Who wants to build a better dating website?

The problem with dating sites is that they will always favor the people that don’t “need” them.

Say you build a dating site with the goal of helping guys that have had bad luck on other sites meet girls. One of two things will happen:

1) there will be essentially no women on the site

2) the success stories will bring all of the successful guys from the plethora of other sites, diluting the whole process and ruining the novel concept

Hinge is currently the closest to a holistic dating site, where you can essentially like someone “for” something and they can see what you liked and how you messaged them all for free. It’s actually so much better than tinder that I’m not sure both why tinder still exists as well as how the make money when all of the usual “tinder premium” features are already included for free.

The secret to succeeding at dating apps is to just stop using them. The connections, by and large, are superficial at best and usually lead nowhere. Meanwhile, finding a girl by doing an activity and striking conversation is so much more successful and holistic.

The secret sauce is creating contexts for relationships to form organically, in group settings. An app that emphasizes a safe, low-commitment environment that doesn't rely on first impressions, and mimics natural group settings instead of awkward 1 on 1s.

I have a few ideas for this and the chops to execute rapidly if you or anyone else would like to chat more.

An idea I've juggled around in my head is a dating app that doesn't directly connect two people trying to date, but rather connect someone with a "matchmaker" who then goes out and tries to find a match.

Tried it a few years ago with the concept of having a picture blurred and profile information required. As you messaged back and forth the pictures became unblurred gradually to spawn more conversations. Hinge kinda had a more conversation based concept and exploded so gave up the dev on it.

I don't think it needs to be free for over-represented demographics, just open source so that it is clear that the algorithm is designed in the best interests of users.

I like Andrej Karpathy's (I think) idea of training something like GPT-3 on each person and using the derived personality to identify those that you would get on well with (if the objective of the site is long term relationships). I suspect that a large leap forward is possible with something like this, although the technology is probably not ready yet.

I've always been interested in this, but could never dedicate the time and energy to it. Every time I've tried to, people would think it's either a solved problem or that a new app would fix it.

I think there's a bad product fit. People who really need a dating site aren't good at dating. People who are really good at dating don't need a dating site. Monetization is terrible too - most of these make money the more they date, but a perfect dating site should only be used once. So there's a lot of serial daters. There's weird stuff you see going on in r/tinder, where both men and women are great at pickup lines, but somehow can't hold a relationship.

I think what's missing is somewhat improving dating skills. Less focus on icebreaking, more on cutting deeper and finding couples that can live together forever. What are your values, life goals. Like a scammer once said, if you want to build trust, you agree with their religious beliefs, then agree with their political beliefs. If you can find people with matching values, they'd be likely to stick through things. Of course, you can't always ask that up front, you have to somehow work it into the tempo of the conversation.

> I'm a software engineer, not a psychologist but I think the only barrier to making a better dating website is customer acquisition but it's doable

I think this might be the underlying problem with existing dating apps.

Actually, that's a good idea. An OS dating app will be amazing, but I don't see a clear way to monetize its development than pure love of the devs. No pun intended.

Perhaps a better dating website could be a dating aggregator, call it the Kayak of dating. When I was single and searching in small radiuses for locals to meet, I remember seeing the same people on multiple dating sites. I think having a site like this would have at least saved me some time and allow me to focus on only the dating sites that had singles that appealed to me.

I paid $15k for a failed dating startup's customers. I spent 6mo building it out before eventually canning it. My go to market strategy was to develop it as a freemium social app w dating features coming in once the user base took off.

The primary gotcha was something for syncing your instagram, spotify, audible, and a handful of other services and generating a graph based recommender engine whereby people could share their "snapshots" and engage in a micro-community of people sharing their "feeds".

The music side of things had a reactive element whereby you could enter two artists and it'd give you 5 suggested options you might also like between them to make the data input side of things exploratory but informative. In my testing, my friends were able to add 250 artists in under 5 min w each finding 3-5 new daily-listen artists the first time through.

I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with current dating websites. They provide a service and you choose to pay for the service or not. Whether dating sites are a good way for you to find a partner or a sex hookup is another matter and a much more complicated problem. I consider the two objectives to be entirely different. You do not need a website for either. My advice would be to make a strategy that works for you and can be applied in real life. Start there. Both are totally doable.

If you want to know more just ask me..

Algorithmic matchmaking is a mistake. Yes filtering the pool makes sense but frankly beyond a point there is not going to be a difference vs randomly chosen. Let a real human do the matchmaking.

The problem with dating services is - if they're honest - are out to do only one of two things:

- enable hookups

- go out of business because all their customers end up happily together

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Best wishes with developing that idea, and I believe there is already a FOSS dating site template out there somewhere, I saw it a few years ago but didn't have the emotional energy to persue it.

I'm older and I've tried multiple ways to meet a partner, and haven't dated in nearly 10 years, but finally am building a primitive website for myself, it still needs more work but I'm getting there.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to spread the word, since I don't participate in "normal" social networks.

It's kind of daunting to be putting myself out there like this.

https://julietnull.me/

Respectfully you are wrong.

Maybe you just live in the wrong place. Dating apps can't solve the ratio problem. When you live in the Bay Area/Seattle area/Bangalore etc that is so overwhelmingly tech then there are simply more men than woman. That doesn't mean you can't get a date but yes statistically it is going to be harder.

No app is going to fix this. Many devs on HN seem not to understand this every time a "how dating apps are bad" thread is posted.

The other part is their own dating profile is mediocre and they need a little help with the art of non tech small talk.

There is a lifestyle business in helping male tech workers make better profiles and dating coaching.

Also no dating app company is going to succeed outside small niche with no money incentive for the devs and marketers.

Just adding after reading my comment, not trying to be negative just realistic so you consider if it something worth your time.

Tried almost exactly this years ago, couldn't get users. Any ideas?

keeper.dating

not mine.