Cuffed – A dating app with only one match at a time
cuffedapp.com
cuffedapp.com
For example, it assumes that you have an even balance of participants in your marketplace. If you have more men than women, you either need to give some men no matches on some days (which decreases engagement), or you need to give women multiple potential matches on some days. There are other ways you can handle this, but they have problems too.
Another potentially bigger issue is monetization. It is hard to monetize one match a day. But you can give people the option to have multiple matches a day if they pay for them, which is what CMB does. But then you should probably give people who were liked by a paid member at least one more match a day, which causes your original premise to break down.
Hinge severely limits the number of people you can like in a given day (unless you pay), and I think this works pretty well.
Dear Lord that must've been incredibly awkward at the dinner table that night?
I've often thought that dating apps should better explore the idea of making it mean something when someone expresses an interest, to show that the person taking that step is actually committed to the process of getting to know the person they have selected, and to prevent people wasting their time focusing on just the most superficially attractive people (who are probably inundated with options, or are catfishing anyway).
The way I imagined it was that your patience would be something like a currency, and the longer you are prepared to wait before contacting someone without contacting anyone else, the higher priority your profile should be for the matching algorithm.
I haven't thought through all the implications of this "market for attention", though, and I know that people could just use a different app if they were getting impatient. The other problem would be monetization, as you mention, but users could pay for the ability to send pictures in the app, and to be able to have the waiting days accumulate automatically, i.e. without having to log in each day (and watch an ad).
Which is why, IMO, the killer feature for dating apps would be one where everyone has to feature a video of themselves on their profile, like TikTok (there's one dating app that does exactly that, called Snack, but it never really took off and the network effect is crucial). You learn infinitely more about a person from a video than any amount of pictures can tell you. To a lesser degree, same with voice, which Hinge just added as an option.
In other words, if you agree that meeting someone in real life is the most accurate portrayal of them, then video is a much better proxy for that than just photos and text.
A video can show you how physically attractive some is, slightly better than a photo can (and you could hear if they have a beautiful or annoying voice, unless they're putting on a fake voice) but for personality you need to see how they react in different situations.
Even if you can infer things about their personality from the video, that doesn't tell you anything about their likes and dislikes, which can be useful for text-based filtering. Users could mention their likes and dislikes in their videos, but you'd end up having to watch hours of irrelevant footage just to find one match, which isn't a great UX, and is expensive for the site too.
You can determine a lot because what they decide to post/record says a LOT about them. Like, waaay more than just choosing whatever random photos of them.
Granted, I joined eHarmony and married a woman I met there.
Anyways...
The one-match-a-day thing was also a brilliant way for them to deal with the marketplace problem... you don't need to have 1000 males and 1000 females in a city to launch if they can only see one at a time.
That depends on the payment model, doesn't it? If it is set up in such a way that the app makes more money the longer people use it, that introduces a perverse incentive.
But what if, for example, people paid upfront for unlimited access to the service? Then the incentives of the app would be better aligned to the users: find them a good match quickly so that they won't come back in a long time, if ever.
That said, I am deeply grateful that I got married well before dating apps became popular. It would have been such a terrible experience for a nerd like me.
The only thing it should be incentivized to do it find you a great match. There is no real reason why it needs to be profitable.
One design decision they made, as opposed to Bumble or Tinder is there's no "swiping", you actually have to go into a profile and like something there. This means more people spend time on your profile, and the folks that actually have liked you back have taken more than just a cursory look at the profile.
It attracts a lot of people that really think the app will "solve" their dating journey, as if it is a journey compared occasional to skin entertainment. I will concede that the Terms of Service also are against hookups. I've had some great flings and hookups on Hinge. Its been the best dating app for me.
I would like an app that had a Hinge-like UX without the "long term relationship" sales pitch.
(of a similar theoretical caliber, I've tried Bumble, women do not initiate conversations with me. I'll get matched similarly to Hinge, but they just let the match expire and I cannot attempt a conversation there. The entire "women + initiate" in the same sentence is an oxymoron in my lived experience.)
