Tinder

A dating panacea?

Last month I was obsessed with Tinder. It is a relatively new but trendy mobile dating app and you have probably heard about it (so I will not waste your time explaining its details). I have tried several online dating sites in the past, such as OkCupid and DateMySchool, and was not happy with them. Tinder was different. It felt like a fresh unexplored concept. Tinder immediately surprised me with the simplicity of starting a profile and “interacting” with potential matches. It had addictive “gameplay” of quickly sliding photos left and right to indicate who you like. This simplicity continued with an ease of starting and keeping chat conversations with matches and scheduling dates. Girls, showing up for those dates, looked like their photos on the app and had “normal” lifestyles and personalities in contrast with higher ratio of weird people from other sites. It felt like magic: much less effort resulted in better dates. However, compared to other sites, more of the first dates did not respond to further messages or did not want a second meeting. As with other surprising products, I was curious to pinpoint what makes Tinder different and how.

Tinder was different. It felt like a fresh unexplored concept.

Tinder has very low-friction on-boarding: a simple Facebook login replaces filling out a lengthy profile (which is often intimidating and for the most part stupid, irrelevant, or not accurate/truthful). Addictive “gameplay” with nice responsive animations keeps users engaged and produces matches without much effort on their part. Tinder is also superb at relaxing inherent awkwardness of meeting strangers via mutual signals of interest before chatting (match), texting instead of writing long emails/messages, and going mobile — with the ability to use on the go and in social settings instead of alone in the evenings at home. All of this brings more people to Tinder and facilitates more dates.

What ultimately is key for sustainable businesses is the ability to solve valuable problems for their clients/users. Does Tinder do that?

This can account for the virality and exponential growth curve for a while, but, what ultimately is key for sustainable businesses is the ability to solve valuable problems for their clients/users. Does Tinder do that? From talking to people using the app, most of them join out of interest to see what it is and then get hooked. They don’t know what they want from the strangers they meet. Thus, smaller second date ratios. The Tinder experience also sets a very casual mood that carries over to dates. Maybe that is why Tinder got a “hook-up app” label. This can hardly be a scalable model as currently society strongly condemns women looking for one night stands.

Tinder also does not address another big problem of most dating sites: skewed supply and demand, a women’s market. I would like to see a more balanced scenario when men and women put similar effort into the first impressions/dates. Most dating sites, including Tinder, (often unknowingly) propagate or even amplify relationship stereotypes: guys are aggressive predators looking for sex and girls are illogically picky and passive; real attitudes should be concealed and new acquaintances — untrusted. To get the most pleasant online dating experience, moods and incentives of participants need to be adjusted for mutual respect and thoughtfulness. Quora seems to be able to solve a related problem for subjective questions and answers and Uber is doing it now for taxis. The winning approach seems to involve mindfully crafted design and user experience and a launch with carefully selected early adopters: most users, not knowing better, would try to bring the product to status quo in the market; “right” first users can set the desired “culture” for a forming community.

Romantic matching and dating is a huge and ever-important market. Currently it is inefficient and is causing a lot of confusion and suffering for many people. It needs to and will change. It is fascinating to see how new technology will make it happen.