Is anyone doing “Tinder, but with video”? Why not? | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone doing “Tinder, but with video”? Why not?

20 points4midori24 comments

Certainly it will require some deep thought and lots of coding, but the concept is easy to understand - like Tinder, but with video which users upload right from their devices.

Has anyone built this, and if not, why? It seems like something that should already exist and be in common use, like Tinder, Bumble, etc.

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Adding video is pretty trivial from an effort standpoint, so this probably falls under a class of startups where the differentiation is not enough to justify a standalone service.

Video costs are higher and probably no additional revenue, so Tinder isn't doing it on thier own. If you put a bunch of energy into such a product and it looked like it would take off... bam... Tinder now has videos and you're dead.

>...If you put a bunch of energy into such a product and it looked like it would take off... bam... Tinder now has videos and you're dead.

Or he could be sufficiently irritating that he is approached for acquisition.

There are segments of the consumer base out there he could go after and use cases we probably are not considering.

Tinder is global and in my country, it has a (bad) reputation as hookup app i.e sex-for-pay. This alienates that group of people looking for something more substantial than a sexual encounter. That's one thing not going for it.

There are other drawbacks. People post their profile pictures, sure, but still misrepresent themselves in other ways.They write glowing tributes about oneself which other people might not agree with .... I for one would appreciate a one minute video of prospective matches to learn more before committing fully . So, an app with a different angle of attack would generate interest.

Dating is nowhere near a conquered market.

Match group corp dev will buy essentially anything over 15k mau so the acquisition angle isn't wrong

I don't think most people would do this. They're likely too shy and/or don't want to put the effort in. In my city, about 25% of profiles are blank on Tinder.

Tinder has gifs now, and you can connect your Instagram to most apps. The functionality exists and isn't used much. Even IG is still mostly photos.

I don't think most people would do this.

Sounds like a good filter then.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/04/tinder-begins-testing-its-...

This is truly horrible. These kinds of looping gifs have all the appeal of watching 4-year-old pick her nose.

Dating apps are only valuable based off their user base. The coding is not the hard part. The app is not the hard part. Well over 90% of the difficulty of dating apps is successfully marketing them.

Yep and the fact that it's a terrible crowded market. If you told me you had 1M users and were growing 10% monthly I'd personally still probably be very reluctant to invest.

I agree. I used to own a domain with the intention of building one.

'Video Dating' used to be 'a thing' back in the 80s.

There's a classic old video on YouTube showing them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bomkgXeDkE

Bash out an MVP and get a few people to try it. Tinder is vulnerable to a strong competitor

I think its a reasonable idea and you never can tell what the customer really wants or what the market will reward.

The technical part is the easy part. What’s interesting to me is how tinder, which unlike twitter or Instagram for example requires a certain mass of active users in the same physical area, established themeselves in the first place.

My only thought on how to make a “Tinder of X” is start hyper local, somewhere like a college campus or a single neighborhood. The small local userbase could well become a selling point too, giving the product the image of exclusivity. Starting hyper local also may help with the “ok so he looks cute but what if he’s actually an axe murderer or Russian troll” problem.

because I'm ugly looking, don't want to take a video.

because while on toilet, don't want nearby stalls hear what I'm watching.

Well, there was Chatroulette: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatroulette

Mmhh..looks like there still _is_ Chatroulette (NSFW!) https://chatroulette.com

That's literally how "YouTube" was born. Registered on Valentine's Day as a way to share interesting videos of yourself to find dates.

I would argue that creating a Tinder but only with voice is much more exciting. Imaging going on a blind date and the only thing you know is the voice.

For the French speaking dating pool

http://www.tuttiflirty.com/

Transpose videos to gifs with audio and I think you will have something. No one does it with raw video because of the hosting cost.

>Transpose videos to gifs with audio and I think you will have something. No one does it with raw video because of the hosting cost

Umm, you do realize that videos provide a way better compression than GIF+audio, right?

Probably all of the intricate privacy issues surrounding how the video is hosted since the service would likely be abused.

Probably same reason you dont need to see video of the food in a restaurant or video of your room in a hotel.

Idk about that. If I could see in video that the dish waiters bring to table actually look like the pictures it would be more enticing. Also, just getting the vibe, feel, and size of a restaurant or hotel could have a big influence.

Video is not an improvement over text.

Thanks everyone - good feedback.

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