Personality assessment is a $10 billion market.
Market research firms estimate the size of the personality assessment market to be over $10 billion per year in the US alone. It’s growing at over 10% per year. The companies that currently dominate this market all use legacy systems to do their personality assessments.
This market is ripe for disruption.
Legacy assessment systems are used in two main market segments: corporate hiring and online dating. Online dating is the segment with the most customer pain. There are over 60 million dating site users in the US, but a great many of them are frustrated.
Go to any social media site, search “online dating,” and you’ll see hundreds of single people talking on video about how finding romance is impossible. That’s because most people meet online these days, and online dating, as it currently works, is fundamentally flawed.
Because it’s done remotely, online dating makes it difficult to gauge someone’s personality. As a result, superficial criteria—mainly looks—are used to make date selections. This means that a few of the best-looking people get lots of “likes,” and most people don’t get many at all.
Even when people on a dating site meet in person, the chances that they’ll have good chemistry are low. That’s because personality is the main factor in romantic chemistry, and they can’t gauge it from a few photos, a short writeup, and maybe a text/video chat.
This market is looking for a solution.
Because dating site customers are being ignored, and they can’t find good chemistry, many of them are leaving. Tinder is losing paid users. OKCupid is shrinking. The stock price of Match Group, which owns most of the largest dating sites, is a quarter of what it was in 2021.
Other sites have tried to solve this problem, but failed. eHarmony tried with its “29 dimensions of compatibility,” but the site is struggling. Chemistry.com also tried, and went under. There are potential solutions now on offer, but they won’t work:
- Bumble has introduced an AI dating assistant…which operates according to superficial matching criteria that Match.com used then abandoned in the 2010s.
- A startup, Date Drop, just got $2 million in venture funding to send people one match per week, based on questionnaire data. That’s a feature, not a product.
