Does this Dating App have the Answer? {VC}
Differentiating between relationship seekers and casual daters
Does dating suck today?
I’m grateful to have met my wife in college, so I never needed to rely on the grind of Tinder, Bumble, etc. But from what many friends have told me, it sounds like online dating apps can be a nightmare—at least for anyone who is searching for a serious life partner.
I just looked at this new startup, which I’ll call Project Date. The founders are rethinking the traditional model of dating apps.
Right now most, if not all, dating apps are designed with giving the user access to a maximal number of prospects. This seems to encourage choice overload and a behavior of constant switching from one person to the next (because maybe the next person will be. . . better? If only we spent more time asking how I can be better 🙃).
I would even go as far as to say that these apps facilitate a nihilistic approach to romance, whereby the “biological” / anthropological imperative on mating gets propelled into the forefront, obscuring the more beautiful and, let’s say, spirit-led considerations of a lifelong partnership based on unconditional love.
What do I mean by this? Consider the following depiction (courtesy of Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU):
Say you have 100 people on Tinder: 50 men and 50 women. 46 of the women will spend all their attention on only 4 of the men.
This means that roughly the top 10% of men have access to 90% of the women, with the rest of the men getting no attention. Such mating inequality incentivizes a power structure that functions something like polygamy. Barring any ethical constraints or desire for a virtuous life, the top-ranking, “premier” men can opportunistically rotate in and out of short-term flings, without really feeling any pressure to commit to any one particular woman.
It’s a simple function of supply and demand, and it currently favors the casual daters at the expense of leaving relationship seekers in the dust. As this structure of opportunism in dating becomes normalized, it incentivizes men and women alike to adapt (or pervert) their love-finding strategies accordingly.
Is there any hope for online dating?
Here’s the magic in what Project Date is doing. The app only allows its users to date one person at a time. If a user wants to talk to someone else, they have to first unmatch with the current person before being able to look for a new match.
Apparently this design is translating to 8x as many deep conversations (where 80% of matches engage in deep conversations, compared to the current app industry leaders’ 10%).
Project Date is also converting users to paid subscriptions at a rate that’s 5x that of Bumble, which further suggests that the founders have tapped into something meaningful.
There are many other dynamics in culture that are contributing to the current state of male-female relationships, but this app seems to be helping society take a step in the right direction.
What do you think? Is Project Date a good idea or is it bound to fail?