OkCu­pid, one of the biggest online dat­ing web­sites around, has had a bit of an up and down history.

Orig­i­nally called Spark­Match, itself a by-product of the once pop­u­lar TheS­park, the site was one of the first com­pletely free dat­ing web­sites that now abound online. Inc. Mag­a­zine looks at the his­tory of OkCupid—it’s strug­gles and successes—paying close atten­tion to the mar­ket­ing strat­egy that even­tu­ally pushed the site into the main­stream.

Now Yagan had set out to bring free to online dat­ing, a grow­ing mar­ket dom­i­nated by a num­ber of, as Yagan saw them, expen­sive and unsat­is­fac­tory com­peti­tors like IAC’s Match.com. Yagan fig­ured he could inflict seri­ous dam­age on [his com­peti­tors] by using the same strat­egy he employed with Spar­kNotes. “Take an exist­ing busi­ness,” he explains, “reduce the rev­enue that indus­try pro­duces by offer­ing a free prod­uct, and then claim the remain­ing rev­enue for yourself.”

The above quote encap­su­lates what appears to be the founders’ busi­ness model, but it’s the Experts Weigh In sec­tion that I found most inter­est­ing. With advice from the CEO of the guer­rilla mar­ket­ing agency Inter­fer­ence (don’t depend on jour­nal­ists to write about your com­pany) and a part­ner at the pri­vate equity firm Accel (be more cre­ative in mon­eti­sa­tion), there’s also this from the founder of Match.com—their direct competition:

Focus on women. A dat­ing site can suc­ceed only if it attracts a lot of women. […] For any dat­ing site, women, not men, are the cus­tomers. Women don’t want a crazy blind date; they want safety and secu­rity, and they don’t want to feel embar­rassed. I would take the money they’re spend­ing on PR and put it toward affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing to women. Yagan and Coyne are clearly smart guys: They should start think­ing about how to lower the cost of cus­tomer acqui­si­tion and build a dif­fer­en­ti­ated audience.