I’ve been helping people write dating profiles and get better dates on dating apps for the last 20 years. Over that time, I’ve seen the highs and the lows of what goes on in the dating industry, and I’ve always tried to help my clients figure out how to avoid the traps companies lay out there to make dating harder, more time-consuming, and way more costly than it needs to be.
You may not know this, but parts of the dating industry are struggling a little bit right now. Online dating has become less popular for men and women between the age of 20-30. It makes sense. Most people in that age group have only ever used swipe apps like Tinder and Bumble . And, they can suck. They are exhausting time and money pits designed to keep you engaged and spending, not to help you meet someone.
A couple of months ago, I was asked to speak at the LTR conference, a conference for executives from the online dating industry where they take the temperature of the online dating world, network, and learn about what’s coming down the road. It turns out that I do something they rarely bother to do, talk to the people who actually use the dating apps. So, they ask me to tell them what I think is taking a lot of the fun out of online dating and how we can fix it, so people get better dates and companies can still make a profit.
One of the things I love about what I do is that I don’t work for the big dating sites. In fact, a lot of the time, it feels like I’m working against them. It isn’t my job to make large publicly traded corporations profitable. It is my job to help people get out of their own way, and successfully navigate the craziness of online dating so they can meet the kind of partners they could see themselves spending their life with. This was a great opportunity to tell them what they are doing wrong and how it is making online dating harder than it needs to be.
One of the biggest things I hit the executives with is just how much they’ve been disrespecting people by cutting back on customer service and filling apps with features that are more focused on squeezing every penny out of their members than helping them find great dates! This problem has been growing ever since the pandemic.
During the pandemic, online dating went through a mini golden age. It wasn’t that dating apps were getting better at matching compatible people, just that most people didn’t go out socially for two years. As a result, many turned to dating apps as a way to connect. As the pandemic started to recede and people started meeting in other ways than just online dating again, companies focused more on profit than quality. They figured they could absorb some of the shrinkage of their database if they could find a way to get each person to pay a little more for the experience. They added more paywalls and removed a lot of the customer support. The hardest hit areas were social discovery swipe apps like Tinder and Bumble. In an attempt to make up the difference on their balance sheet, they sucked the fun out of online dating.
All of this isn’t to make you think that I stood up in front of the online dating industry and gave them a sad talk about their end being nigh. Online dating is awesome. I met my wife online, and thousands of my clients have started relationships with men and women they’ve met on dating apps. I was even just talking to one of my clients this morning about how, after four dates with an amazing woman he met on Hinge, they’ve already started discussing taking things exclusive! Other than a storybook meet cute, or being set up by friends, online dating is the best way to meet someone.
So, while I absolutely told them everything they were doing wrong and all the ways they were failing the people who use their apps, I also showed them how they could better serve their members, based on their individual needs, in a way that would help them find love without the companies losing their shirts. Check out the whole talk below.
