The year was 1994. “Friends” had just premiered, Bill Clinton was president, and online dating – if it happened at all – was a sketchy proposition. A startup called Match.com was trying to persuade the romantically inclined that the World Wide Web (as it was then known) was a hot spot to meet potential mates.
Fran Maier, who had a background in marketing, joined Match.com to bring a woman’s perspective to the burgeoning field. Her first decision? Nix the question about body weight.
In this podcast, Maier talks about the highs and lows of building Internet companies over the past three decades — and the big mistake she made with Match.com, which she’d like other women entrepreneurs to learn from. She’s currently the CEO of BabyQuip.com, a baby gear rental platform.
COLLEEN: Welcome to The Story Exchange. I'm Colleen DeBaise.
SUE: And I'm Sue Williams.
COLLEEN: And to start today's episode, we're gonna take you back, for a hot second, to 1994–back when "Friends" had just premiered…
MONICA GELLER: This is not even a date. This is just two people going out to dinner, and not having sex.
CHANDLER BING: Sounds like a date to me.
SUE: Back when Bill Clinton was in his first term as president – and it was memorable.
WOMAN: Mr. President, the world is dying to know - is it boxers or briefs?
COLLEEN: Oh my.
BILL: Usually briefs… I can't believe she did that…
COLLEEN: And back when people were just starting to use this thing called… the Internet. Here's a kinda hilarious clip from the Today Show…
BRYANT GUMBLE: What is Internet anyway?
COLLEEN: …with then-host Katie Couric asking her producer…
KATIE COURIC: Alison, can you explain what Internet is?
SUE: It was also called the "Information Superhighway."
COLLEEN: That's right, and in 1994, there were plenty of Internet-based companies looking to transform the way we shopped, the way we worked–and even the way we dated.
SUE: Which brings us to the launch of Match.com.
FRAN MAIER: I would say that having a woman be one of the co-founders probably is one reason why Match became the leader almost from the beginning.
COLLEEN: That's Fran Maier, one of the early founders of Match, and the current CEO of BabyQuip.com. We caught up with her recently ….
FRAN (from interview): Great.
COLLEEN (from interview): Good. Well, thank you very much for speaking with me
COLLEEN: And we had a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from dating apps and what women want – to her long career in tech…
FRAN: I learned some tough lessons, and I have some various regrets.
SUE: Her story is one that listeners will really enjoy – not the least, women trying to make it in what is still a man's world.
COLLEEN: We'll share all that and more, in today's podcast.
SUE: Stick around.
*Musical Interlude*
COLLEEN: You might not recognize Fran Maier's name, but if you've ever done any online dating –
SUE: And the majority of American couples now meet online –
COLLEEN: – you might know that before there was Tinder or Bumble or Hinge, there was Match.com.
SUE: Back in the early 1990s…
FRAN: Dating in newspapers was a pretty big deal. 800 number personals, you'd call the number. That was a business model. You'd pay per minute but they were kind of sleazy.
COLLEEN: Here's a commercial from that time…
SLEAZY MALE VOICE: 1-197-MATCH - finally a service so hot your phone will sizzle.
WOMAN’S VOICE: Hi, my name is Michelle. I'm uh 23 years old, I teach aerobics…
SUE: Oh… That makes me cringe
COLLEEN: I know… well, around this time, Fran, who was just building her marketing career, working at Clorox and then Triple A, went back to her 5-year-reunion at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.
FRAN: When I went back to my reunion, I ran into Gary Kremen who had this vision for getting newspaper classifieds onto the internet. Again, this is really early.
COLLEEN: Gary Kremen was a former classmate – and from most accounts, a pioneer in what was then the Wild West years of the Internet.
FRAN: Gary's crazy, but a smart, brilliant guy.
COLLEEN: So when he mentioned to Fran that he wanted to create the online world's first dating service…and that he wanted her input…
FRAN: I was like, I got to be part of this.
COLLEEN: Fran joined the Match.com team – and went to work, making the site appealing to women customers.
FRAN: I think the contributions I've made were many, but basically we had the idea that we were going to focus on women. Get women, then we'd get the men.
COLLEEN: So the first thing she tackled was the profile questionnaire.
SUE: I'm guessing – in 1994 – a bunch of nerdy tech guys sitting around, coming up with questions for women, that probably wasn't working out too well.
COLLEEN: That's right… Fran immediately nixed some ill-conceived questions about weight, as in body weight, which the guys hadn't thought twice about …. All these years later, she is still incredulous about that one.
FRAN (from interview): One of the things, and I get a lot of laughs for this, but have you ever done any online dating?
COLLEEN (from interview): Oh yes.
