Company: WotWentWrong
Website: www.wotwentwrong.com
Founder: Audrey Melnik
Headquarters: San Francisco
Year Founded: 2011
Twitter: @wotwentwrong
Facebook: www.facebook.com/wotwentwrong
Blog: blog.wotwentwrong.com
Brief Company Description: WotWentWrong is a new way to get advice about your dating life—directly from your ex or via crowdsourced insights.
By Audrey Melnik, founder and CEO
Product Overview
WotWentWrong is a free website dedicated to helping people get answers about dating and relationships. The site currently offers two services. The first, ‘Breakups,’ launched in January 2012 as a way for people to request dating feedback from exes who passively dumped them. Daters get closure and invaluable pointers directly from their former partners, allowing them to move on while improving chances for success in future relationships.
Users can send a low-key, customizable feedback request to a date who disappeared. WotWentWrong securely sends the request on the user’s behalf via email or text message (U.S., Canada only—for now). Responding to a request is also quick and easy—with pre-defined categories as to why someone lost interest, as well as the option to add personal details. To encourage exes to answer feedback requests, the process is incentivized with survey results and questions ranging from things like, how attractive the person found them, how good a kisser or dresser they are, or maybe even how good they were in bed! Send the feedback request, get the answers.
In October 2012, WotWentWrong launched its newest service, ‘Impressions.’ Impressions is the first ever social timeline for people to anonymously seek crowdsourced dating and relationship advice, record their relationship milestones, and follow other people’s relationships.
Impressions lets people anonymously post about general dating topics or their personal relationships and solicit crowdsourced advice from the community via polls and comments. Users follow other people’s relationships and populate their timelines with community dating content, filterable by topics like, ‘flirting,’ ‘first dates,’ and ‘celebrity breakups.’ People can also anonymously record and share all the milestones of their relationships—from ‘First Date’ and ‘Became Exclusive’ to ‘We’re Engaged’ and ‘First Child.’
Founder’s Story
I created WotWentWrong because I think everyone has, at one time or another, experienced a situation where they thought things went well on a date, only to never hear from the person again. It’s happened to me, and it’s happened to my friends.
A few years ago I had a first-date with someone, who I’d actually known for a number of years. He contacted me through Facebook a few months after ending a long-term relationship. We had a great first date—drinks, dinner, and he invited me up to his place for a goodnight kiss. He initiated all of it. Then…he vanished. No follow-up call, no more communication from him, nothing.
It didn’t make sense to me—why would he invite me up to his place if he wasn’t interested? I really wanted to know the reason, but there was just no socially acceptable way for me to find out. I couldn’t call—unless I wanted a reputation as a stalker, and an email could have gotten forwarded to his friends and turned me into a joke. So, I wound up creating my own way to get this kind of information in these unfortunate situations.
We spend so much time and effort improving our skills for our vocations and getting feedback on our work performance so we can improve for the future—yet, it’s considered unacceptable when we think of applying those same concepts to our personal relationships, so we move on from these failed romantic scenarios none-the-wiser as to what went wrong.
Marketing/Promotional Strategy
We have been using a public relations firm since the site’s initial launch in January. They have helped WotWentWrong get placements in major media outlets such as Associated Press, Reuters, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! Shine and many others.
In addition, we have used social media and partnerships in the past and will be looking to grow our partnerships in the future as well as build upon our recent success with advertising.
How the Company Differentiates Itself
There are countless websites out there to help people to meet online. But what we noticed was that there wasn’t much out there to help people to be more successful in their dating endeavors. Unfortunately, relationships don’t always work out. We want to create a way for people to be better in their dating and relationship lives, and that is where we focus.
Our social relationship network, Impressions, allows people to share their experiences, concerns and ask questions of the community, all with the aim of helping them to be more successful in their love lives.
Business Model
The site is currently free to use. We have a number of different avenues for revenue we will be implementing in the coming months.
Current Needs
We have 100 percent bootstrapped the endeavor thus far. This has allowed us the freedom to develop WotWentWrong in the direction that we have, which is great, but it certainly doesn’t reflect so well on my bank account! We are now based in San Francisco, and are looking to raise a Seed round for WotWentWrong and take it to the next level.
We are currently seeking investors to help WotWentWrong to grow. With added funding, WotWentWrong will be able iterate and improve our existing offering and implement many more features across multiple platforms and multiple languages. We are also looking to develop mutually beneficial partnerships with complementary businesses, enabling further growth.
WotWentWrong – www.wotwentwrong.com
