Dating Apps Are Dying

I am currently developing one and what I can see is the following:

• people get treated like cash cows. It is almost not possible to successfully date without spending money
• people are burned out. The low quality swiping, matching, just to get ghosted, is hurting the motivation.
• people have other problems nowadays. COVID reshaped us completely. We don’t want to spend 2h a day on a dating app. 2h a week max and then they want to continue in real life.

Those are pain points introduced by big corpos (e.g. Match.com) and the fact, that they have launched their apps before COVID.

I have addressed those pain points.

I worked customer service for match for almost a decade, so I can give you a few pointers.

People leave when they’re the only ones in an area. So giving them something to do is important to retain people. The best idea I’ve ever saw was having a forum where people can discuss any topic. I think Match also tested public chatrooms and streams, but i didn’t really dealt with those. You’ll have to deal with forum drama and moderation, but some people will be very engaged.

Speaking of, moderation will take lots of time and effort. People sick. Make sure that moderation tools are as robust as the matching ones.

I think those are the general ones. Best of luck!