WooMe

» see woome.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I missed WooMe entirely and the reason is boring. By 2008 I was twenty-four and working, and dating in Turkey either happened on Turkish sites or did not happen online at all. An English-language webcam product priced in dollars had no route to anybody like me. Video chat with strangers was a category I knew from the outside in those years, mostly as a thing you heard about in the context of it going wrong.

WooMe launched in September 2007 on stage at the first TechCrunch40, which at the time was as close as the startup world got to a debut with an audience. Stephen Stokols founded it after watching his sister go to speed-dating nights, and the product was a direct translation of the format. Live video sessions in the browser, three people in three minutes at the start and five in five later, and you marked who you wanted to see again.

The money came in fast and it was serious money. Index Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners took part, and so did Atomico, the fund Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis started after selling Skype, alongside the angels Klaus Hommels and Oliver Jung. The total is reported between seventeen and twenty million dollars depending on who is counting, and one analyst valued the company at forty-one million at the time of the round.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

It ran in Flash, so there was nothing to install, which in 2007 was the whole reason a browser video product could exist at all. Growth was reported as a thousand users at the start and a million inside the first year. By the end the company was giving out ten million registered users and around twenty thousand new signups a day, and it had expanded into Woo Media, a group of communication properties rather than one dating site with offices in London and on both American coasts.

Those numbers were also the problem. A dating product's registered-user count is the easiest figure in the industry to inflate and the hardest for anybody outside to audit, and WooMe leaned on it in every piece of coverage it got.

~ the horse ~

In February 2011 TechCrunch published a piece about its own former finalist with the phrase one huge scam in the headline. The reviewer had signed up in the middle of the night using a photograph of a horse as the profile picture. Inside fifteen minutes the account had unsolicited messages and popups from women who had supposedly found it. Reading any of them required a paid membership at $24.99 a month, or $9.99 if you committed to six months up front.

Stokols answered that the company did not send messages from fake accounts and that new profiles get a visibility boost in search results, which would explain attention but not the timing. The reviewer's objection was that some of the contacts had arrived before the signup was even finished. Whatever the mechanism was, the site had a bait waiting for every new account and a paywall between the account and the bait.

~ the exit ~

Zoosk announced the acquisition of Woo Media on Friday 4 November 2011. The price was not disclosed and TechCrunch called it a firesale on straightforward arithmetic: roughly twenty million dollars in, an undisclosed number out, and a headline user count that nobody outside the company believed described active people.

The archive dates the shutdown a day ahead of the announcement. On 31 October woome.com still had the product page up, telling visitors the service was undergoing some exciting new changes and to check back in a couple of days. By 3 November the same address was serving a notice headed Move to Zoosk, with a support email and a Los Angeles phone number for anyone with billing questions, and that notice is all woome.com did for the next several years. Stokols went on to co-found FreedomPop in August 2012 with Zennstrom. In 2026 the domain is a sale listing.

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