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Coffee Meets Bagel did something similar to this when they first launched. You got one potential match a day, and you either liked or passed. I thought it worke

Coffee Meets Bagel did something similar to this when they first launched. You got one potential match a day, and you either liked or passed. I thought it worked well, but there were eventually some problems. For example, it assumes that you have an even balance of participants in your marketplace. If you have more men than women, you either need to give some men no matches on some days (which decreases engagement), or you need to give women multiple potential matches on some days. There are other ways you can handle this, but they have problems too. Another potentially bigger issue is monetization. It is hard to monetize one match a day. But you can give people the option to have multiple matches a day if they pay for them, which is what CMB does. But then you should probably give people who were liked by a paid member at least one more match a day, which causes your original premise to break down. Hinge severely limits the number of people you can like in a given day (unless you pay), and I think this works pretty well.

Wiseacre 5y ago
Well no the issue is not monetization. Dating apps should not be profitable. It is an extreme conflict of interest against successfully matching users and getting them off the app. You cannot possibly expect to do this faithfully if you are making money off your users.
- ovao 5y ago
  You’re not wrong, but how does an app cover operating costs?
  - Wiseacre 5y ago
    How do other useful not-for-profit services cover operating costs? I bet we don't need to reinvent the Wikimedia Foundation for this.
- david-gpu 5y ago
  > It is an extreme conflict of interest against successfully matching users and getting them off the app. That depends on the payment model, doesn't it? If it is set up in such a way that the app makes more money the longer people use it, that introduces a perverse incentive. But what if, for example, people paid upfront for unlimited access to the service? Then the incentives of the app would be better aligned to the users: find them a good match quickly so that they won't come back in a long time, if ever. That said, I am deeply grateful that I got married well before dating apps became popular. It would have been such a terrible experience for a nerd like me.
  - Wiseacre 5y ago
    In your scenario, the app would be incentivized to find you poor matches and to keep you on the app for as long as possible to maximize number of daily active users. After all, who in the world would pay for unlimited access to an app if you only needed it temporarily until you found a great match? And who in the world would pay unlimited access for an app that wasn't full of active users? The only thing it should be incentivized to do it find you a great match. There is no real reason why it needs to be profitable.
andrew_ 5y ago
My wife ended up being my first match on there. The rest of my matches were ... not great. I thought I remembered it being one a week, but maybe it was daily.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- coolso 5y ago
  > My wife ended up being my first match on there. Dear Lord that must've been incredibly awkward at the dinner table that night?
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    Nah. it's just a new take on the Pina Colada Song.
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    Hahaha should have prefaced with "future"
dane-pgp 5y ago
That's a really clear analysis, thank you. I've often thought that dating apps should better explore the idea of making it mean something when someone expresses an interest, to show that the person taking that step is actually committed to the process of getting to know the person they have selected, and to prevent people wasting their time focusing on just the most superficially attractive people (who are probably inundated with options, or are catfishing anyway). The way I imagined it was that your patience would be something like a currency, and the longer you are prepared to wait before contacting someone without contacting anyone else, the higher priority your profile should be for the matching algorithm. I haven't thought through all the implications of this "market for attention", though, and I know that people could just use a different app if they were getting impatient. The other problem would be monetization, as you mention, but users could pay for the ability to send pictures in the app, and to be able to have the waiting days accumulate automatically, i.e. without having to log in each day (and watch an ad).
- zachkatz 5y ago
  The problem with dating apps is that it can very often be pretty unclear whether the person is actually worth getting to know or not (cute pictures =/= compatible personality). Which is why, IMO, the killer feature for dating apps would be one where everyone has to feature a video of themselves on their profile, like TikTok (there's one dating app that does exactly that, called Snack, but it never really took off and the network effect is crucial). You learn infinitely more about a person from a video than any amount of pictures can tell you. To a lesser degree, same with voice, which Hinge just added as an option.
  - meristem 5y ago
    This assumes the best (or worst) of one's personality shows through in a video.
    - zachkatz 5y ago
      No, the assumption is that video shows a more accurate portrayal of one's personality [than just photos/text], because it's closer in resolution to real life. In other words, if you agree that meeting someone in real life is the most accurate portrayal of them, then video is a much better proxy for that than just photos and text.
MrDunham 5y ago
I came here to mention this exact thing. When I was last dating CMB was one at a time. I had some of my best dates on that app and response rates were through the roof. Granted, I joined eHarmony and married a woman I met there. Anyways... The one-match-a-day thing was also a brilliant way for them to deal with the marketplace problem... you don't need to have 1000 males and 1000 females in a city to launch if they can only see one at a time.
nsomani 5y ago
Yeah my hesitation with only showing people a single profile everyday is that in my experience I swiped left most of the time. So most days I wasn't swiping right on anyone. That's why I'm hoping to let users swipe freely but just restrict the optionality on the actual matching.
_fat_santa 5y ago
It doesn't even have to be one match. I've been using Hinge lately and I found that I get much higher quality matches on there, conversation starts with almost everyone, and I found I can "convert" a conversation into a date much easier on there. One design decision they made, as opposed to Bumble or Tinder is there's no "swiping", you actually have to go into a profile and like something there. This means more people spend time on your profile, and the folks that actually have liked you back have taken more than just a cursory look at the profile.
- meristem 5y ago
  It's amazing what just a little design friction can do in terms of human behaviour.
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    This is the billion-dollar insight. Two programs, very similar areas of functionality, but one becomes Instagram, and the other dies.
- vmception 5y ago
  I've really enjoyed Hinge in the past, my main recurring issue periodically is the sales pitch of meaningful and implies long term relationships "the app meant to be deleted". It attracts a lot of people that really think the app will "solve" their dating journey, as if it is a journey compared occasional to skin entertainment. I will concede that the Terms of Service also are against hookups. I've had some great flings and hookups on Hinge. Its been the best dating app for me. I would like an app that had a Hinge-like UX without the "long term relationship" sales pitch. (of a similar theoretical caliber, I've tried Bumble, women do not initiate conversations with me. I'll get matched similarly to Hinge, but they just let the match expire and I cannot attempt a conversation there. The entire "women + initiate" in the same sentence is an oxymoron in my lived experience.)
  - nsomani 5y ago
    Yeah I'm curious to see what percent of users have been actively on Hinge for more than a year. They should be optimizing to minimize that if it's actually meant to be deleted
bradlys 5y ago
While the Hinge model is good in limiting how much liking men can do - it unfortunately doesn’t limit the same problem that dating apps have. Men just wildly outnumber women on them. The general 4:1 ratio is pretty typical (most dating apps don’t even publicize their numbers). So, really you need to limit what men like the most and what women like the least. I think limiting likes to even less than 7 like Hinge does is the way to go. Maybe 2-3 a day for men and 10+ for women. I think limiting matches is also a better way to go. I’ve seen the screens of many women and 50+ matches is normal. Whereas most men get 0-5 in their entire experience. It’s making it where most women are overwhelmed with options and won’t progress forward with any of them and use most for entertainment. The other fun part of this is that most women on Hinge never even visit the discovery part where you like new people. Instead they just look at the people who have liked them and this takes up all their time. It would explain why most men get 0 likes in their entire Hinge experience. They always have to initiate. (Liking and messaging of course…)
LorenPechtel 5y ago
(Note: No actual experience with dating apps) I would think that making them pay for more than one match/day would simply make it a de-facto paid app and defeat the whole point of limited matches.

