7 ms·

I've thought about making a new dating app. The existing apps suck for 2 reasons: in most markets men are at a significant disadvantage because of how men and w

I've thought about making a new dating app. The existing apps suck for 2 reasons: in most markets men are at a significant disadvantage because of how men and women differ in the way they approach dating (and there's also a significantly unfair male:female ratio in many markets). Additionally, none of them are really designed to get people off the app, but rather they're built to increase engagement and keep people on the app. One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match. Another idea is to introduce a payment aspect to make spamming economically unviable, except that the payment goes to the recipient instead of the platform. Some apps have tried things like this, but they kind of suck because it's not real money so it's not useful.

btrautsc 7y ago
the plan part is a really interesting idea.
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 7y ago
Interesting idea. First issue that I thought of: People will create fake profiles to rake in all the money from admirers. Or, if the profiles are genuine, the app quickly becomes a cam/chat site because why would you ever go on a date if you could get paid for just being there and chatting with admirers.
- brenden2 7y ago
  It's relatively easy to prevent fake profiles by requiring basic identity checks (phone number, etc).
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    Nothing is easy when more money can be made by claiming it is difficult.
jermaustin1 7y ago
> except that the payment goes to the recipient I believe you just described escorting/prostitution. Not that I am against sex work, but that app would be DOA.
- greggman2 7y ago
  Have you seen https://www.whatsyourprice.com/ https://www.whatsyourprice.com/ ? Most amazing spin ever. Here's the ad targeted at women https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK2MrUOfAPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK2MrUOfAPE and the one targeted at men https://vimeo.com/21179683 https://vimeo.com/21179683 Also https://misstravel.com https://misstravel.com and their pitch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLSiy4nUvnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLSiy4nUvnc
  - user5994461 7y ago
    Wow, this is as close to escorting as it gets. I could think of a gentle spin where the money would go to pay the date (restaurant/drinks/activity), which is expensive anyway, but the way it's framed I am speechless.
    - imtringued 7y ago
      Yeah, attractive people should be able to build a wish list of dates (restaurant, cafe, movie) with a price tag and less attractive people could then choose whether they want an expensive, medium or cheap date with that person. It would still have an element of escorting because there is an incentive to go on as many dates as possible but there would be no reward beyond the date itself.
  - ipython 7y ago
    Ha. Fascinating. What's even better is the bracketing in the two videos - the guy offered $20 and went on a date with "an attractive female" yet the female only accepted the $100 offer. So as a man you're primed thinking your date will cost you on the order of $20, but the woman is expecting offers in the order of $100. Expectations are already mismatched before you've even signed up!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mc32 7y ago
Payment going to message recipient is going to create perverse incentives and people are going to monetize this aspect. So you’ll have many frustrated users who are simply being gamed for messages.
- brenden2 7y ago
  I'm not convinced that's a bad thing if that's the type of interaction people want.
  - cft 7y ago
    But it will select a certain type of people
    - brenden2 7y ago
      Dating has always been a quid pro quo interaction, and it probably always will be.
      - friendlybus 7y ago
        There's more to give and take than money.
  - mc32 7y ago
    I mean that it can devolve into scamming where people pretend to be interested but aren’t really and many will be people in “Romania” (some country) with fake profiles and so on...
cj 7y ago
> One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match. I like that idea. The business model is tricky to figure out. You'd have to ditch subscription fees and advertising (since both of those models disincentivizes real matchmaking in favor of long-term endless use of the app).
- lm28469 7y ago
  All these apps suck at doing what they're supposed to do because they need to generate money. As soon as you want to make money in this domain you will sacrifice the core feature.
- brenden2 7y ago
  I would just charge $10 for the app one time, or perhaps $10/year as long as you keep using it.
- greggman2 7y ago
  I've been told by several women they'd never meet someone on dating service they didn't have a chat with first. No idea if these women represent the norm.
mumblemumble 7y ago
> One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match. Shooting from the hip, I'm guessing this would not do much to even out that male:female ratio.
post_below 7y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=dating+app+focused+on+actual+dates https://www.google.com/search?q=dating+app+focused+on+actual... The app I was actually looking for with the search isn't in the top 10, but you can see that it's been tried more than once. Do you mean paying a potential match? It would be a dating site for cam girls and professional escorts. I mean, you might actually be on to something there :)
hammock 7y ago
>men are at a significant disadvantage Datings apps aren't men vs women, where a woman wins and a man loses (or vice versa). Any real life connection that gets made is mutual. So what you mean is MOST or SOME men are at a disadvantage, and then you must ask which ones and why. >One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match Why not just do this yourself? It's not a bad strategy for a guy. Why does making this a rule forced on others do anything?
Someone1234 7y ago
> One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match. You should likely run this idea past a few women. The typical reason they want to converse before meeting is security: Meeting strangers is dangerous and they want to "sniff test" to see if it is safe enough to even go that far. Your app idea largely seems to exist to solve issues men have with dating apps but it doesn't really address why women avoid them/prefer direct social interaction.
- swimfar 7y ago
  Is meeting a stranger in a public place actually dangerous, or do people just feel that it's dangerous? What is the worst that is likely to happen if two people meet up in a cafe or city park?
  - zasz 7y ago
    Most women I know would want to meet at a very public place for safety reasons. If a guy comes on hella strong and suggests you meet up at his house and doesn't understand why meeting at a public, neutral place is a good idea, that's a huge red flag.
  - CPLX 7y ago
    The worst that could happen is rape and murder. Talk to women sometimes about how they approach personal safety, and how many scary situations and too-close calls they've already had. It's a law of truly large numbers thing. Even if a tiny tiny minority of guys are actually dangerous, over the course of even a relatively young life the average woman has encountered quite a few of them. They make life decisions accordingly, for understandable reasons.
    - RandallBrown 7y ago
      Rapes and murders in public places are exceedingly rare. The app could certainly facilitate "safe" dates by helping guide people toward certain places. That could even be the business model where you would book reservations at certain restaurants, coffee shops, or wherever through the app.
