One of the most interesting international dating brands on the marking is Seeking.com. As a dating app designed for the elite and the beautiful operating as a truly luxury dating brand, Seeking.com has an impressive 46 million+ members worldwide in over 130 different countries. Today, our own Matt Seymour got the opportunity to sit down with Emma Hathorn, an in-house dating expert with Seeking.com. The two discussed the future of Seeking, the company’s ideal client, and how the company underwent a major brand transformation over the past few years.
Let’s have a listen!
Full Seeking.com Dating App Interview Transcript
Matt Seymour:
Hey everybody. It is Matt here from Healthy Framework. Today I’m super excited to be joined by Emma Hathorn, a dating expert from Seeking.com. Emma, thank you so much for joining.
Emma Hathorn:
Thank you so much for having me, Matt.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, sure thing. Well, hey, let’s get right into it. When it comes to Seeking, what separates Seeking from the rest of the dating apps out there?
Emma Hathorn:
So Seeking is a luxury dating site. It’s a very niche, luxury dating site. It works quickly. It’s hyper efficient. The wonderful thing about Seeking I found was that, I actually dated on Seeking myself, you can get a date that evening. People aren’t interested in long conversations. They want to actually meet you in real life and get to a date immediately, which is, it makes it so much fun and very exciting.
Matt Seymour:
That’s cool. That’s awesome to hear that not only do you work there, you’ve experienced it yourself.
Emma Hathorn:
It’s true.
Matt Seymour:
Excellent. How would you describe the ideal customer that Seeking is designed for?
Emma Hathorn:
So I would say someone who’s tired of the dating game, they’re over those kind of, their time being wasted. They’re tired of meeting people who don’t actually fit with their standards, who don’t fit into their lifestyles. They’ve usually got quite demanding lifestyles. I mean, they’re usually extremely busy. So any kind of that playing around, having those relationships that don’t always fit their vision for where they see themselves in the future. It’s people with very, very high standards. [inaudible 00:01:42]
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, for sure. I’m aware, maybe everybody’s not, but Seeking underwent a pretty major rebranding over the past few years. Are you able to share some information about that?
Emma Hathorn:
Yeah, absolutely. We’re quite open about our past, actually. It’s something we talk about. It’s something we don’t shy away from. We obviously used to be a sugar dating website and we were named Seeking Arrangement. And through a lot of discussion with the user base, we did a lot of focus groups, we started to see the user base itself evolving. I mean for me as well, it was never a sugar dating thing, it was a luxury high-end dating website where I could meet people who were really interesting and inspiring and who had a lot going on in their lives.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah.
Emma Hathorn:
So we found that this conversation was being had across the board and interestingly enough, at the same time, our founder, Brandon Wade, met his wife. So it kind of changed the tune. It was time for a different conversation.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah. And that’s another good example of somebody using it that actually founded it and worked there. So that’s amazing.
Emma Hathorn:
Seeking is such a community, within the company itself we all love and use the website.
Matt Seymour:
That’s awesome. I love it. So it’s no secret, and you’ve touched on a bit here, that you’re looking to attract successful and affluent members. If somebody’s interested in Seeking, is there a certain income threshold that people have to make or be making to fit that Seeking’s designed for there?
Emma Hathorn:
Now, this is an interesting one because Seeking obviously supports the entrepreneurial spirit. We love when there’s young up and coming people who are starting their own businesses. But I also think that the website itself fosters quite a wealthy mindset. So we tend to find, just without even having to go through a process of selection, the people who are coming here are of a certain wealth standard regardless of any kind of enforcing that we do. So we have over 1.1 millionaires worldwide on the site and there’s a little bit of an expectation there that everyone’s wealthy in their own way.
Matt Seymour:
Makes sense. But if somebody’s applying, they don’t necessarily need to worry, okay, I make over X. There’s not a dropdown, so to speak, to get into the club.
Emma Hathorn:
And you know what the nice thing is who knows, you might meet a partner who so inspires you and supports you to get, and you break out and get into that level in the next six months kind of thing. But it’s wealthy, successful people and it’s also a mindset.
Matt Seymour:
Awesome. Perfect. I like it. Switching gears a little bit, I know a hot topic. I mean, you can’t get on a news site or anywhere without seeing talks of AI and AI technology. Is Seeking using AI technology at all, and if not, do you have plans to use it in the future?
Emma Hathorn:
So Seeking is using AI technology and we’ve found that it aids us best in the security side of things. So we use deep learning and we train our AI algorithm to understand what images and what messages are harmful. So it kind of learns like a human brain and then it brings everything back. We also have a humans in the loop system, so it brings everything back to the human team who then moderate it and it creates a really safe environment because the AI is working constantly to kind of nail down anything inappropriate or outside of guidelines.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, no, I’m sure your security team loves it, but it’s bringing them potential concerns that they can dig deeper.
Emma Hathorn:
Definitely [inaudible 00:05:20].
Matt Seymour:
Yeah. Excellent, excellent. Sticking along that same topic with AI, not so much Seeking specific, but if we’re looking at the dating industry as a whole, are there any concerns when it comes to AI technology and that dating industry as a whole?
Emma Hathorn:
Yeah, I think AI is such an incredibly positive thing and it’s actually going to revolutionize dating and make it so much more efficient. There’s obviously questions we’re going to have to start asking ourselves regularly. Am I talking to a real person? Are their photos legitimate? Did they really go to Paris? Were they really in front of the Eiffel Tower on their dating profile? We’re going to be using tools like Reality Defender, which detects AI and Deep Fix. Just a little bit more caution honestly, but I think we should be excited about AI rather than afraid of it.
Matt Seymour:
I like it. No, I have the same outlook myself. Something else that we are keeping a close tab on, and we’re seeing it rise pretty dramatically in the United States are romance scams. How does Seeking work to combat this growing problem?
Emma Hathorn:
So of course I did speak about our AI system, but in this case specifically, I think this is where Seeking’s sense of community comes in. We’ve got this really strong community reporting system, so if someone is involved in a conversation that they find suspicious, for the good of the other users on the site, they’ll bring it up really quickly to the security team and it just gets nipped in the bud very fast.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, no, that’s great that there’s a strong sense of community looking out for one another in terms there. That’s great. All right, so last one for you. Are there any misconceptions about Seeking that you’d like to clear up?
Emma Hathorn:
Yeah, I think this one comes from our sugar past and the history. People have preconceived notions. They believe that the website is transactional, that it’s very young women and very old men. And in reality, it’s a luxury dating website. It’s very much about meeting partners that actually inspire you. And age doesn’t necessarily have to come into that, though it sometimes does. And obviously none of the relationships are transactional. These are genuine relationships. I mean, our CEO met his wife. It’s very much about connection, but it’s about extremely positive, uplifting connections and I think the misconception definitely ties to the original name and the original stigma actually around it.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, that makes sense. Well, excellent. Emma, thank you so much for joining us today. Appreciate the added insights into Seeking. We’re excited to see what you guys continue to do in the future. Maybe we do a future series and revisit as new things come, but really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much.
Emma Hathorn:
Thank you so much, Matt. It was great speaking to you.
Matt Seymour:
Same to you.