FRAN (from interview): Okay, right, yes, I know. (laughs) Have you ever had to put in your weight in pounds?
COLLEEN (from interview): No.
FRAN (from interview): That's because of me. None of the dating websites ask for your weight in pounds because -- and let me paint it. Our first release had five or six questions. Okay, and there were no photos. Photos didn't really happen for a couple of years later. Really, people didn't have digital photos until about '99 or 2000, right? Plus, most people were doing dial-up. A lot of the questions were about how you look, color of hair, color of eyes. But no, we did not do weight because women would not want to do that. We did body type.
COLLEEN: Knowing that women would not want to put down their weight – she gave them options like “slim” or “athletic” or “tall” –
SUE: Much more palatable descriptions…and that kept the focus on connection, not just physical appearance.
COLLEEN: That's right – and Fran also added questions about kids, as she knew that many women would use this not just for hook-ups but long-term relationships.
FRAN: One of the biggest questions we added back to Match when we started to expand and add questions was the children question. Children question is complicated. “Do you have children? Do you want children? Are your children all grown?”
COLLEEN: And within a few years – thanks to Fran’s female perspective, good timing and changing norms about where to meet your mate – Match took off…. and turned into a household name.
SUE: Well, she must be a billionaire.
COLLEEN: Not quite. This is where some of those regrets come in – and maybe something worse. We'll be right back.
COMMERCIAL: Here at The Story Exchange, we aim to keep you informed. If you like what you’re hearing, check out our podcast on menopause. We talk to Dr. Mary Claire Haver, an OBGYN and TikTok influencer.
DR. HAVER: Menopause just gets shoved into this narrow, narrow, narrow box, and we need to open that box.
COMMERCIAL: Listen to the episode, “Meet Mary Claire Haver, Top Menopause Influencer,” wherever you listen to podcasts.
COLLEEN: Welcome back. We've been sharing our conversation with Fran Maier, who helped change the way we date with Match.com … here's one of its early commercials
MATCH.COM COMMERCIAL: At Match.com, we create you so many love stories - we guarantee you'll start one in 6 months or we'll give you 6 months free.
SUE: So Fran was working in tech in the 1990s. It's still difficult for women to get jobs in tech, and so many complain – to this day – about "tech bro culture." Think Mark Zuckerberg and the platform he created at Harvard to rate the attractiveness of female students. And that was in the early 2000s. What on earth did she face back then?
COLLEEN: I asked her about that…after all, she had basically been recruited to do "gender-based marketing" for Match.
COLLEEN (from interview): Was it refreshing for you to be sought after? Because I don't think a lot of women were at that time, right, in the early '90s.
FRAN: I had the right experience. Everybody talks about how important it is for women to be in the STEM fields. Obviously, I think so. Marketing and sales is a pretty good background to bring to building internet businesses. I had a decent understanding of tech and what tech can enable. I felt I was in a really good place. Now, there was some bullshit, like there always is. One time, I was persuaded I had to hire a particular sales gal because she had great legs, that sort of thing. There are times that I felt like I wasn't taken as seriously. Yes, it's a litany of small microaggressions and being underestimated.
COLLEEN: Possibly the biggest is what happened a few years after Match took off….
FRAN: At this point, Gary was out of the picture. I had gone through, I think, four different CEOs.
COLLEEN: The company needed to raise cash. Fran was under pressure from the company's board. And a fateful decision was made.
FRAN: We sold Match in 1998 for less than $8 million. I knew almost immediately, I made a mistake there. A year later, it sold for 70 million to what would become later, IAC. Through all that, I got a couple hundred thousand dollars, which is not nothing, but come on, look at the valuation.
COLLEEN: Match Group, which now owns Match.com and other dating sites, posted $3.3 billion dollars in revenue in 2023.
FRAN: It hurt, still hurts.
SUE: Wow. She missed out on… a lot.
COLLEEN: Yeah, and she recently posted about the Match experience on LinkedIn – saying, she shouldn't have sold Match, the startup she worked so hard on and to which she brought so much value. She's 62 years old now – and she wants to share her story as a cautionary tale for other women.
FRAN: The regret there is that I should have put together the investment group and led it. Why didn't I? One thing, honestly, is I'm a woman, and nobody suggested I could do this. I think if I were a guy, somebody would have. The other thing is, I don't think I had enough confidence. If I had more confidence, I probably would have asked for help and somebody would have said, "You can do this."
COLLEEN: And then a third thing…
FRAN: I was sort of beat up and tired. I had to fight all the time. I had two small children at home. I almost had no room to think beyond, how do I get through this day or this week? Looking back at the time, there wasn’t a lot of support for entrepreneurs in general, but certainly not for female entrepreneurs.
