The $2bn online dating industry has given rise to a spectrum of secondary businesses: Lisa Hoehn helps you find love one profile at a time

The $8000 course on "how to commit" and other expenses of online dating

Lisa Hoehn is very, very good at online dating. Which is lucky, because she winces when she tells me that she just got dumped.



“It’s OK. It’s still a little rough.”

Hoehn can provide her own professional help. The creator of a perfectly tuned digital presence, Hoehn was soon pressed into service to tweak her friends’ dating profiles. They enjoyed more attention online. Hoehn became a kind of dating-profile sherpa, guiding the clueless and the lovelorn into words that would unlock happiness for them.



Word got around. It turns out, there’s a lot of money in this kind of work.

Her website, Profile Polish, offers editing of dating profiles, ranging from $48 for a Tindr special to $198 for services covering all web and app-based dating profiles. Hoehn says she has had over 200 clients so far with about 10 people on her waitlist. “Asking for help is hard and it’s not cheap.”

“Writing about yourself is really hard,” says Hoehn who collects comprehensive information about her clients’ dating histories. She even adds them on Facebook and scours through their photo albums, describing her job as “people-watching all day.” She spends three to four hours on each client, rewriting their profiles to sound conversational, upbeat and interesting.

Business is steady, if seasonal. Demand for her services slows to a trickle during the summer, when people are outdoors, or on vacation. Cold weather, in contrast, seems to inspire an urge for coupledom. Hoehn hired extra writers this year to meet the usual spike in demand around Valentine’s Day, when many people start to question their romantic choices.

“One day, I woke up and I was like, oh, people will pay me for this. Why aren’t I doing this?” says Hoehn. She dropped her career as a freelance journalist and decided to focus solely on the new business.

Three weeks ago, Hoehn was advising Gary, 44, who had just moved to Kansas City.

“Every woman is like … married, married, married,” he sighs.

In the city of only 500,000, he was told that most people married straight out of high school.

He says he didn’t expect to find himself in the middle of an intensely competitive dating scene. With the odds already against him, Gary searched for help. That’s when he found Profile Polish. After signing up, one of his tasks was filling out a questionnaire about his personality and interests.



Hoehn runs the website and stage-manages the applicants as they fill out their forms.



“When you’re writing responses, write like you’re in a coffee shop and we’re talking,” Hoehn told Gary. Going off on a tangent is OK, she told him. “I’ll just get to know you better.”



Gary says that Hoehn’s editing gave his online dating persona the serious but fun tone he was looking for. He doesn’t mind the $200 price tag. “It’s an investment in yourself,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a dating profile is in need of a profile editor. Photograph: c.Focus/Everett / Rex Features

$7,775 for a 12-week ‘commitment’ course



Even with her success, Hoehn’s business wouldn’t even make a dent in the US market for help with dating. As of 2014, the US dating industry is worth $2.2bn, according to an IbisWorld report. Major dating sites tried to offer professional profile editing services themselves but failed, says Mark Brooks, an internet dating industry analyst.

Major dating sites including Match and eHarmony quickly learned that people didn’t just need help writing their profiles, but required all-around coaching on online romance. It’s a territory Brooks terms “hazardous” for the dating sites to do themselves.

A section of the dating market tends to focus on women, who seem perpetually convinced that they need to change themselves. Evan Marc Katz has a dating coaching business that is focused entirely on women, but his language is that of an athletic coach.



“I’m a personal trainer for people who want to fall in love” his page proclaims, advertising expertise based on 15 years of dating “prolifically”.



Katz does well on addressing the insecurities women didn’t even know they had about dating. He sells books, targeted at successful women with the title Why He Disappeared. It’s billed as a guide for smart, strong successful women intent on keeping their partners “hooked forever”. To buy it, women must click a button on Katz’s site. The button promises you’ll “Understand Men Now”.



As with Hoehn, Katz found that there is money in the business – a lot of money, in this case. Katz’s dating training ranges from a $5,250 four-week Romance course to a 12-week course for $7,775 designed to teach women how to make a man commit.



If that may seem like big money, Brooks is not surprised. It’s behavioural economics, he says. “When people do good [in dating], then they are willing to pay good in business.”