Wiseacre 5y ago

Well no the issue is not monetization. Dating apps should not be profitable. It is an extreme conflict of interest against successfully matching users and getting them off the app. You cannot possibly expect to do this faithfully if you are making money off your users.

ovao 5y ago
You’re not wrong, but how does an app cover operating costs?
- Wiseacre 5y ago
  How do other useful not-for-profit services cover operating costs? I bet we don't need to reinvent the Wikimedia Foundation for this.
david-gpu 5y ago
> It is an extreme conflict of interest against successfully matching users and getting them off the app. That depends on the payment model, doesn't it? If it is set up in such a way that the app makes more money the longer people use it, that introduces a perverse incentive. But what if, for example, people paid upfront for unlimited access to the service? Then the incentives of the app would be better aligned to the users: find them a good match quickly so that they won't come back in a long time, if ever. That said, I am deeply grateful that I got married well before dating apps became popular. It would have been such a terrible experience for a nerd like me.
- Wiseacre 5y ago
  In your scenario, the app would be incentivized to find you poor matches and to keep you on the app for as long as possible to maximize number of daily active users. After all, who in the world would pay for unlimited access to an app if you only needed it temporarily until you found a great match? And who in the world would pay unlimited access for an app that wasn't full of active users? The only thing it should be incentivized to do it find you a great match. There is no real reason why it needs to be profitable.

