Dating sites like OKCupid and Match.com are great if you live in a city, where you go on dates with matchesand never seen them again if it doesn't work out. But what if you live in a town with, say, 8,000 people?
Rural towns often tout the perks of being a community where everybody knows everybody, but that can be a
real drawback when it comes to expanding your dating horizons. And OkCupid, while solving the "new person"dilemma, often matches farm folk with city folks who just didn't get it. So Jerry Miller thought up a better way.
Miller created the dating siteFarmersOnly.com, which now boasts 1.5 million members — a number doubled in
the last year — and 70-80 percent, he tells me, are in the agriculture industry now.
"We're in every state. It's amazing how spread out it is," he said. "I thought for sure we'd be real strong in the
Midwest and what's known as the "Cornbelt," and I was amazed how many people we had from California,Texas, Florida and New York State.
FarmersOnlyis one of the more successful niche dating sites that have cropped up in the last few years, and
are just hitting their stride. I talked to a couple of founders, who are fine with being the little guy in the worldof Match.coms, OkCupids, and EHarmonys.
Miller explained to me that the reason he started Farmers Only in the first place was because of a female
farmer he met. She had trouble meeting someone new, and created an online dating profile whereupon she wascontacted by city guy after city guy. The hardest part of going into a Sears of dating, was that everyone wasalready there and those people stood in the way of finding someone you might connect with.
"It's just so much easier than to go through a million profiles to find someone like you," Miller said. "Imagine if
you threw a party ... and they all had a similar outlook on life. Same lifestyle. It's so much easier to meetsomebody," he added.
Farmers and people who work in agriculture have unique lifestyle — days are long and a lot of time is spent in
rural communities — and finding someone that is accustomed to that rhythm is something that can't becompromised. "There is a different living in a rural farmland communities ... They [people living in the city] don'tunderstand the lifestyle of a farmer. It's Monday through Sunday," Miller told me.
"Lifestyle" is a word Miller repeated often. And perhaps that's perhaps one of the problems about bigger dating
sites, and why the demand for niche dating sites continues to rise — bigger dating sites haven't found a way toproperly weigh the importance of certain aspects and features of someone's life. For example, someone'ssuperficial disgust for eggplant or the smell of sun screen may be given the same weight as someone'svegetarianism or a farmer's outlook on life."For many vegetarians and vegans, it's a lifestyle," Dave Rubin from VeggieDate, a site that connects vegetariansand vegans said. He continued, stating that there are values like having a compassion for living beings andfuture plans, like raising children may be vegetarian, are really important to vegetarian and vegans. "I wouldwant a partner in life who shares my values," he added.
Values can also mean being a big fan of someone else's credo or beliefs.
"Over the years I formed many friendships with others who found them equally inspiring. Some of these people
I had met at summer conferences, for fans of her writings," Joshua Zader, the founder of The Atlaspheretold me. The Atlasphere connects fans of Ayn Rand with each other."So many of us were attending these conferences with the hope of eventually meeting our soulmate, someonewho loved Rand’s novels as we did. Wouldn’t it be great, we realized, if there was a dating service — so wedidn’t have to wait for annual conferences?" For Zader and many the 17,020 members of Atlasphere whohave created dating profiles, an appreciation for Ayn Rand is one of those make-or-break lifestyle musts.
"If you define your niche too narrowly, I’m sure it could backfire," Zader told me. "We think we’ve found the
perfect niche, though, because fans of Ayn Rand’s novels have so much in common — often including artistic,ethical, political, and spiritual values," he continued.
A look around the niche dating site pool, and you find things like Trek Passions, OkComrade, and
GlutenFreeSingles— enough sites to make you wonder if Zader is right. Setting up a website is getting easierand easier these days. And if the niche is popular and broad enough, you can really take off.
SCRUFF, a gay, location-based dating app which was inspired by gay men with facial hair (and their admirers),
has a user base of 6 million worldwide — quite a feat considering another app, Grindr, had a strangleholdon the market.
Part of that success was making itself distinct. "SCRUFF is somewhere in the goldilocks zone of gay dating,
which is one reason why I feel we are successful," Johnny Skandros, the app's Co-founder, said. Skrandosexplained that the app's balance between diversity and niche — it was first the first gay app to add atransgender search option and has options to search for all kinds of men — is one of the reasons its becomepopular. "With that said, we will always lean scruffier, and that makes us unique."
But getting big isn't necessarily something that all sites are looking for or need.
"We're not going to compromise our core just to try and get more people [on the site]," Miller said. "They say
opposites attract. Opposites do attract and a lot of times it's fun. But you can waste a lot of time searching ordating somebody opposite."Original source can be found
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