Posted by Daniel B. on 9-22-2009

I'm often surprised by the lack of creativity shown on speed-dating sites when they suggest good questions to ask when speed-dating. For example, "What do you like to do in the weekends?", "What do you like about living in Manhattan?", "Have you tried speed-dating before?"... Now of course these questions are perfectly fine, and I'm not suggesting that it isn't a good idea to be interested in someone's hobbies, likes and dislikes. But it's unlikely to make that much of an impressi ... [Read full post]

Posted by Daniel B. on 9-21-2009

I wasn't sure whether to post this, but it was kind of funny. When I use the word "origami" below, I'm not actually talking about origami classes. I'll have to leave it to you to decide actually what class this woman was asking us about. Oh, and her name wasn't Trish.The e-mail thread went like this:Customer: "Hi, can you tell me when your next [origami] class is scheduled? Trish."NYED Event Manager (Alice), forwarding it to me: "Hey, can you answer this? Hilarious. Oh, and let ... [Read full post]

Posted by Daniel B. on 9-14-2009

Ok, so this is a first. At our speed dating recently at one of our regular NYC venues, two customers took speed dating to a new level. I received a call from the bar's manager at 11.30pm saying that two speed-daters had been found in the cost closet. Enough said. [Read full post]

Posted by Daniel B. on 9-11-2009

Of course, every business wants to make sure their marketing e-mails are opened by members of their database, but it's not easy - generally 10-15% of marketing e-mails get opened.So when we first started out, and had 100 people on our mailing list rather than the 20,000 we have now, we decided to add a limerick (loosely related to speed-dating) to each e-mail. The subject line would be "Speed-dating in NYC, plus a limerick". The body of the text would be the limerick and whatever event we w ... [Read full post]

Posted by Daniel B. on 9-10-2009

This is the second in our series of funny customer moments over the past six years. As a reminder, we only have a handful of these from 20,000 customers, so don't feel discouraged about speed-dating!The customer who "forgot" to select someoneThis dates back about five years, when we were not so technologically advanced. Back then, the customers had to hand in their forms with their selections at the end of the event, and the host would drop these forms to my apartment. Early the next morni ... [Read full post]