LoSboccacc 7y ago
> the payment goes to the recipient doesn't sound like a dating app, more like "uber for escorts"
- pepy 7y ago
  already exists, Smooci
zifnab06 7y ago
For the payment aspect, charge $5 then refund it once both people say they’ve met?
realbarack 7y ago
One idea I had was to basically open up analytics to the end-user. Let a user see their ELO rating + stats for different sub-groups and run A/B tests with different photos, messages, and profile text. Basically just product analytics software, except the product you're trying to sell is yourself. I'm not on the apps these days so maybe this exists already. Swipe apps more-or-less turned dating into a game—you could provide the tooling to become a better player.
- ctack 7y ago
  While you're at it, you could provide power inbox tools to help recipients weed out potentially spammers/ dangerous/ flaky/ fake/ disturbed users using auto-reply chains(randomly staggered in time of course) that they could come back to later and see if the person replied sensibly to their messages. The more popular the person, the more messages they would be encouraged to create.
  - realbarack 7y ago
    Yeah, totally. I think this was basically the problem Bumble tried solving with their "women message first" restriction, but I bet you could come up with better/smarter tooling than that blunt heuristic.
aeyes 7y ago
Try the Facebook dating app, they aren't trying to monetize anything. It basically is Tinder but with all the features you'd pay for included. And since this is built on top of Facebook the spam ratio is pretty low. Some of the features it has: You can always see who has "right-swiped" on you, even if you didn't match with the person. You can see everybody on the app in Facebook groups you share. If you accidentally swipe left you can go back. This obviously doesn't change anything about the valid point that men and woman approach dating in a different manner. I guess apps made this even worse.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  > I guess apps made this even worse. They just make obvious what otherwise we don't like to admit, like how important attraction is in the deal even though we don't have much control over it. Usually when I see criticism of dating apps (like in this comments section), I wonder if the critic realizes that what they are complaining about is how dating already works. You are always sizing people up around you based on how attractive you find them, for example.
theflyinghorse 7y ago
Interesting idea for sure, but it seems to me that unfairness is built into the species' firmware. Women simply inherently have more value on dating "market" (feels weird to call it market, but I can't exactly articulate why).
pastor_elm 7y ago
>One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match. As a guy who has been on dating apps, being able to hold a conversation puts you at a significant advantage. I don't see how restricting the ability to have one helps, unless your intention is to help guys who can't or shoot themselves in the foot early.
woadwarrior01 7y ago
A remotely related idea that I was thinking about a while ago, which came back to my mind while reading Vitalik's "Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency" blog post that I found here[1], yesterday. Specifically the problem of spam is a special case of a Sybil attack[2]. People usually tend to be better behaved in real life than they tend to do in online anonymous/pseudonymous settings. Tying the two in a privacy sensitive way might be the way to go. IMO, any attempt at verifying that people actually did go out on a date after matching on a dating app would be a rich signal that the user(s) are not spammers or bots. The UX for this could perhaps take the form of a QR code that one could scan from their date's phone (or vice-versa). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21618079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21618079 [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
greggman2 7y ago
There are apps/sites that focus on meeting Dine: You match only by choosing a restaurant listed in their profile to meet at. They get a notification, "So-and-so would like to go to ABC with you". If they click "yes" the system puts up a list of times to meet. HowAboutWe: You list only activities you'd like do together.
empath75 7y ago
> in most markets men are at a significant disadvantage because of how men and women differ in the way they approach dating This is such a ridiculous thing to say. A significant disadvantage compared to _who_? Other men? That sort of negates your statement? The women on the platform? Men aren't competing against women on the platform to find a date, for the most part. I think you're sort of dancing around the issue that attractive people on the platform are going to attract more attention, but that applies to both genders equally. If you don't want 'competition', try seeking out people who aren't conventionally attractive.
- eej2ya1K 7y ago
  Oh, come on - the top 20% of men are dating the top 80% of women. This is pretty well documented.
- viklove 7y ago
  It's not at all a ridiculous thing to say... Men and women have significantly different experiences using dating apps, and if you were able to release an app that solved the problem many men face (being completely ignored for years), you would probably capture a large segment of the market.
  - empath75 7y ago
    Do you think any women get ignored on dating sites?
uniquelygeneric 7y ago
This already exists in NYC: https://trybounce.com/ https://trybounce.com/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
OKCupid used to have a service called Crazy Blind Date. [1] I went out on a couple dates using that service like 10+ years ago. I thought the concept was fun. On an amusing side note, I went on a job interview several years later where the hiring manager was a woman I'd met via that service. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Blind_Date https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Blind_Date
mywittyname 7y ago
Replace the money with some sort of credit or token that guys get from other sources. Like getting replies from women or having pictures that are liked.
lazyjones 7y ago
Why do we need apps with local scope if the aim is to meet in person anyway? Can't we just build clubs/pubs for singles only, with one age group per day of week and security to keep things safe and gender ratios balanced? There's even a good, well-tested monetisation scheme that doesn't have an effect on quality of matches...
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  This already exists, from speed-dating to singles-only events on meetup.com or at your church. I wonder how many people in these sorts of HN threads who complain about the crapshoot of dating have taken it seriously enough to try these sorts of things. I highly recommend them. Speed-dating itself is really eye-opening.
  - lazyjones 7y ago
    > This already exists Exactly, which is why apps that work in the same way, based on exactly the same input (just superficial visual appeal), seem redundant to me. I'd much prefer something that actually makes use of modern technology, for example: upload 3 photos of your exes and we'll find someone similar for you. Or, match people by professions and lifestyles that are compatible in some way (in addition to ML-rated visual appeal).
rebuilder 7y ago
For the payment idea, consider the incentives you're putting in place. You think you're building a dating site, but I think you'd end up with a sex chat site instead. Add video, and it's a cam site.