I think limiting likes to even less than 7 like Hinge does is the way to go. Maybe 2-3 a day for men and 10+ for women. I think limiting matches is also a better way to go. I’ve seen the screens of many women and 50+ matches is normal. Whereas most men get 0-5 in their entire experience. It’s making it where most women are overwhelmed with options and won’t progress forward with any of them and use most for entertainment.
The other fun part of this is that most women on Hinge never even visit the discovery part where you like new people. Instead they just look at the people who have liked them and this takes up all their time. It would explain why most men get 0 likes in their entire Hinge experience. They always have to initiate. (Liking and messaging of course…)
I would think that making them pay for more than one match/day would simply make it a de-facto paid app and defeat the whole point of limited matches.
When you make a profile you get two accounts. One that shows only pictures, and another that only shows interest/text. There should be no way to infer one from the other without a “true match” as described below.
You match with peoples picture version and text versions separately and only when both dual matches complete mutually are you truly matched.
This in effect forces people to make themselves interesting enough without the crux that is photography but also presentable enough so that the natural superficial curiosities can be satisfied.
Assuming no one makes it I’ll probably make it at some point. The way monetization would work is by allowing you to rank people across attributes for both the picture profile and text profile. Paying users can be given information on this.
In addition paying users can be given a “second chance” where if your text profile receives a match but your picture profile doesn’t, you can ping the person anonymously in the future with a new set of pictures and speak with them again, but only after some cooldown period, say a week.
Obviously I’m biased but I think what I described is the solution to the problem that is modern online dating.
If the purpose is to create relationships then I believe people shouldn’t be able to match too many times without giving “chances”.
The app could facilitate this through ice breakers or perhaps embedded small games or showing a TikTok or other short video to facilitate conversation.
The problem is that modern apps make people do all the work, which is fine, but there are some who require a little push or something explicitly to discuss to get started.
Were they as generically sarcastic as Tinder's? "Going to the supermarket, want me to get you anything?"
The main difference is expectation, mainly.
“I’m the guy with 3 ducks” and in their profile pic in the background is an image of 3 ducks. Or something like that.
Could be too much effort for most to try workaround though.
Ah I can dream right? Haha
As long as you have trustees making decisions about staffing levels and remuneration (and they can't hire their friends or give themselves salaries), then there should be no incentive to raise the app's pricing or do anything else that would put off users.
I do have a novel app monetization strategy to suggest, though, which I've not seen anywhere. Imagine that the monthly costs for the servers and staff were published, along with the number of paying customers that month. There could then be a monthly reverse-lottery where N% of free accounts are chosen at random for deletion, with N being proportional to how much financial loss the app made that month (hopefully zero).
The only advantage to having a paid account would be that you are not subject to the lottery, and the only disadvantage to having your account deleted is that you have to reinstall the app and fill in your profile again. Hopefully that would provide enough incentive for people to do the right thing (combined with the fact that people should want to support the services they use, especially if they end up finding their soul mate through it).
It might take a while, but as long as it's possible for existing users to pay more, pressure will build up to convince them to do so. Whether because costs go up, usership goes down, or what. Any organization seeks to survive, and it will need money.
Your lottery is sufficiently weird that I can't say it's exactly what my proposal is designed to prevent, but it's definitely in the space of wacky things no one should have to worry about. Also I don't think you understand the level of investment that can go into a dating profile. Message history, for instance.
To the extent you do have trustees, I'm not sure it's wise to not pay them a salary. You don't really want to give power to people who will accept a power trip in lieu of money. Unless it's really easy for the community to replace them
Why stop with dating apps though?
In my large US city, even some of the big-name apps (like Coffee Meets Bagel and Match) had almost no active users.
I think it would only work if you tacked it onto an existing social network, like Instagram or TikTok, but you'd need the parent company's blessing (which almost certainly wouldn't happen).
