Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2012; the revenue, staff numbers, MissTravel sign-ups, bid amounts and premium fee it cites are figures reported at that time.
If we talk about the entrepreneur Brandon Wade, most people won’t know who he is. If we talk about the website misstravel.com, some may start to make the connection, because he is the controversial figure behind the campaign “If you’re good-looking, you don’t need money to travel”. That campaign is what made him known in Spain, but by pulling on the thread we found the rest of his creations: four websites with one single theme, “pretty young women on one side and men with money on the other”. With these two “products”, he has built a young empire that employs 18 people and already bills more than $10 million.
For this entrepreneur, online dating is not useful for certain kinds of people, and the kind of person it is precisely not useful for is the well-off man. Brandon Wade thinks every relationship starts out superficial and materialistic, because, as he argues, on a first date the first questions are “How old are you, and what do you do?”
People don’t usually ask whether you like children or how good you are at sharing the housework. And he can’t be wrong, because the following websites (all owned by Brandon Wade) are already a real success.
WhatsYourPrice.com
On this website we have, on one side, generous people (as a rule, men with money) and, on the other, attractive people (as a rule, very pretty young women, students, aspiring actresses…). The business consists of auctioning a date with a woman, with men bidding to go out with her. The average amount per agreed date is around $80, although some bids have gone as high as $900. The website itself warns that it only helps two people meet, and that whatever happens between them is none of the company’s business.
SeekingArrangement.com: mutually beneficial relationships
On one side we would have the “modern sugar daddy”, a respectful and generous person (financially generous, of course), and on the other the sweet girl with goals (the Sugar Baby): attractive, intelligent, ambitious and focused on her goals. Basically, this website is for sponsoring a young woman, with the “sugar daddy” helping her both with advice and with money for her studies or projects. In exchange for what? According to Brandon Wade, it doesn’t have to be in exchange for anything intimate.
SeekingMillionaire.com: woman seeks rich man, rich man seeks pretty woman
On this site, not only do both sides sign up as users, but the site itself warns that it is easy to get a date with a millionaire. The hard part is marrying him, so they give women various tips on how to seduce a millionaire and make him fall in love. The millionaire doesn’t need any advice, apart from a single tip: on this website, size does matter (the size of his wallet).
MissTravel.com: pretty women travel for free
More than 600,000 people have signed up to this website since April, of whom around 1,500 are premium members, meaning they have paid the minimum of $50 to be able to contact young women looking for pleasant company from someone who will pay for their trip.
Controversy guaranteed
Many people doubt that a stable relationship can come out of people meeting on the basis of such a materialistic selection. I’ll spare you my personal opinion, and we will focus on the entrepreneurship side.
You have to admit that Brandon Wade has not only come up with a good business idea with these dating sites, but has also done an excellent marketing job: the main business media all over the world have talked about his dating sites, even if only to stir up controversy.
He has managed to break into a business that was already saturated and to compete stoically with two giants, Match.com and eDarling. The secret of his success has probably been getting straight to the point of what people, as a rule, are looking for.
The reason premium subscriptions have grown in recent months is, without a doubt, first the economic crisis and second the time of year we are approaching: a “rich sugar daddy” won’t have to spend this Christmas alone, and a pretty young woman can earn some extra money thanks to a man’s generosity.
Further reading
- The man who started a company to save his children’s lives
- A successful businesswoman thanks to her daughter’s sticking-out ears
- Habits of great business owners that we can copy as entrepreneurs
Featured image: Frank O'Dwyer (batsignal), CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
