Is anyone having a good experience with this? What would it take to fix this? I investigate.


First off, you need a business model that isn’t mobile gaming.

A monthly fee. Even better, you have a great thing to “sin tax.” Single men.

Charge men money per month. Only men. Every club promoter understands this. You don’t want your club to be a sausage fest, similarly, you don’t want your dating app to be a sausage fest.

Seeking is one of the only sites to do this right. They claim a ratio of 4 women per 1 man, and they get this by charging men $109/month. Why the hell are all the others charging the same for men and women? Tinder is a sausage fest with 75% men.


Second off, pictures should not be the primary selection mechanism.

Of course you want a looks match, but beyond that, how much do pictures predict whether you will have a good date or not? For me, beyond someone not being out of shape, not much. Some people might be extremely good at telling things from pictures, but I know I’m not, and I probably pay more attention to detail than the average.

Part of this is going to involve people getting over themselves with respect to attractiveness. Think of every couple you know. With almost no exceptions, they are fairly similar looks wise. The bottom date the bottom, the middle date the middle, and the most attractive date the most attractive. You will end up dating your looks match.

OkCupid did something clever back in the day with the compatibility questions. It’s a shame you don’t see this on modern dating apps. Example: for men who are looking for hookups, the single best predictor of if a girl will hook up with you is this question. What’s her body count? 5 and she won’t, 50 and she might.

Part of this also can be fixed by just linking your social media accounts from your dating profile. Link Instagram for your pictures and Twitter for your words. Again, this comes down to a certain sort of honesty, the Nash equilibrium is that nobody will be able to get an edge on anyone else by hiding things, and the sooner everyone accepts that the sooner we can all have a nice experience.


Third, make the app look like a CRM.

The dating cycle is the same thing as the sales cycle. Find leads, connect, qualify leads, present, overcome objections, close the deal, and nurture.

I have never used Salesforce, but I imagine the experience is not similar to a swiping based dating app. You want to present likely leads, and design the app in such a way to discourage non unique messages. Part of this involves a good chunk of freeform text on your profile that people can use as conversation openers.

Now you are on to the qualify leads step. If you aren’t agreeing on a time to meet in the first ten messages, this is a dead lead. While leaving reviews for people goes too far, the best predictor of if someone will meet with you is the ratio of meets/conversations. I would make this public on the app, similar to Airbnb’s response time.


What’s interesting is some of this can be done on top of the existing platforms without their approval, similar to my Twitter vampire attack. Imagine a CRM-like interface overlayed on Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble. You’d have to scrape their databases, and it would probably be pretty easy to image search to find all these people on Instagram, then their Twitter, YouTube, etc…

Instead of swiping, you are presented with a list you can filter in smart ways (btw, why doesn’t Instagram allow me to filter my inbox by male/female? another purposefully crippled front end). Then you spend a little time looking at their profile with all the data aggregated and sending a message that the person is likely to appreciate a lot more.

Everyone would have a better time.

Except the shit online dating companies, which need to be disrupted.