But my guess... There's a disconnect between what the woman expect from me and what I do.
Further more I'm either a sports guy or a nerd. Not both, because that doesn't exists in their world yet.
(I have redacted a lot of things, but it's kinda difficult for me, I'm not talking about getting a match.) Hope I don't get downvoted.
You seem to be claiming that most women stereotype you (& poorly at that. What is this "their world" B.S.?) & that being interested depends on your job and/or hobbies.
That's bullshit.
Both my job & hobbies are boring & stereotypical, but I compensate for that by being interesting in the way I communicate (like actually listening to the woman I'm speaking with) & what I choose to discuss (hint: not my job or hobbies. Probably her job and/or hobbies/interests instead).
Emotionally unavailable people that think they just need to outsource the size of their dating pool? No app can fix that no matter what theme they do, because the size of the dating pool or their network isn't the only issue.
So, thats just an audience. Trying to match the superficial with the text. Why not just match the text and find out later. Instead of making the rejected person have a new set of pictures, a fun perk could be to show people how many 50%s they matched and rejected, and letting them revisit later or revealing who it was.
My comment might sound blunt but the reality of biology and how our brains are wired cannot be denied.
So in your example people will game their interests till they are matched with a picture they like.
As a thought exercise I wonder if there is a dating service for blind (since birth) people and how they choose their partners. Something tells me even they would go by voice rather than 'interests'.
Also (and sorry for so many questions I never met anyone blind from birth), do you feel more at peace than people with vision (anecdotally)? Because people can barely sit for 15 minutes in meditation and I always wondered what would not being aware of one sense completely felt like (not losing but never having).
I still think the idea is worth building, but it's also very easy to copy and the existing players could make it an optional mode in their apps or so and immediately have a big userbase.
Would you be interested in collaborating on a proof of concept?
A big problem with dating apps (particularly for women) is that users see so many potential matches that they don’t take anything seriously, imagine they’ve got more choice than they really do, and that if they hold out long enough something better will come along.
I’ve been thinking of how to engineer selection processes in ways that calibrate people better such as show people a block of ten items and let them pick the top three as opposed to rating things on a 1..10 scale or a swipe right/swipe left process.
I said this in another comment, but IMO, the reason people don't take anything seriously isn't because of the number of matches/potential matches. Rather, I think it's the resolution of information that a profile shows. A few pictures and some text is wildly low-resolution compared to even just an audio recording or video. I think requiring people to include one of the two (ideally a video) would be solve this problem once and for all and make dating apps infinitely better.
> the best way to proceed is to interview (or date) the first 36.8 percent of the candidates. Don't hire (or marry) any of them, but as soon as you meet a candidate who's better than the best of that first group — that's the one you choose!
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h...
The question becomes how many more dates or relationships will you have in your life? 36.8% of what?
More importantly, will my soulmate also be on that app? Better chance to find them on Tinder.
You could actually employ that strategy on Tinder, no need for a separate app. Allthough looking for a soulmate using optimal stopping does not seem like a good match, anyways.
What exactly qualifies as a rejection (is it a swipe left or a match + date + unmatch)? Thinking match + date + unmatch is the more reasonable application but difficult to enforce
Second I just don't agree that it's the right optimization function, IMO you should max E[quality of partner] rather than max Pr[ending up with best quality partner]
Honestly - it has no future unless you make this one way. (Only men can match with one woman at a time - maybe limit it to 5 for women or something)
First, it clears out the thousands of fake profiles using random pics found online. Voice recognition can easily flag any profiles that don't fit the pattern of "Hi, my name is... ".
Second, it fixes the problem of catfishing, where real people use fake photos, or usually the best photo of themselves ever taken when they were 21 years old, 20 years ago.
Finally, it's not long enough to embarrass yourself. If you've ever seen the video dating recordings from the 80s, you'll know what I'm talking about. Five seconds or so is just enough time to say hello and give a sense of who you are without being cringe.