COLLEEN: These days, the environment for female founders has improved a bit, thanks to women-focused accelerator programs and business incubators.
SUE: Yes but there is still a very frustrating gender gap when it comes to access to capital, particularly venture capital funding.
FRAN: It's still really, really hard to raise money. Really hard. The stats for women are depressingly low.
COLLEEN: Less than 3% of VC funding goes to all-female founders, a figure that has remained consistent for three straight decades, according to Harvard research. And Fran worries that AI is even more of a boys’ club, with record rounds going to all-male startups.
FRAN: There's no reason other than massive bias. Even if that was 20%, massive bias.
SUE: And it's not just in VC funding, of course. We see bias against women, in other areas – in the C Suite, in science, in politics…
COLLEEN: That's right. I actually spoke with Fran a few weeks before Election 2024 - and she didn't mince words about how we could be facing a second Trump presidency.
FRAN: We're talking three weeks in advance of an election, and many people are sitting here thinking, “How could it be this close?” I think it comes down to racism and misogyny.
COLLEEN: On a more positive note, Fran now serves as a mentor to women entrepreneurs. After leaving Match, she found success again – building several companies, including Women.com, BlueLight and TrustArc. She advises female founders to believe in their chances of success – even if no one else does.
FRAN: The biggest thing is I think women need to have more confidence. I think they can be very successful entrepreneurs. Usually, when they start companies, they really do know their market. They do know what they’re trying to do. They do know what the problem is they’re trying to solve.
COLLEEN: From a tactical standpoint, especially when pitching, women still need to make their case more, as disheartening as that is.
FRAN: They have to put their qualifications up front in a deck, not in the fifth or sixth or eighth page, because otherwise, especially when you’re pitching to men, they’re going to wonder, ‘Who are you, that you think you can do this?' It still goes on.
COLLEEN: I asked her how we can fix this. She suggested that we need…
FRAN: Many, many more wealthy women. We need wealthy women to know that investing, that is a reasonable thing to do with part of your portfolio, and you can have some impact and solving this problem.
COLLEEN: For her part, Fran is already steering herself in that direction. Since 2016, she has been at the helm of BabyQuip…
SUE: And she actually got on Shark Tank with that one – here is one of the sharks, Mr. Wonderful, explaining what it is…
KEVIN O'LEARY: This is kind of a cool idea - you have a baby - you need equipment - you're traveling around - what do you do, haul it with you? Nooooo. You avoid all that with Baby Quip.com - you rent it!
FRAN: We rent baby gear primarily to traveling families, strollers, car seats, cribs, toys, baby baths.
COLLEEN: BabyQuip is sort of like Rent the Runway or AirBNB, except you're renting baby gear – which is sort of funny from someone who created one of the first dating sites.
FRAN: I'm making a presentation called From Marriage to Carriage.
SUE: She relies on a network of over 2,000 independent providers to stock, rent, clean and deliver baby gear in various cities around the U.S. and a few other countries.
FRAN: The secret sauce is we have this community of independent contractors who we call quality providers. 90% of them are moms. Okay? This is a side gig they can do with their kids.
COLLEEN: She's raised more than $12 million dollars for Baby Quip.
FRAN: I'm in it for the win. Like I mentioned earlier, I think I've been underestimated. I think BabyQuip is going to be big for me, so I'm motivated by that.
SUE: It's really good to hear from someone who has experienced so much and is willing to be open about the highs and the lows.
COLLEEN: It is… and Fran joked to me that if a movie is ever made about the start of dating apps….
FRAN: I’ve decided I want Aubrey Plaza to play me (laughter). I'm just fantasizing here.
COLLEEN: Despite everything, especially the regret of selling Match.com when she did…
FRAN: I'm lucky. I have lived through very interesting times.
COLLEEN: We thank Fran for spending time with us.
SUE: And we thank you for listening.
OUTRO: This has been The Story Exchange. Join us next time to hear more stories about innovative and inspirational women doing the things you’d never dream of. Or...maybe you would. If you liked this podcast, please share on social media or post a review wherever you listen. It helps other people find the show. And visit our website at TheStoryExchange.org, where you’ll find news, videos and tips for entrepreneurial women. And we’d love to hear from you: Drop us a line at [email protected] — or find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and BlueSky. I'm Colleen DeBaise. Sound editing provided by Nusha Balyan. Production coordinator is Noël Flego. Executive producers are Sue Williams and Victoria Wang. Our mixer is Pat Donahue at String & Can. Recorded at Cutting Room Studios in New York City.