I created one of the world’s most popular dating sites – it was all going swimmingly until my girlfriend ditched me for a man she met on there

The founder of a popular dating site has told how his girlfriend left him – after meeting someone else on it.

As the founder of Match.com, Gary Kremen from California invented online dating as we know it and is responsible for millions of relationships, marriages and babies throughout the world. 

In April 1995, the American entrepreneur launched the site, which started as an email-based hub of scanned-in pictures of singles and, by December 1996, it had more than 100,000 users.

The popular dating site, for singles in the 30-40 age range, now has over over 39 million users all around the world.   

Kremen even designed the site with women in mind to help counter the overwhelming presence of men on the internet. 

But he was soon the victim of his own success when his own girlfriend left him for another man she’d met on the site, per The Financial Times. 

The founder had everyone in the company, friends and family create a profile on the site, including his girlfriend at the time. 

He hoped it would help the company grow the number of users quickly, but it came at a cost after his girlfriend met another man on the site.

Speaking to the FT he said: ‘You have to design the whole system for women, not men.

‘Who cares what men think? So things like security and anonymity were important. And little things, like talking about body types, not pounds. Never ask a woman her weight.’ 

Kremen’s dating website idea was born in 1993, when the then 30-year-old Stanford graduate was looking for love. 

In 2015, he told MailOnline: ‘I find the best ideas I come up with, I’m solving the problems that I want to understand.’

‘At that moment in time, I was trying to find the right person to marry but it was just a case of reading newspaper ads or calling pay-per-minute 900 numbers.

‘You weren’t going to find a real relationship on there.’

He was working for an e-commerce company when he received an email from a customer – a woman.

The rare occurrence (just 10 per cent of web users were women at the time and few people owned computers at home) planted the idea of connecting with potential dates online.

‘I thought, I wonder if someone could go to a Kinko’s, scan in a picture of themselves and send it to someone via email.

‘What if you could connect different pictures and send messages too?

‘Basically, an online database of classified ads that anyone can connect to and personalise.’

Initially, Kremen envisaged a conglomerate of databases: dates, cars, jobs, and more. 

He took a $2,500 (£1,880) advance on his credit card to buy Match.com – along with autos.com, housing.com, and Jobs.com – and by the end of 1993 wrote a 76-page business plan for Electric Classifieds Inc.

Match would be the guinea pig to test his big idea – it was more controversial, more eye-grabbing. Little did he know it would be the largest player in a multi-billion-dollar online dating industry 20 years later.

Starting from scratch, he interviewed more than 100 women to find out if they would use an online database – and if not, why not.

‘I would literally go to women in the street,’ Kremen laughed.

‘I spoke to successful women, women I knew, friends, women I wanted to understand.

‘I just thought, if I could step into a woman’s shoes and make something she was comfortable with, then maybe women will join. If they do, men will follow.

‘So I interviewed them – literally sat them down, showed them screens.

‘They would go “ew no I’m not doing that” or “I don’t want them to know my name’ or ‘make sure you block out my co-workers”.

‘There was definitely much more conservatism around this back then. You worried about respect and control, perhaps even more than people do now.

‘You’ve got to understand the times, this was ’93, ’94, ’95. Things weren’t very women-focused.’

Fran Maier, co-founder of Match and a key consultant to create a female-friendly environment, also remembered the sorry state of affairs singles faced 20 years ago.

‘900 numbers… They were very sex-based and very… sleazy,’ she says.

In the early 90s, looking for love beyond the realms of mutual friends and chance encounters was a case of flicking through personal ads in the newspaper and calling their 900 number (for $2.99-a-minute) to leave a voice message for a particular ad.

People could then listen to all the messages, leave a response, or leave their own. It was public and inefficient.

Joining the Electric Classifieds team in December 1994, Maier lent the female perspective Kremen so keenly desired.

She tweaked the questions they wanted to ask women, and she worked with a dating expert to design safety guidelines (‘have your first meeting in public’). Later, she would devise the idea of a paid membership rather than pay-per-message – ‘it validated the men, showed were serious because they were paying long-term’.

‘We wanted it to be a clean, well-lit space for people to have safe, anonymous fun,’ Maier, who now heads up cyber protection group TRUSTe, explained.

‘It wasn’t just about making it a big heart with friendly colors like pink, purple and orange. We did that, but it was more about what women wanted.

‘I remember an engineer coming in saying ‘what weight categories do you want?’ and I said ‘oh no we are not asking that!’ I knew women didn’t want to describe their weight or their appearances in such a cold way. So we went with body type – athletic, slim, tall et cetera.’

Finally, with just $1.7 million angel investment, Match.com launched in April 1995 – to astonishing success.

It started as an email-based hub of scanned in pictures and messages on a Sun Microsystems server.

Very few users had computers at home, and even in the office they might not have access to the web.

Instead, they would be sent a link via email to a dynamic webpage (Kremen’s invention, still used online today) which could be accessed by any kind of browser – web, gopher.

They also ran regular newsletter, with tips on dating, relationships and sex. By December 1996, they had more than 100,000 users.

‘I can’t remember a time when our user numbers weren’t growing,’ Maier reminisces, adding that at one point the site was growing up to 4 per cent a day.

‘It wasn’t just young people, it was older people too – anyone. Almost immediately it was all over.’

Initially, she explained, things were slow (‘we’re talking dial-up modem, no digital pictures, no capacity for people to upload photos, slow bit rate, limited multimedia’). And most people could only access the internet in the office.

But Kremen insisted that they commit to the web over other service providers such as gopher.

‘I don’t know why, it was just instinct,’ he explains. ‘In the beginning we didn’t have a choice, no one was using the web so we had to do it all via email until about 1997.

‘But until then I had a feeling we should stick with it. I saw that communications were getting quicker.

‘I used to work for a modem company and I saw people starting to add images more and more. I saw that the speed of connectivity was increasing. So for all these reasons I felt like the web was going to be the winner.’ 

Luckily it all worked out in the love department for Kremen as he married in 2008 and went onto have two sons with his wife.