This Alabama man has been on 30 unsuccessful dates in the past the past ten months — to remedy this situation, he created a website offering a $10,000 reward to anyone who can find him a girlfriend.
Ren Lu You is a 29-year-old living in Birmingham, Alabama.
He's a recent Harvard Business School graduate and works full-time as a private equity associate.
You created his own dating website, dateren.com, where people can submit female friends who might like to date You.
As an incentive, if You and a woman submitted to the site wind up dating for more than six months, You says he will pay $10,000 to the person who helped set them up (unless You's future girlfriend submits herself, in which case she would not be eligible for the cash reward).
(It's worth mentioning here that we were initially suspicious about the possible word play here. His last name is You ... he says "I'll pay you" ... could he mean ... he'll pay himself? That would be smart and kind of funny! But then we got out of our own heads.)
Finding the woman of his dreams is worth at least $10,000 to You. He compares finding a potential partner to purchasing other "big-ticket items" such as a car or a house.
"I would argue that all these things pale in importance to finding somebody you get along with and you may end up marrying," You told BI. "So $10,000 seemed pretty reasonable."
Before starting his own dating site, You was disappointed by his experiences with standard dating techniques.
"I’ve been on a bunch of dates and gone through all the usual methods: friends of friends, introductions through coworkers, OkCupid, Match.com, Tinder, everything," You told Business Insider of his failed dating efforts.
Even though he was going on plenty of dates, he wasn't meeting the kinds of women he envisioned potentially spending the rest of his life with.
"With online dating you have this problem of adverse selection," You explained. "Only the people who self-select into a particular dating website are the people you have access to."
Unlike other dating websites, women can be involuntarily submitted to You's website.
"With this site I have access to basically everybody," You noted to BI. "You don't have to see the site or know who I am, you just have to know somebody who has seen the site."
You made sure to let his family and friends know what he was up to before starting this new dating adventure.
"I understand there's always the potential hazard of people thinking you're an a------ and the internet deciding it doesn't like what you're doing," You said of his concerns in starting the website.
For now, You is just trying to streamline the process of finding a woman who he can call his girlfriend, and maybe someday, his wife. "I'm trying to make dating as efficient as possible," he said.
If you're interesting in submitting yourself or a friend, check out You's dating site here.