andrew_ 5y ago

My wife ended up being my first match on there. The rest of my matches were ... not great. I thought I remembered it being one a week, but maybe it was daily.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
coolso 5y ago
> My wife ended up being my first match on there. Dear Lord that must've been incredibly awkward at the dinner table that night?
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  Nah. it's just a new take on the Pina Colada Song.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  Hahaha should have prefaced with "future"

dane-pgp 5y ago

That's a really clear analysis, thank you. I've often thought that dating apps should better explore the idea of making it mean something when someone expresses an interest, to show that the person taking that step is actually committed to the process of getting to know the person they have selected, and to prevent people wasting their time focusing on just the most superficially attractive people (who are probably inundated with options, or are catfishing anyway). The way I imagined it was that your patience would be something like a currency, and the longer you are prepared to wait before contacting someone without contacting anyone else, the higher priority your profile should be for the matching algorithm. I haven't thought through all the implications of this "market for attention", though, and I know that people could just use a different app if they were getting impatient. The other problem would be monetization, as you mention, but users could pay for the ability to send pictures in the app, and to be able to have the waiting days accumulate automatically, i.e. without having to log in each day (and watch an ad).

zachkatz 5y ago
The problem with dating apps is that it can very often be pretty unclear whether the person is actually worth getting to know or not (cute pictures =/= compatible personality). Which is why, IMO, the killer feature for dating apps would be one where everyone has to feature a video of themselves on their profile, like TikTok (there's one dating app that does exactly that, called Snack, but it never really took off and the network effect is crucial). You learn infinitely more about a person from a video than any amount of pictures can tell you. To a lesser degree, same with voice, which Hinge just added as an option.
- meristem 5y ago
  This assumes the best (or worst) of one's personality shows through in a video.
  - zachkatz 5y ago
    No, the assumption is that video shows a more accurate portrayal of one's personality [than just photos/text], because it's closer in resolution to real life. In other words, if you agree that meeting someone in real life is the most accurate portrayal of them, then video is a much better proxy for that than just photos and text.

MrDunham 5y ago

I came here to mention this exact thing. When I was last dating CMB was one at a time. I had some of my best dates on that app and response rates were through the roof. Granted, I joined eHarmony and married a woman I met there. Anyways... The one-match-a-day thing was also a brilliant way for them to deal with the marketplace problem... you don't need to have 1000 males and 1000 females in a city to launch if they can only see one at a time.

nsomani 5y ago

Yeah my hesitation with only showing people a single profile everyday is that in my experience I swiped left most of the time. So most days I wasn't swiping right on anyone. That's why I'm hoping to let users swipe freely but just restrict the optionality on the actual matching.

_fat_santa 5y ago

It doesn't even have to be one match. I've been using Hinge lately and I found that I get much higher quality matches on there, conversation starts with almost everyone, and I found I can "convert" a conversation into a date much easier on there. One design decision they made, as opposed to Bumble or Tinder is there's no "swiping", you actually have to go into a profile and like something there. This means more people spend time on your profile, and the folks that actually have liked you back have taken more than just a cursory look at the profile.

meristem 5y ago
It's amazing what just a little design friction can do in terms of human behaviour.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  This is the billion-dollar insight. Two programs, very similar areas of functionality, but one becomes Instagram, and the other dies.
vmception 5y ago
I've really enjoyed Hinge in the past, my main recurring issue periodically is the sales pitch of meaningful and implies long term relationships "the app meant to be deleted". It attracts a lot of people that really think the app will "solve" their dating journey, as if it is a journey compared occasional to skin entertainment. I will concede that the Terms of Service also are against hookups. I've had some great flings and hookups on Hinge. Its been the best dating app for me. I would like an app that had a Hinge-like UX without the "long term relationship" sales pitch. (of a similar theoretical caliber, I've tried Bumble, women do not initiate conversations with me. I'll get matched similarly to Hinge, but they just let the match expire and I cannot attempt a conversation there. The entire "women + initiate" in the same sentence is an oxymoron in my lived experience.)
- nsomani 5y ago
  Yeah I'm curious to see what percent of users have been actively on Hinge for more than a year. They should be optimizing to minimize that if it's actually meant to be deleted

bradlys 5y ago

While the Hinge model is good in limiting how much liking men can do - it unfortunately doesn’t limit the same problem that dating apps have. Men just wildly outnumber women on them. The general 4:1 ratio is pretty typical (most dating apps don’t even publicize their numbers). So, really you need to limit what men like the most and what women like the least. I think limiting likes to even less than 7 like Hinge does is the way to go. Maybe 2-3 a day for men and 10+ for women. I think limiting matches is also a better way to go. I’ve seen the screens of many women and 50+ matches is normal. Whereas most men get 0-5 in their entire experience. It’s making it where most women are overwhelmed with options and won’t progress forward with any of them and use most for entertainment. The other fun part of this is that most women on Hinge never even visit the discovery part where you like new people. Instead they just look at the people who have liked them and this takes up all their time. It would explain why most men get 0 likes in their entire Hinge experience. They always have to initiate. (Liking and messaging of course…)

LorenPechtel 5y ago

(Note: No actual experience with dating apps) I would think that making them pay for more than one match/day would simply make it a de-facto paid app and defeat the whole point of limited matches.