The rest is just bog standard dating stuff. Ghosting is a real problem, but what are you going to do? I guess you could have some sort of point system...
Call the app "SixSeconds" (adjusting the record time accordingly). It's the perfect name! It has an alliteration, naturally shortened or nicknamed, and gives a double subtle reference to sex, which works perfectly. I can already see the logo in my head. It's a winner.
This conflates exclusivity, commitment and intimacy in a way that doesn't reflect my romantic and dating life, or the lives of a number of my friends. I can only imagine what other assumptions it makes.
It's okay that this isn't for me, there's honestly a lot of room for innovation in the dating app or socialization app space. I've yet to find an app I consider perfect, though there are definitely ones I'm using that are more niche, and better suited for me, than tinder/CMB/OkCupid.
I met my wife on Bumble, it has a bit of a swipe mechanic, but realistically my (now) wife was the only one (out of all the apps) who actually captured my attention and had interesting conversations with.
The conversation was interesting enough to draw me back from all the other conversations that were going nowhere.
I think the point of this app is to try and slow people down and try to spend a bit of time talking with people to get to know them; you've got a whole day to ask about interests, news, adventures, plans, history, etc. rather than "your pickup line wasn't witty enough, next!" or "lets trade witty remarks to each other for the next week, have sex, and never see each other again"
(although arguably you don't want to match with that sort of person. so maybe the real benefit is that they would be filtered out by this app?)
sorta letting people know that they're more than just a profile picture?
Though now I'm trying to think of dating apps that just wouldn't work. Cuffed could totally be the name of a dating app for people on house arrest or out on bail.
It's bad for men who already get ~0 matches unless you're in the top few % of men. It's bad for women who get a lot out of the massive selection options (why limit themselves to one? no benefit to them). The issue with dating sites is men are a commodity and women have too many options and that commoditization of men causes problems. Artificially limiting to one doesn't fix this though because the other apps still exist, you can't enforce a true limit when one doesn't exist (and can't exist given how mate selection works in people anyway, women will always be mostly choosing among many options and men have to pursue).
It's a little better based on region, but if you're not in the top few % of men (particularly if you're in a skewed area like the bay area) dating websites are not in your best interest. We're more similar to gorillas than people think.
I don't think this is an issue that can be solved via dating sites. Men will always have to adapt to meet their particular strengths in order to succeed and for that vast majority of us this means eschewing dating apps. Basically learning the human male variant of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX40mBb8bkU
The naive appeal of dating apps for men is obvious, it's really hard to meet single women randomly and showing interest correctly is complicated. The barrier seems lower with apps (but mostly isn't), people deeply desire a mate, but I think the lower barrier of apps is mostly an illusion for the vast majority of men who will get very few matches, even then there's no real replacement for improving social skills through the difficulty of actual practice and attempts (which apps don't help much with given effort to match ratio, effort to actual date ratio is even worse). The actual effort required I'd argue is higher in the end and you end up feeling worse about yourself because your value among other dating site men really is close to zero (a commodity).
I think for women the apps can be useful because you can set a date every week (or even more frequently) and there's a lot of benefit to this in practicing, getting a sense of what you like (or even just feeling good about yourself/desirable with hundreds of matches). Sure many dates are bad, but just getting this kind of at-bat practice is useful. This doesn't contradict the previous paragraph because most of these dates are with the same top few % of men that do well with apps.
Obviously the above applies to heterosexual matching, other types are different.
Personally I'm so glad to be out of the game. To other men still in it, I'd at least say it does get easier as you get older. If you're 22 and miserable, it'll be way easier at 27+ (I suspect largely because young men have low status, women tend not to want to date younger, etc.)
This doesn't seem to help relationship-building (and strength training!), which seems to me to be the problem most of my friends (ok, and I) face.
CMB limits you to a few ‘swipes’ per day. To its credit, that keeps it from being an addictive app, but I’ve also had maybe 5 conversations and never a date from it. Tinder on the other hand has allowed me to have all kinds of regrettable experiences.