Who wrote your potential love's online dating profile? (maybe they outsourced it to a professional who specializes in that)

By Danielle Braff of the Chicago Tribune. Output is greater when we all specialize and then trade. So maybe it should not be a surprise that people outsource the writing of their online dating profiles. Why not have an expert do it for you, freeing your time to do something else? Seems like Cyrano de Bergerac was ahead of his time.

"After responding to a Task Rabbit request, Dan Hirsch, a writer who's gay, became an OK Cupid ghostwriter for $55 per week, plus a $10 bonus for each woman who agreed to a date.

Hirsch, who is now an master of fine arts candidate in dramatic writing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was based in San Francisco at the time. He would sign into his client's profile, message potential matches for him and arrange first dates.

"His whole rationale was that he wanted to get to the part where he could meet in person as quickly as possible and that the messaging was a big time suck," Hirsch said.

It worked: His client met a match, though the relationship fizzled after a month.

At a time when people are outsourcing nearly everything, including putting together Ikea furniture, it's not surprising that they're outsourcing parts of their dating life.

"When my client told his girlfriend about his scheme, she seemed to appreciate him for what he was: a life hacker of sorts," Hirsch said.

But he's not the only one doing it, and if you're looking for a match online, you've probably been reading through plenty of profiles that weren't written by the person in the profile.

If the profile looked too good to be true, it probably was.

It may have been written by Lisa Hoehn, New York-based founder and CEO of Profile Polish, and author of "You Probably Shouldn't Write That: Tips and Tricks for Creating an Online Dating Profile that Doesn't Suck."

After conducting in-depth interviews with her clients and choosing and editing photos for their pages, she creates their profiles. Each week, she does between four and 10 profiles, and work has been steady since she launched her business in August 2013.

"A profile is your way to get your foot in the door with a potential match," Hoehn said. "It's all that you have to entice someone into talking to you.""

"Gandhi's company (Bela Gandhi, Chicago-based CEO of Smart Dating Academy) does complete online profile makeovers but draws the line at taking over the entire account, and it won't message anyone to score potential dates, though people have requested this many times.

She does help her clients learn how to date, though, and encourages everyone to take the process slowly, emailing and speaking with love interests over the phone before meeting them, just in case the person on the other end is a professional posing as a date."