Advandate Reviews 

SECOND review (January 29). Scroll down the first.

This is an additional review of Advandate on my part. To me, writing a review is serious. I try to be as accurate as I can when describing my experience with a particular company. On the one hand I want to help the company gain publicity, and on the other I feel I owe it to the readers to let them know what I experienced, in case it's not what they're looking for. Advandate and their iCupid dating software is a great purchase if, and I do emphasize "if", you have a similar style of doing business. Rick Jacobson, the owner, and his staff, offer excellent product support after purchase, as per my previous review. They answer quickly when you need them and they offer the odd piece of advice here and there to help you become profitable in your business as quickly as possible. For my partner and I, profits are not our highest priority. And for this reason we might not be a very good match as a customer for Advandate. And in fairness to them, in fairness to Rick Jacobson in particular, who has spent so much time trying to help us, his time might have been better spent helping other customers launch their dating site. We made so many changes to the software that it probably became frustrating for him to continue providing support for a product that had been altered so much. Let's be honest and admit that sometimes it's the customer who deserves to have a bad review and not the company itself. But I choose to simply call it "having different styles of doing business". We might choose to no longer have Advandate host our site, which is still in the development stage, because we have different priorities when it comes to how we do business. But I still recommend Advandate for anyone who wants to have a profitable dating site. The after-sale support is excellent.

FIRST review (January 19):

I rarely write reviews, but I wanted to write one for Advandate. My life partner and I are like that. We like to give credit where credit is due, and we like to be as considerate with strangers as we are with loved ones. Therefore, when a few weeks ago we read a bad review of Advandate during our research and noticed what the owner said in his reply in an attempt to defend the reputation of his company, we felt that he was telling the truth and we vowed that if we purchased the iCupid software from him we would write our own review after using the product for a while. We did purchase it, three weeks ago, on December 27, 2015, to be exact. Our dating site is not launched yet, but if anyone has a question for us and would like to either speak to us on the phone, email, or video-Skype, we'll be glad to back up our claims about what we've experienced so far. My name is Joseph Ouellette, and my life partner is Emilie. Get in touch with us and we'll be glad to answer your questions. Prior to making the software purchase from Advandate, the customer-service person on their Pre-Sales Chat impressed us with the amount of information he provided about the company. Advandate promised 24-hour support, either by phone or by email, and that's exactly what we got from Day One. And this, NOT from a recently-hired person working in a call centre, but from the owner of Advandate himself! Wanting to respect that he has a private life like the rest of us, we chose NOT to simply do the easy thing and jump on the phone as soon as there was something we didn't understand. Instead, we tried to find the solution by ourselves (and often did), and when we couldn't, we sent him an email, to which he replied promptly, without exception. Only once did we decide to call him using the U.S. phone number posted on their website, and we were impressed by the way he quickly resolved something we couldn't have resolved on our own. On another topic, Advandate provides a detailed user manual with the iCupid software. There are a few spelling and grammatical mistakes in the text, but we don't mind that. I'm sure they were already there when he purchased the rights to the software from another company a few months ago. Before deciding to purchase the software, our other option would have been to go with an online database-app-building service, but it might have proven more expensive in the long run, and it still wouldn't have addressed the issue of the website itself. The Advandate iCupid dating software is a stand-alone website, as well as a database application, so it meets all our needs. At first we took advantage of the free-installation service of Advandate, and had it installed on the servers of another web-hosting company, but we weren't sure if these servers were perfectly optimized to work with the software. So we decided to take advantage of the One-Year Free Hosting that came with the package, and allowed Advandate to re-install the software on their own servers. There's a multitude of dating-site functionalities included in this software which would have cost us time and money to configure on our own if we had chosen a different option, but we chose Advandate. And so far, so good. Will the web hosting be top notch? We don't know yet. Will the software work smoothly when a lot of people start registering and interacting with other members? We don't know yet. What we DO know is that we're dealing with an owner of a company who stands behind his product by making himself personally available on short notice to address any issue that may come up as a customer configures the software to meet his needs. And we feel that the iCupid product itself is reasonably priced. So, will there be issues in the future when we get busy and the software is really put to the test? It's possible. But isn't that a chance we take with every single company we deal with in life? Even large companies with a long history have been known to leave their customers disappointed on some occasions. And we don't usually have access to the owner of the company to discuss something important. By contrast, both my partner and I have interacted on numerous occasions with the owner of Advandate, and we both feel that this is a man who is intent on offering an excellent product and service, and is willing to do whatever it takes for his customers to become successful in the online dating industry.