Key Idea #3: eHarmony was late to the matchmaking business. They first started in business to teach the principles found in Dr. Warren's book, Finding the Love of Your Life. Yet, being late gave to enter the field to be an online dating service had its advantages. First, they could look at what everybody else was doing and do it better and differently.

Topic for Discussion: How is it that they are winning customers by being the most expensive and the most time consuming of all the match services on the web?

Answer: Singles are exhausted by the dating process. The quick and the cheap has already been tried and there is a group of singles that have been burned by quick and cheap online services. Also, plenty of men have told us that dating is expensive because women want to be taken to very nice places. Not only do men have to fork over hard earned dollars to go on a date with someone that they have no idea will be a good long-term match for them, they have to spend hours on the date.

Let's just think about the price first. Spending $49 a month or $249 for a year to use eHarmony could save a guy hundreds of dollars and plenty of Friday nights. For a woman, the money invested in eHarmony is more about safety than about saving on the cost of dating. By letting eHarmony match them and screen potential dates when two singles who decide to meet in person do so it is only after the relationship has been somewhat established. The cost of the service is worth the reduction in risk it provides.

If time is the #1 commodity that no one seems to have enough of, why would an eHarmony customer be happy to invest over an hour in the first step of the process?