I'm not sure how this is the top comment. Obviously written by someone who doesn't use dating apps. I don't know a single person who uses these apps that would describe it like that.
The point of speed dating is to meet a lot of people quickly in the hope that you'll find someone who has chemistry with you. It's about personality, not sex.
Here's my idea for an AI-based speed dating site/app. You fill in the basics (about you and your preferences), plus 5 things that are important to you in life, plus 1-2 things you want to absolutely avoid (ex, smokers), your availability and that's it.
In the background, the AI matches you and sets you up for a quick coffee date at a location that's not far from either person. Twist: every single person actively looking for a relationship in each particular city must be on the site (aside from self-reporting, I haven't figured out how this will be done).
Essentially, you don't peruse the app, you just receive when & where notifications and then go have a 5-minute coffee to see if you have chemistry, which no current app can actually tell you.
That leaves you essentially only dating people who are within ~10 minutes of you at some point. Anything more would be a big time sacrifice- a 5 minute coffee turns into 15 minutes with a 5 minute commute. If that person ghosts (as online daters will know happens ALL THE TIME) or is suddenly unavailable, or 5 minutes late or whatever, you're wasting extra time on someone you've never met and might never met.
As an example, I haven't been actively dating in a bit, but when I last was it was in a big city with lots of public transit, and my radius was ~10 miles. If I started talking to someone I liked it was no problem for us to work out a time to meet, but I was constantly interacting with people who were never within "random meetup" distance of me.
Careful, this is sounding a little eugenic with the "must be on the site". There is no possible way to implement this without some authoritarian regime making it so. I get the impression that this idea if rather coercive.
Then 60 sec is probably really not enough to feel that.
Basically, 60 seconds give you just enough time to really see if the guy/girl at the other end of the screen is cute enough for your standards.
What those guys are saying is: "don't loose a whole date on someone who use a photoshopped profile pic"
> in the hope that you'll find someone who has chemistry with you
Speaking about chemistry ... I'm hoping for an app that can use pheromones to match people. Or genotyping, or both (I suppose pheromones correlate with DNA somehow). Am I the only one who finds smell most important?
I dislike social profiles like the next person and would like a better way of verifying...
I just had an idea whilst thinking about how I was going to respond to this -- perhaps I could do e-mail signup but instead verify the user through the clearbit/fullcontact api. Need to look into that
How is a Facebook or LinkedIn account considered “verification” when spammers routinely use thousands of fake accounts to astroturf fraudulent pages & ads? Surely this means any malicious actor targeting your platform can do the same.
The problem with dating isn't lack of meeting people, it's lack of heuristics. Speed dating just makes it faster to judge, but it doesn't actually do any work for you. One of the big benefits to OkCupid is that the heuristics are relatively good. Improve on that, and you're golden.
one of the problems with good heuristics is that almost all the desire is sent towards the 9's and 10's. Yet obviously most of the site users are 8 or less. So the 9-10s gets swamped, and leave early. The remaining users gets bored because nobody replies.
The problem here is not that heuristics of finding "your best match" is bad. It is quite easy to figure out who is attractive and matches you. The problem is that most people wants to trade up, and few people (on dating sites) have the desire to end up with someone their own score. Fewer yet wants to date someone less attractive. Hence the dating market ends up being a sort mechanism which works poorly because none of the sorted numbers wants to be where they are.
OkCupid had some great blog articles about the statistics behind this unbalanced matching phenomenon. Read them.
Not the dating market, just the online dating market
People date up and down all the time, and attraction isn't just limited to good looks. People are attracted to different things in an individual (good looks, ability, wealth, intellect, power or status, etc) -- it's just that those don't always show well on dating profiles. They are much easier to spot in the real world.
It's called speed dating, but it's actually much slower per decision than popular places like Tinder and Bumble. I imagine ML can be built to decide who should talk to each other. (push a button, wait in a queue, ML decides who to pair up)
Currently, * unless someone has a better idea * it would be through manually checking any social profiles including git profiles. The aim is not to turn it into a 'club' but just be selective enough that there are alot of like-minded individuals.
A comment on design: I'd recommend removing the large buttons for "How it Works" and "Queue up" on the landing image and instead using some visual indicator to scroll down. Scrolling down vs. clicking buttons (that just automatically scroll you down) seems redundant to me.
I really like this concept OP. I think your biggest non-technical hurdle is going to be dealing with the classic issue of there simply being significantly less women than men. I'm curious to know how you plan to approach that after you introduce a proper business model.
Former speed dating entrepreneur here. In person, at least, women are much more open to the idea of speed dating than men. Much of our marketing revolved around how to appeal to and attract men to our events.
I'd focus heavily on hotdog detection, lewd language detection, and other ways of terminating calls (and banning users) that break a code of conduct in the calls.
The problem is that it can become insincere very quickly.
Like when a group of people decides to have some fun by laughing at other people who are hoping for a date. This could happen even on a "genuine" account, because intentions of people can change. And people don't act the same when alone versus with friends.
it's not going to fly. I think the problem of this kind of ideas is that dating is actually a by product of social interactions, not suitable for engineering.