Dating

First published: ; Last modified:

If you’re interested in dating people (& I’m a member of your set of possible partners), and you have answers to my questions, I’d love to hear from you! Email me at rohanselvaradov@outlook.com :)

I’ve been working on building a dating service for Oxford students (Oxheart) this year, but as a friend pointed out, I’m not creating a product which is precisely tailored to what I’d like to have exist. Whether that’s sensible as a ~startup strategy isn’t the subject of this post. Rather, it’s an assortment of thoughts I’ve had about dating apps as a user of them, and what I would change if I were building one from the ground up.

Observations from Hinge

Questions I’d ask

As noted, I think profiles on Hinge aren’t that informative about the person. Of course, you can get to know someone better by messaging them (so long as it’s not pure small talk) or going on a date, but I certainly wouldn’t have the energy or motivation to do that with everyone I don’t rule out from their profile alone, precisely because profiles are so uninformative.

More bluntly, if you think that dating is mostly a numbers game – that is, that you just need to look through enough potential matches for there to be a reasonable chance of you finding someone really great – then you’ll want to avoid spending your limited dating effort budget on matches that are unlikely to work. Since I think finding love mainly is about looking widely enough, I would very much like to apply a strong initial filter that not many people pass through.

On my side of things, I’ve tried to make my profile opinionated and specific, to help other people decide if they’re interested in me. This doesn’t help with me deciding about what profiles I’m interested in though. If were designing the app from scratch and tailoring it to suit me, then I’d make people answer the following questions in their profile, as a way of eliciting their values/priorities/projects.

Features I’d add

Something I made a big deal about in my Emergent Ventures application was the idea of friends-as-matchmakers, inspired partly by manifold.love. Basically, the idea was that dating apps massively underutilise existing social networks and the “insider information” they contain from friends about what their peers would like in a partner. Incorporating this directly (get people to suggest matches for friends) or indirectly (encourage people to have input onto their friend’s profiles, or augment profiles in the backend with information gathered straight from friends) might help produce higher-quality, better-curated matches. Even without implementing this idea fully, there’s a few simple things that could be done to make it easier for friends to collaborate in their quest for romance.

Screenshot of WhatsApp message. A friend replies 'Slayyy, let me edit it for u I beg' to me saying 'Ive made myself a hinge profile again lol'
I don’t always sound like that in texts.

One friend was keen helping me improve my profile, but this isn’t something that Hinge natively supports. In fact, you can’t even share your profile with other people! I had to take screenshots of it all. A few sharing use-case examples: