I played matchmaker to see if I could set up more dates than a dating app.
One of the greatest feelings in the world is when I receive support emails directly from our users with positive feedback on how Dine gave them an amazing first date experience. We launched just back in March 2016 and you can read about us here in this Business Insider article. I have to say, it’s been one hell of a successful year for Dine. We introduced Dine to the dating app world because we saw a huge problem and if you’re reading this, you probably know what I’m getting at; lots of matches, almost never any dates. It’s annoying, it’s frustrating and many of us want to skip the BS small talk and just meet up. Dine lets you do that by setting up dates at restaurants, bars or cafes.
Being that this was our very first Valentine’s Day, we wanted to do something very special for our users who were really eager to get out and date it up. As an experiment, we launched a V-Day matchmaking service for our users to try and see if we could set up more dates on V-Day by manually matching people rather than leaving all the heavy lifting to Dine.
To our surprise, much more people than we had expected ended up registering for the matchmaking service. We learned a lot about this direct matching approach and the results were interesting.
With all this tech “helping us” meet “new people”, why did so many single people sign up for a blind date this V-Day?
I read a very relevant article from the NY Post called “Why Valentine’s Day has would-be lovers going offline”. In this piece, writer Heather Robinson quoted Michelle Frankel, owner of NYCity Matchmaking, a service which offers coaching as well as fix-ups who mentioned:
“People are coming to me saying, ‘I’m tired of people swiping right and ghosting, or not taking dates seriously, or disappearing after a few dates with no explanation.’ When apps started around five years ago it was trendy. Now everyone is saying, ‘I’m exhausted swiping.’ People are treating it like a game and that’s dehumanizing.”
Although Dine does a great job at providing solutions to many of these dating app frustrations, giving some validation to Michelle Frankel, many users eagerly registered for this free service knowing that they would be set up on a blind date. People really just want to meet someone new and many seemed perfectly alright essentially leaving their Valentine’s Day fate in my hands if it meant making that a reality for them.
No algorithms, no formulas, no listing/learning logic. Just me, the almighty matchmaker.
This exclusive matchmaking service was made with the hopes of getting more people out on a date this Valentine’s Day, 2017. On paper, it was offline dating at its finest. However, this process wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be and naturally we received a very disproportionate amount of male to female registrations.
Taking into consideration both registered male and female users’ preferences while using our own special matchmaking abilities/capabilities, our CEO Keisuke and I manually handpicked a few potential male candidates for each registered female user who we felt had the highest probability of becoming a match.
With the little information I was able to provide (no photos, just occupation and brief description), I individually called each male and female candidate and 1-by-1 introduced the potential handpicked matches accordingly. Each user then confirmed to meet their top pick for V-Day dinner.
To go the extra mile, I even made all the restaurant reservations for each confirmed match. I realized if I wanted to make this successful, I had to be extra aggressive in terms of contacting people. Everything was 100% coordinated over the telephone kind of like how they did it back in the 1980’s. This was an interesting experience for both me and our users because I think our generation really lost touch with real human connection. Think about it? You call your credit card company and you speak to a bot. When you reach out to your friends, it’s over text or Facebook messenger. Many people were surprised to hear my stern voice over the phone informing them that I had found them a match!
Results: 20 successful dates! (NOT BAD!)
After all arrangements were made, we eventually were able to set up 20 dates this V-Day, 2017. That’s 20 more dates that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. We’re pretty proud about that. Honestly speaking, if we had the manpower, we potentially could have arranged 10–20+ more if we take into consideration the high volume of registrations we received.
The reality of matchmaking.
Working in the dating app space shines light on some of the negative superficial aspects tied to our Millennial dating generation which are often highlighted on dating apps. You know, hot or not, swipe left on someone you don’t know shit about, or swipe right on as many people as you can when you had zero intention on meeting IRL in the first place. Sadly, many of us (even me) have extremely strict preferences when it comes to dating.
Although it was a breath of fresh air seeing how many people are still up for an old school blind date in 2017, some of our registered users’ preferences were flat out unrealistic. It’s fair to say that hand picking matches in accordance to one’s preferences was the hardest task and in some cases, downright impossible to find a match.
