My working theory is on a dating app woman have unlimited access, so tend to go torwards the top 99.9% of men.
Solution: Shadow ban hyper attractive people.
Solution 2: Only show people a similar level of attractiveness as yourself.
Much more likely you don't put enough effort into your profile or you have something on, that is a red flag for most women.
I disagree with that the top man can not date more than a few.
A single woman needs a romantic partner let's say ever three months, a man can have one every day. We see this in gay men having 500+ average sexual partners. Gay men can have sex as much as they want, because of access.
Top 0.1% of men can also have sex when ever they want, they are getting constant matches with 6,7,8 level woman. Well below their level, because its easier to get people below your level into bed without courting.
They have sex, he doesn't call her back, she is mad at men for another three months.
A few men can soak up all of the above average woman, considering they are on a bell curve and are rare them self. Only a subset of people are even on these dating apps.
Average looking people don't have this problem, because they are happy with matching other average woman who the top men are not interested in.
Summary: top men can date below their own level because a 7 woman, three below them is still very beautiful. But a 7 man can't date three below their own level because a 4 is not attractive and not worth the time using a app for.
I'm pointing out that the causal relationship the poster is making might be wrong. The issue could be the behavior if the poster, not some systemic issue with women.
Couple that with trying to predict likely matches and weight towards showing profiles which are likely to match and you would likely approach solution 2 without explicitly focusing only on attractiveness.
But at the same time you'll have killed a major revenue driver for a lot of dating sites: frustration over few matches.
I think trying to move away from images is a good idea, so people can showcase their worth to better compete with the physical gifted people who benefit from images.
I thought of a idea where you have to have a reel 10second video showcasing 5 traits
Let's say, you see the list of options and choose
Cooking Humour Adventure Intellect Strength
Say those are your traits, your reel will show case them. With the aim of creating relationships rather than hook ups.
The typical user stays only for weeks or months at a time. Many users come back rarely enough that e.g. Bumble offers a lifetime premium membership for less than it costs you to renew their quarterly membership a third time ($149 for the lifetime membership I think), which should tell you something about how long they expect even the most committed users to hang around.
Which makes sense. After all, if they do their job, you'll meet someone and not need the app any more, and if they do nothing for you, you'll get tired of them and disappear eventually. Only a very narrow subset of users use the non-hookup focused sites for very long.
The challenge then is that this puts a very severe ceiling on your customer acquisition cost. Who knows what their average lifetime value of a user is, but it's going to be a small fraction of that $149 lifetime membership, with most users never paying anything at all.
If you can make one that is good enough that you don't need to advertise much, you might have a chance, but it's a very tough, very crowded market (for every Tinder and Bumble, there's are hundreds of dating sites which nobody remembers).