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tibastral2 | 9 months ago

Let's pretend you have good dating apps and bad dating apps at the time T. As soon as you find love on a dating app, they "lose" you as a user, you stop paying your monthly fee, and you leave the app. So I have a theory about dating apps. They give you somebody average, somebody that you could like enough, but not for too long, because YOU NEED TO COME BACK TO THE APP for them to succeed. So only the bad dating apps darwinely are being used more and more by people. They have more and more profiles (who doesn't find love).

It's called retention my friend, and it's the key metric for apps.

discuss

thorncorona|9 months ago

Or put the other way, only users which do not succeed at finding someone will stay long enough to grow the user base enough for the app to spread.

JohnBooty|9 months ago

(FWIW, I used to run a very small/niche, mildly profitable social/dating thing.)

    As soon as you find love on a dating app, they 
    "lose" you as a user, you stop paying your monthly fee

I think this is clearly true for a lot of business models, but I really don't think this is as true for a dating app.

As a business, you are competing against an endless array of other options. How many dating apps are there? A billion? If people don't like the matches you're serving up, they'll try one of the other options... not just hang around your app endlessly, hoping it improves.