Screen grab from personaldatingassistants.com. Personal Dating Assistants offers online ‘wingmen and wingwomen’ to manage your dating profiles. Photograph: Personal Dating Assistants

‘Dates with gorgeous women sent for you. Silver platter’

A different manner of enterprise is aimed only at men: Personal Dating Assistants. Its employees are wingmen, except they pose as the customers to manage their dating lives. The site’s employees manage their client’s profiles, and interact with women online without disclosing their role.



“You didn’t join online dating to be a message boy” a video on the Personal Dating Assistants websites blares. For extra testosterone, it calls online dating a “fiercely competitive sport”.

Consider this promo video where a male voice endorses the benefits of online dating over visuals of men courting attractive women:

...You need an industrial-strength solution. Gentlemen, this is Personal Dating Assistants. Imagine what life will be like: regular dates with gorgeous women sent for you. Silver platter. We take over your online dating profile. We find women who meet your criteria. Generate inbound interest, send messages, get her phone number and set you up right for the in-person date.

There’s even a joke that could reference anything from The Matrix to Viagra.



“Ready to take the red pill?” the website asks its customers, who can sign up for an ‘International Playboy’ package by paying $1,520. For that, they are guaranteed at least eight dates.



When I asked what “guaranteed dates” means on an online chat on the website, a “personal dating concierge” named Matthew wrote back: “We get phone numbers.”

It’s never been more true than now that if people are willing to pay for a service, sure enough someone will create an online startup for it. But even industry insiders like Brooks are worried about what seems like a paid impersonation service. “It’s just kind of wrong. It shouldn’t happen but it does.”

Hoehn, however, does not see her own service as manipulation – merely as some toning up. She thinks of the dating profile as being like a resume.



“All you need to do is get the first interview and then you’re set.” she says. But online dating profiles have limited space in which to make your case. “You want to put forward your best possible self. Which is why I have a business,” she says.

‘You sound like the mom in Mean Girls’



Still, online dating suffers from an icky reputation. As part of her work, Hoehn also wants to erase the “stigma” around online dating – especially people’s reservations about telling friends they met their partner online. She is frustrated with the expectation that men make the first move online.



There’s an irony in online dating: to get the glossy ideal, you have to start by mucking around in the dirt. Hoehn’s clients have to revealing the most significant aspects of their personalities on their dating profiles – even if they may not be particularly attractive. Hoehn has no patience for blandness and posturing. Her ideal answers: “You kinda like hang your dirty laundry out a little bit.”

What doesn’t cut it: cliches. “I’m smart and witty and confident and a real go-getter,” she lists, exasperated at the most common descriptions she sees on dating sites. “There’s nothing to back it up. It could apply to 80% of the population.”

There are other common mistakes in language and tone that Hoehn, as a former journalist, catches. Among her demons: grammatical errors and passive-aggressive disclaimers about “types of women”. She is least tolerant of rambling, long personal descriptions. She considers the excess words an unacceptable imposition on the time of any potential love matches.



“You’re telling a stranger: I’m so interesting, I’m worth this much of your time,” she says.

Collecting so much personal information often gets her into sensitive territory. “Right now, you sound like the mom in Mean Girls,” Hoehn once wrote to a middle-aged woman, in response to her dating profile, which sounded like it belonged to a teenager.

Hoehn told her she needed to present her interests with maturity. The client responded saying it was really hard to hear this, but thanked her for her candor.



“I felt like her therapist a little bit,” Hoehn confesses.

‘I’m not like a regular mom. I’m a cool mom.’ Photograph: Facebook/Paramount Pictures

Online dating is going younger as well. Websites are passe. More and more users are moving to mobile apps, which the industry has still not learned to monetize.

The distant future, Brooks says, may be wearable computing. More data could lead to better algorithms. In 10 years’ time, dating websites may track everything that goes on when you meet your online date. “Do we know your heart rate? Do we know if you’re sweating. There’s going to be so many more observables,” Brooks says.

For now, the hardest test of dating is still in real life, or IRL, as it’s known to digital natives. For Hoehn, the immediate future is in finishing her book of tips on how to do online dating better. Then she plans to become a dating coach. She wants to help clients on their perilous first dates – “instead of just doing their profiles and sending them out into the wilderness”.