btrautsc 7y ago

the plan part is a really interesting idea.

tqkxzugoaupvwqr 7y ago

Interesting idea. First issue that I thought of: People will create fake profiles to rake in all the money from admirers. Or, if the profiles are genuine, the app quickly becomes a cam/chat site because why would you ever go on a date if you could get paid for just being there and chatting with admirers.

brenden2 7y ago
It's relatively easy to prevent fake profiles by requiring basic identity checks (phone number, etc).
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  Nothing is easy when more money can be made by claiming it is difficult.

jermaustin1 7y ago

> except that the payment goes to the recipient I believe you just described escorting/prostitution. Not that I am against sex work, but that app would be DOA.

greggman2 7y ago
Have you seen https://www.whatsyourprice.com/ https://www.whatsyourprice.com/ ? Most amazing spin ever. Here's the ad targeted at women https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK2MrUOfAPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK2MrUOfAPE and the one targeted at men https://vimeo.com/21179683 https://vimeo.com/21179683 Also https://misstravel.com https://misstravel.com and their pitch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLSiy4nUvnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLSiy4nUvnc
- user5994461 7y ago
  Wow, this is as close to escorting as it gets. I could think of a gentle spin where the money would go to pay the date (restaurant/drinks/activity), which is expensive anyway, but the way it's framed I am speechless.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    Yeah, attractive people should be able to build a wish list of dates (restaurant, cafe, movie) with a price tag and less attractive people could then choose whether they want an expensive, medium or cheap date with that person. It would still have an element of escorting because there is an incentive to go on as many dates as possible but there would be no reward beyond the date itself.
- ipython 7y ago
  Ha. Fascinating. What's even better is the bracketing in the two videos - the guy offered $20 and went on a date with "an attractive female" yet the female only accepted the $100 offer. So as a man you're primed thinking your date will cost you on the order of $20, but the woman is expecting offers in the order of $100. Expectations are already mismatched before you've even signed up!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mc32 7y ago

