h2>Dating : Is There Room in the Market for a New Dating App?
Yes.
In my last 8 years of dating regularly across 25 cities and consulting for dating companies, service providers, and online daters of all stripes, I’ve been developing increasingly strong opinions about what the dating industry needs.
But before you go building the next best dating app, please realize:
- It’s expensive.
- No one will fund you.*
- You may get sued.
- The landscape is incredibly competitive (4,000+ dating apps & websites)
- Swipe fatigue is at an all-time high.
*(To see which dating companies do get funded, check Internet Dating Investments by Online Personals Watch.)
My most important finding after 8 years in this industry is that dating app users’ ROI on their attentional spend has been decreasingly dramatically in recent years.
What this means is that we as users are getting less and less value for each additional minute we spend on dating apps.
The introduction of mindless Tinderized swiping in 2013 has insidiously coupled with a focus on maximizing numbers of users, numbers of swipes, and amount of screen time. Now, rather than training the hundreds of millions of newcomers to online dating in the basics of profile design, messaging, and online civility, dating apps are incentivized to do nothing more than capture as much of our attention as possible, regardless of whether we as users are deriving any success, fulfillment, or even joy from these platforms.
To put it simply…
- We spend more time than ever on dating apps.
- Yet each additional minute we spend delivers us less and less value.
- And the overarching structures that influence the industry (funding rounds, acquisitions based on user counts rather than not genuine value created) lead to more products focusing on the wrong things.
So…is there room to make a new app?
Yes!
But you absolutely must focus on creating a positive ROI on user attention.
Currently, the most realistic online dating experience for tens or even hundreds of millions of online daters around the world is as follows:
🤳Download a dating app
🤳Swipe a bunch
👨👩👧👦Match with a few dozen people
💑Send messages to a few dozen people
🤷♀️Most people don’t reply
🙇♀️The ones who reply don’t give you a sense of whether they even want to meet up
🤦♀️The ones who want to meet up don’t necessarily know how to propose a date/meetup that’s worthwhile enough to justify even putting it on your calendar
💃🏻Repeat
🙇♀️Burn out, feel exasperated by how much of your attention you just wasted
🙅♀️Delete the app
🙍♀️Feel lonely again
🤳Reinstall the app, or download a different app that a friend recommended
🧟♀️Repeat
In the last 2 years, we’ve seen several powerful breakthroughs in the dating user experience, which have set a new kind of north star for what modern dating could become:
- Hinge and Coffee Meets Bagel began notifying you about which matches you’ve failed to respond to, and nudging you to keep the conversation going, thereby leading to fewer dropped conversation threads.
- Instant commitment dating apps like Tonight and Bounce attempt to get users to commit upfront to meeting up within 24hrs, thereby mitigating the endless graveyards of dead message threads that so many millions of users quietly ignore in their inboxes.
- Livestreaming apps like MeetMe and Momo became popular due to their instant ROI on user attention (you get to see and engage with a live human within seconds of logging in), but these apps ultimately fail to deliver actual human connection because the vast majority of users will never meet anyone IRL.
- Realtime video connection apps like Spottle and The League are enabling users to rapidly jump into meaningful live conversations with others on the app at specified times (so all user attention comes online at once and there’s no more endless messaging back-and-forths), and these users can potentially meet up with those people right away if they happen to live nearby.
So what’s next for the dating industry?
That’s where you come in, intrepid would-be dating app founder!
How can your app deliver positive value (not just dopamine) to an online dater within a short enough timeframe that they don’t uninstall your app? Remember, about 25% of users uninstall their dating app within the first 24 hours of downloading it! What can you do that gets your users to instantly say “holy crap, this app actually solved my problem! I need to get this into my friends’ hands so they can experience this, too!”
Online daters have a million different needs, and their intentions span the gamut from finding love, to getting hitched and making babies, to finding a quick hookup, to witty online banter, to getting a free lunch, to finding a sugar daddy, to finding fun ideas and collaborators for adventures in new cities, to…. you get the picture? People have lots of needs and desires! But at the end of the day, they’re still people, and if you’re wasting their attention and not actually delivering value, they’ll notice. And they’ll leave you.
Ironically, the same principle holds for the actual people you’re hoping to date…
So, I pose this question to you, dear reader:
If someone were to build a new dating app today, what would you want it to do?