For example, almost all women stated that they would only meet men who were tall, in very good shape and have really high ranking positions within the workplace (for example, finance, CEOs, marketing directors, etc.). Men were also no different and mentioned similar unrealistic preferences aiming to meet women who were shorter than them, athletic and a “cool chick” (whatever the hell that means). These were the top 3 specifications for both male and female’s “ideal match”:
Although preferences were tight, we still did our best to make as many dates happen. Playing matchmaker is tough!
Twenty dates, doesn’t sound like a lot of work right? Wrong. In the beginning, everything sounded simple; users register →fill out preferences →submit registration form→organize the list based on location →start the hand picking.
After doing a bit of research (google.com), I learned that there are still quite a few matchmaking services thriving in the U.S. and Canada. Although our V-Day service was nothing short of a botched simulation of the professional services companies like this offer, with a little further research, I learned that some of these services can run singles upwards of $1000 per month depending. Luckily for Dine users, ours was FREE.
Hand picking vs. Dating apps.
Manually picking matches for people is a lot of time and effort. The largest benefit with hand picking is that it is done with more accuracy and precision than modern day dating apps which in effect could possibly result in higher quality match. It’s also more direct and will certainly get you dates. But the time and effort that goes into this matchmaking process will run you a lot of money.
After this event, it’s quite fair to say that leaving matchmaking up to algorithms, features and concepts on dating apps is the most efficient way to meet new people in terms of cost and time performance. For example, on Dine, you can pay $16.66 a month for a premium membership (or just use it FREE) and if you can make at least 1 date happen in that given month, you definitely succeeded in opting for a dating app rather than taking the expensive route and hiring a matchmaking service. All in all, it was a challenge and we were happy with the results. While we put the hand picking on hold too, maybe next year, we promise we will continue improving Dine and doing what we do best, getting YOU first dates.
My personal outlook on Valentine’s Day.
As a guy who earns his bread from dating apps, I hate to admit that I always found Valentine’s Day to be immensely overrated, a manufactured corporate propaganda machine turned evil. But is there something more to V-Day than bitter singles like me making it out to be?
Although I didn’t have anyone to Dine with this year, the fact was many people were wishing they did. I think V-Day pumps life back into people, a spark that reminds us we don’t have to stay single if we don’t want to. I think me being single motivated me even more to help these 40 people. I wish I could have helped more.
Waking up last Tuesday and being done with the matchmaking event, I had already completely blocked it out of my mind that it was V-Day until I opened up Instagram:
Maybe I’m not remembering clearly, but it seemed as if this year, more people than usual posted about their gf/bf this V-Day. I have to say, it was beautiful seeing everyone post about each other. It gave me a sense of hope that maybe I too will find love someday, someone who I can travel, cook and be together with. But when I put my phone down, I couldn’t help to notice all of that euphoria I was feeling just seconds ago quickly wither away. I felt sad, I felt lonely. It was yet another V-Day and I didn’t have someone to spoil or hang out with. No one to say ‘I love you’ to. I think Valentine’s Day has a tendency to make single people like me feel like shit, but maybe it’s not so bad taking one day out of the year to celebrate love!
CHECK OUT MY OTHER BLOG POST: I used Tinder, Happn, Bumble and Dine for 2 weeks. The results were interesting.
Dine’s Concept
Each person chooses 1–3 restaurants, bars or cafes to meet for a first date at. Any place is searchable and can be chosen. These locations will appear on your dating profile. Every day, you will be introduced up to 5 people in your area that you can see in your “Today’s Pick”. Now this is where the cool part comes in, instead of swiping left and right and hoping someone likes you back, if you like any of the 5 people in your today’s pick and wish to Dine for a first date, you can directly ask them out and if they like you, it’s a match and having the first date is now set up. Obviously, following through on plans is up to the users, but it’s safe to say that having that date coordinated all the way up until the match goes a long way. Dine users tend to just consider their matches more seriously because of the strong direct aspect of meeting up for food or drinks. Check us out on the apple app store.
Download Dine Here:
About Dine
We designed Dine to solve a major issue we found among existing dating services. While all of these services allow people to mutually like each other and then start talking, there’s a big problem: all that hassle leads to an actual date only a fraction of the time! That means liking 100s of users just to go on a single date! Plus, it’s been shown that the average time it takes from first greeting to first date is usually around two full weeks.
