h2>Dating : Swoop — a start-up born in quarantine
Background
My name is Aravind and I work as a Data Scientist in San Francisco. In March, I returned to Ireland to see my family and have been stuck here with the border closure.
Two weeks into my Irish quarantine, I was in a bantery mood and posted this (see picture) on my favorite facebook group, Subtle Mallu Traits. The response I got was staggering: 431 comments — dozens of guys called me “kozhi” countered by some lovely messages from women. And some of them even hopped on a zoom call with me!
I had two strong contrarian macro-views at the time.
- Corona will go on for a lot longer than most people will think (years not months).
- This will create a permanent change in people’s behavior.
Zoom dating women from a facebook group would have been a bizarre concept three weeks ago, but I was sitting there with an inbox full of women who were game to the idea. I knew I had stumbled upon something from the future — and was eager to build that which can satiate this new found demand.
The Birthing
I am very lucky to have a lot of very smart and talented friends. I got in touch with three close developer friends and recounted my story to them. Due to borders closures, we were spread across San Francisco-Dublin-Delhi-Sydney but were as keen as each other. And about 7 weeks ago, as one of the first Covid all-remote start-ups, Swoop was born! The world was ready to Stop Swiping and Start Swooping.
Our NorthStar
One big question we were wrestling with during the initial few weeks was if people actually wanted this or if we are all wasting time. This question was lingering until one of our team members called out that he isn’t worried because, even if no one uses Swoop, he still will. We will always have one loyal user ad infinitum. We all shared that sentiment that we were building something we were all excited to use until one of us interjected that it takes two to swoop and we have only solved half of our problem.
We only truly found our company NorthStar after posting on Subtle Mallu Traits (see below). A girl contacted me saying that she is 27 years old girl and is really excited by our app but is apprehensive and feels that the user-base might be younger and whether she should sit out.
I was really touched by her message and told the team, if her or even just one person embraces vulnerability and pushes past, comes onto our platform and finds love, I will label this whole endeavor a success.
They countered that the real success is that I am getting facebook messages from random cute girls and by that metric, this endeavor is already a huge success.
Development / Doing Things That Don’t Scale
Hofstadter’s Law states that development always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. We learnt that the hard way — after having grandiose plans to scale to thousands of users, 5/6 weeks later we had made very little headway.
One of my favorite Paul Graham anecdotes is about Airbnb founders knocking on people’s doors and to get people to sign-up and helping improve their listings. The moral was to do things that don’t scale initially and try get to 10–100 users who love your product. We returned to where it all began, the beloved Subtle Mallu Traits group and made a post (see picture) to run a small pilot event (thank you to wonderful group admins for their help!). The response again was astounding and we got over 250 sign-ups for our pilot event.
Pilot Launch with Subtle Mallu Traits
Our sign up page used Mailchimp so we were able to see which cities people were signing up from. For our pilot, we randomly picked 10 guys and 10 girls from Sydney. All plans to spend weeks building a video client, ML matching algorithm etc were put on hold and instead we used AI — Anonymous Indian (me) in the background to click buttons, put people in chat rooms and manually enter names into databases so users can accept/reject their dates. Out of the 20 people we contacted, half of the people joined and on Sunday, the 24th of May, Swoop dating had its first pilot event!
The event was a lot of fun and as we met our first set of users as they went on speed dates and tried out our product. The were all Malayali people from Sydney so they were instantly able to connect and we had two wonderful hosts guiding. I want to thank everyone who joined that day and for the valuable feedback provided.
If we build it, they will come
After our crazy sign-ups from Subtle Mallu Traits and our pilot launch, we have validated a keen user base for our product. We are currently working on some features suggestions given during our pilot event as well as integration to login with Facebook. There are 230 people from the Subtle Mallu Traits group who have signed up and they will all soon be invited to our upcoming events. Meanwhile, we are also talking to one other Subtle group about potentially having them try out Swoop as well. And all through this, we are constantly in touch with our users, hearing feedback and building what you want. Super excited to work with you all and build the next generation dating platform for my Subtle facebook groups ❤.
If you enjoyed reading this and want to get in touch, please contact me at aravind@swoopdating.com.
If you are interested in signing up to try Swoop, go to www.swoopdating.com and sign up and we will contact you for our upcoming events.
