best friend than somebody we have a spark with.
And don't get me wrong, I love the spark.
Spark is great.
However, I'm arguing to look behind the spark and
figure out if long term interests and
values actually align instead of just relying on an initial chemical connection.
When I had my two empirical learnings given that I'm a scientist,
I decided maybe there's real research out there.
So I went down a rabbit hole of reading every research paper that has
ever been written about dating and love.
And I put it all together into something that I call an informal PhD in dating.
So I ended up writing a dating book called Startup Your Love Life,
where I apply business knowledge and data analysis on finding a life partner.
And yes, you can buy it now on Amazon.
I brought some of the most important insights here with me today for you.
But first, let's take a step back.
We were talking about Julia Roberts and Richard Gere.
They meet each other randomly and fall deeply in love.
What a great story.
But how likely is that the odds of finding love
randomly are 1 to 562-0.17%.
It is five times more likely that your next bottle of wine is going to cork.
We spend an average about a 10th on the time we spend on choosing the right career
on choosing the right partner, and from going to date to actually having a baby.
It takes an average seven years in the US.
So how can we make the odds a little bit more likely?
And how can we make this whole process a little bit more efficient?
We need to use business knowledge.
And yes, we're in business school, so let's do that.
When you start a new business, the first thing you should think about is do your
research and development and decide what market you're going after.
In business terms, we call this total addressable market.
Short TAM.
So let's do this for me, as a dating product.
My time is as follows.
I'm looking for a man 50% of the market, aged 30 to 37.
Six feet or taller, only 9% of the market, with a bachelor's degree and
similarly attractive, and max 50 miles from here.
The time for me as a dating product is 223 men.
That's not big.
If I'm willing to go down to 511 or taller, my time goes up to 450 men.
Still not big, but doable.
After you do your research and development and decide on your time,
the next step in every startup process is to decide on your sales strategy.
The good thing is when it comes to dating,
there's only three big sales strategies that captured 90% of the market.
You can date in bars and restaurants, you can date on dating apps, or
you can date through friends of friends.
And every good investor in the room will have the same question for me right now.
Sara, what's the return of investment of all of that?
The return of investment or also ROI for
these three sales strategies is as follows.
If you date in bars and
restaurants the ROI is you need to meet about 90 people to get one actual match.
The ROI of dating apps is you need to match with 60 people to get one
real potential candidate.
And the ROI of dating through friends of friends is about 30 people to 1.
Yes, you're smart enough.
We should all date through friends of friends After you have
figured out your sales strategies, the next step in your startup process is you
need to do some piloting and figure out if you have product market fit.
And product market fit and dating is really when you found somebody,
you hopefully like but also where you don't have any serious deal breaker quiz.
So in order to get there you need to decide on your deal breakers versus your
nice to haves.
Write those deal breakers down, screen for them early and
do not compromise because you probably get hurt down the road.
And yes, I know of some people who keep track of the deal breakers
in Excel spreadsheets, so they have weekly KPIs.
Next step in your dating journey is marketing.
And the good news is when it comes to dating,
marketing is really all about optimizing your dating profile.
And there's a lot of research about this.
First, when you take pictures for your dating profile,
take them from the left of your face, not from the right, why?
Because through an art history,
we have developed an inherent bias towards seeing beautiful faces from the left and
not from the right things to people like Leonardo da Vinci.
Second, if you're a guy and you think sunglasses or whatever kind
of other glasses will do the trick, get rid of them, you lose 15% of swipes.
And yes, if you have a picture of you from that last wedding or
whatever the picture with formal wear, put it on your dating profile.
Because you score higher on trustworthiness and influence.
And yes, you need a picture with a pet, preferably dog.
So go out there, steal your neighbor's dog, take a picture with it and
put it on your dating profile, because you'll score higher on date ability.
And lastly, if you're a man, we're bright colors, and
if you're a woman, we're red, and you're going to crush it.
I'm telling you all of this to give you hope.
There is research out there that we can leverage to make dating more efficient,
and ultimately more enjoyable.
Business is not magic.
Businesses strategy.
Love is not magic either.
It's more like a magic trick.
So look behind the curtain, figure out what's actually going on and treat it more
like your career than like something that will randomly happen to you.
Make magic happen.
After having researched dating for several years, I have the toolkit, the scientific
formula for love and the conviction to build a real family while having a career.
Luckily, I am now cancer free, and I can still have children.
Have I found the right partner yet?
No, not yet.
I might have to rethink some of my deal breakers in my time.
But I know that by putting in the work and using strategy,
I will find a co founder for my life so that we can IPO our love.
And given last week's KPIs and funnel data, I think I'm slowly getting there.
So, instead of waiting for Richard Gere to drive by this limo,
go make strategy your copilot.
Get into the driver's seat yourself and start up your love life.