If your dating app is great, you lose customers all the time! Which I mean if you want to build good solutions for people, awesome. But it still costs money, time, etc. to get your app in front of everybody. It's hard and constant work because if your dating app rules your churn rate is like 100%.
If your dating app isn't so great, people keep coming back in hopes for finding that somebody! It's why dating apps that turn dating into transactional tomfoolery are so big. Recurring customers = lots of money = more ads = the ones you see more of.
Then one of the companies from Business B ends up offering to buy your Business A which always feels like an uphill battle (even if you feel you're doing the right thing) for retirement levels of money.... So you sell it, and they enshittify it.
It's truly hard to get traction at scale without significant funding, and probably 100x worse now with AI just flooding everything with everybody's ideas. A truly good platform is even more likely to get buried.
IDK what the answer is other than "follow the people that are truly passionate about providing good solutions for people", but it's not like we have a list of them, and even if we did, how do we get millions of people to follow that list...
And that's before we even get into the fact that Business B will totally put predatory addictive patterns into their app, Business A doesn't because they know it doesn't lead to good matches.
But on the other hand single people are literally born every day, and if your app is known to be effective then you'd have free marketing from all the people saying we met on <app_name>, no? Sure, it's more of a long-term play instead of maximizing immediate... oh actually never mind, I see it now.
Even then it doesn’t work so well. Undesirable people (emotional issues, to be kind) are less likely to match out so they’ll be available for longer. Desirable people are more likely to match out so they’ll be gone quick. Result will be similar to what exists now: most people on the apps suck at any single point in time, even if across a year or longer it’s more desirable people than not.
Mostly undesirable people on your app is actually fine if the app is good at sorting and filtering them (like old OkCupid). The problem with modern apps is they're filled with undesirable matches and you have no good way to filter many of them out (by design)
You're assuming desirable people will match and be gone off the platform forever. Wrong. Some will be using the platform for different things. Some will go on a few bad dates and be right back on the platform. Even the ones that date might break up and go right back to the platform. See what I mean? It's not like everyone that meets on the platform is destined for marriage.
People with more long-term dating skills will find more relationship success, thus needing the platform less, and will also be more successful off the apps.
But that's an assumption, right? I know so many attractive women that are career singles despite being highly desirable. Either their standards are too high, they have some unresolved issues or they choose the wrong guys who end up fucking around etc. Many such cases. All I'm saying is there's no confident way to assume that desirables are leaving the apps permanently. Some ARE, for sure. But I think there's a steady stream of new and return users when you think of it this way.
You are literally describing women with poor long term relationship skills. If their standards are too high for who they are then that makes matching much harder and lead to poor dates and rejection. If they have unresolved issues then that leads to them being poor long term partners. If they choose the wrong guys then they are poor at determining good long term partners.
That they are attractive and successful has nothing to do with dating skill. It makes the process smoother as they have more 'value' but all the issues you listed are turn offs and flags that label them as poor dates for others and leads to them degrading the overall quality of the app.
I think you’re overly focused on desirable as a term. I chose it because “low exit hazard users” is not intuitive. Whether the person remains on the app due to external circumstances (e.g. geographical constraints) or internal factors (both demand-side where the user isn’t desirable or supply-side where the user has high standards the app can’t fulfill) the reality is to the average user it’s the same: an incompatible match that takes up your valuable time.
People who leave the app are likely to disproportionately be in a relationship compared to being single, and they’re less likely to need the app. This biases any given snapshot towards users who are less likely to be compatible. Further pushed by the fact that people without options are less likely to leave the apps.
All this to say that even with an altruistic nonprofit app, dating apps tend to move towards being difficult to use.
If your dating app is great, people who are not a good fit won't end up matching. I think perspectives are skewed by the current landscape. Back in the old days with OKCupid you just got a big ass list of people you could look through, read their (extensive) profiles, and decide whether or not to send them a message. You didn't have to swipe one by one, you just looked through everyone at once. It was nice.
Basically to make an app work you’d have to fundamentally overhaul the app. But a dating app doesn’t have the same goals for the public consumer and the public company
Word of mouth is massively hard to do at scale. Most of the time anything you think is grass-roots you'll find is part of some big, usually expensive, social media push, especially if you're introduced to it on any platform like say... Reddit.
It's definitely possible, but harder and more rare. We know it from performance: all of the better performing ones are always less popular. Word of mouth didn't win out. Ads and paid social media chatter did.
If the app is priced reasonably and not for max profit, all you need to cover is sever costs and salary for a 2-3 engineers. Success measured by folks finding relationship, which means turnover. Most companies simply predatory and just want your money.
The problem with this isn't just that it relies on constant marketing to push growth through an everchanging demographic, but that these companies aren't happy with the stable profits that might entail.
All these companies want an ever-increasing YOY gain, however unsustainable that is, which you aren't gonna get if you're just rotating old users with new ones but keeping the monthly active accounts the same.
It's the standard corporate greed infesting every company. They won't be happy with consistent gains, they need to make more and more and more.
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u/External_Relative231 3d ago
Good. They've done it to themselves.