Payment going to message recipient is going to create perverse incentives and people are going to monetize this aspect. So you’ll have many frustrated users who are simply being gamed for messages.

brenden2 7y ago
I'm not convinced that's a bad thing if that's the type of interaction people want.
- cft 7y ago
  But it will select a certain type of people
  - brenden2 7y ago
    Dating has always been a quid pro quo interaction, and it probably always will be.
    - friendlybus 7y ago
      There's more to give and take than money.
- mc32 7y ago
  I mean that it can devolve into scamming where people pretend to be interested but aren’t really and many will be people in “Romania” (some country) with fake profiles and so on...

cj 7y ago

> One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match. I like that idea. The business model is tricky to figure out. You'd have to ditch subscription fees and advertising (since both of those models disincentivizes real matchmaking in favor of long-term endless use of the app).

lm28469 7y ago
All these apps suck at doing what they're supposed to do because they need to generate money. As soon as you want to make money in this domain you will sacrifice the core feature.
brenden2 7y ago
I would just charge $10 for the app one time, or perhaps $10/year as long as you keep using it.
greggman2 7y ago
I've been told by several women they'd never meet someone on dating service they didn't have a chat with first. No idea if these women represent the norm.

mumblemumble 7y ago

> One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match. Shooting from the hip, I'm guessing this would not do much to even out that male:female ratio.

post_below 7y ago

https://www.google.com/search?q=dating+app+focused+on+actual+dates https://www.google.com/search?q=dating+app+focused+on+actual... The app I was actually looking for with the search isn't in the top 10, but you can see that it's been tried more than once. Do you mean paying a potential match? It would be a dating site for cam girls and professional escorts. I mean, you might actually be on to something there :)

hammock 7y ago

>men are at a significant disadvantage Datings apps aren't men vs women, where a woman wins and a man loses (or vice versa). Any real life connection that gets made is mutual. So what you mean is MOST or SOME men are at a disadvantage, and then you must ask which ones and why. >One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match Why not just do this yourself? It's not a bad strategy for a guy. Why does making this a rule forced on others do anything?

Someone1234 7y ago

> One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match. You should likely run this idea past a few women. The typical reason they want to converse before meeting is security: Meeting strangers is dangerous and they want to "sniff test" to see if it is safe enough to even go that far. Your app idea largely seems to exist to solve issues men have with dating apps but it doesn't really address why women avoid them/prefer direct social interaction.

swimfar 7y ago
Is meeting a stranger in a public place actually dangerous, or do people just feel that it's dangerous? What is the worst that is likely to happen if two people meet up in a cafe or city park?
- zasz 7y ago
  Most women I know would want to meet at a very public place for safety reasons. If a guy comes on hella strong and suggests you meet up at his house and doesn't understand why meeting at a public, neutral place is a good idea, that's a huge red flag.
- CPLX 7y ago
  The worst that could happen is rape and murder. Talk to women sometimes about how they approach personal safety, and how many scary situations and too-close calls they've already had. It's a law of truly large numbers thing. Even if a tiny tiny minority of guys are actually dangerous, over the course of even a relatively young life the average woman has encountered quite a few of them. They make life decisions accordingly, for understandable reasons.
  - RandallBrown 7y ago
    Rapes and murders in public places are exceedingly rare. The app could certainly facilitate "safe" dates by helping guide people toward certain places. That could even be the business model where you would book reservations at certain restaurants, coffee shops, or wherever through the app.

LoSboccacc 7y ago

> the payment goes to the recipient doesn't sound like a dating app, more like "uber for escorts"

pepy 7y ago
already exists, Smooci

zifnab06 7y ago

For the payment aspect, charge $5 then refund it once both people say they’ve met?

realbarack 7y ago

One idea I had was to basically open up analytics to the end-user. Let a user see their ELO rating + stats for different sub-groups and run A/B tests with different photos, messages, and profile text. Basically just product analytics software, except the product you're trying to sell is yourself. I'm not on the apps these days so maybe this exists already. Swipe apps more-or-less turned dating into a game—you could provide the tooling to become a better player.

ctack 7y ago
While you're at it, you could provide power inbox tools to help recipients weed out potentially spammers/ dangerous/ flaky/ fake/ disturbed users using auto-reply chains(randomly staggered in time of course) that they could come back to later and see if the person replied sensibly to their messages. The more popular the person, the more messages they would be encouraged to create.
- realbarack 7y ago
  Yeah, totally. I think this was basically the problem Bumble tried solving with their "women message first" restriction, but I bet you could come up with better/smarter tooling than that blunt heuristic.

aeyes 7y ago

Try the Facebook dating app, they aren't trying to monetize anything. It basically is Tinder but with all the features you'd pay for included. And since this is built on top of Facebook the spam ratio is pretty low. Some of the features it has: You can always see who has "right-swiped" on you, even if you didn't match with the person. You can see everybody on the app in Facebook groups you share. If you accidentally swipe left you can go back. This obviously doesn't change anything about the valid point that men and woman approach dating in a different manner. I guess apps made this even worse.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
> I guess apps made this even worse. They just make obvious what otherwise we don't like to admit, like how important attraction is in the deal even though we don't have much control over it. Usually when I see criticism of dating apps (like in this comments section), I wonder if the critic realizes that what they are complaining about is how dating already works. You are always sizing people up around you based on how attractive you find them, for example.

theflyinghorse 7y ago

Interesting idea for sure, but it seems to me that unfairness is built into the species' firmware. Women simply inherently have more value on dating "market" (feels weird to call it market, but I can't exactly articulate why).

pastor_elm 7y ago

>One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match. As a guy who has been on dating apps, being able to hold a conversation puts you at a significant advantage. I don't see how restricting the ability to have one helps, unless your intention is to help guys who can't or shoot themselves in the foot early.

woadwarrior01 7y ago

A remotely related idea that I was thinking about a while ago, which came back to my mind while reading Vitalik's "Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency" blog post that I found here[1], yesterday. Specifically the problem of spam is a special case of a Sybil attack[2]. People usually tend to be better behaved in real life than they tend to do in online anonymous/pseudonymous settings. Tying the two in a privacy sensitive way might be the way to go. IMO, any attempt at verifying that people actually did go out on a date after matching on a dating app would be a rich signal that the user(s) are not spammers or bots. The UX for this could perhaps take the form of a QR code that one could scan from their date's phone (or vice-versa). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21618079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21618079 [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

greggman2 7y ago

There are apps/sites that focus on meeting Dine: You match only by choosing a restaurant listed in their profile to meet at. They get a notification, "So-and-so would like to go to ABC with you". If they click "yes" the system puts up a list of times to meet. HowAboutWe: You list only activities you'd like do together.

empath75 7y ago

> in most markets men are at a significant disadvantage because of how men and women differ in the way they approach dating This is such a ridiculous thing to say. A significant disadvantage compared to _who_? Other men? That sort of negates your statement? The women on the platform? Men aren't competing against women on the platform to find a date, for the most part. I think you're sort of dancing around the issue that attractive people on the platform are going to attract more attention, but that applies to both genders equally. If you don't want 'competition', try seeking out people who aren't conventionally attractive.

eej2ya1K 7y ago
Oh, come on - the top 20% of men are dating the top 80% of women. This is pretty well documented.
viklove 7y ago
It's not at all a ridiculous thing to say... Men and women have significantly different experiences using dating apps, and if you were able to release an app that solved the problem many men face (being completely ignored for years), you would probably capture a large segment of the market.
- empath75 7y ago
  Do you think any women get ignored on dating sites?

uniquelygeneric 7y ago

This already exists in NYC: https://trybounce.com/ https://trybounce.com/

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

PopeDotNinja 7y ago

OKCupid used to have a service called Crazy Blind Date. [1] I went out on a couple dates using that service like 10+ years ago. I thought the concept was fun. On an amusing side note, I went on a job interview several years later where the hiring manager was a woman I'd met via that service. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Blind_Date https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Blind_Date

mywittyname 7y ago

Replace the money with some sort of credit or token that guys get from other sources. Like getting replies from women or having pictures that are liked.

lazyjones 7y ago

Why do we need apps with local scope if the aim is to meet in person anyway? Can't we just build clubs/pubs for singles only, with one age group per day of week and security to keep things safe and gender ratios balanced? There's even a good, well-tested monetisation scheme that doesn't have an effect on quality of matches...

hombre_fatal 7y ago
This already exists, from speed-dating to singles-only events on meetup.com or at your church. I wonder how many people in these sorts of HN threads who complain about the crapshoot of dating have taken it seriously enough to try these sorts of things. I highly recommend them. Speed-dating itself is really eye-opening.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > This already exists Exactly, which is why apps that work in the same way, based on exactly the same input (just superficial visual appeal), seem redundant to me. I'd much prefer something that actually makes use of modern technology, for example: upload 3 photos of your exes and we'll find someone similar for you. Or, match people by professions and lifestyles that are compatible in some way (in addition to ML-rated visual appeal).

rebuilder 7y ago

For the payment idea, consider the incentives you're putting in place. You think you're building a dating site, but I think you'd end up with a sex chat site instead. Add video, and it's a cam site.