YALE.EDU – May 20 – Last spring, when college students found themselves isolated in quarantine, Ileana Valdez created a digital tool matching singles for blind dates or conversation. It quickly blew up into a full-fledged dating app, OKZoomer which was featured in Rolling Stone and other national media. It now has 30K registrants.
by LuAnn Bishop
See full article at Yale.edu
KENS5 – Aug 25 – "OkZoomer is a dating app for college students that was born because we were all kicked off of campuses back in March," said Ileana Valdez, creator of OkZoomer and senior at Yale University majoring in computer science. The dating app can also be used as a way to make new friends. New users need to verify they're a college student with school email. And they'll need to fill out a personality quiz. Then the algorithm does the work. So far, students from ~1,200 colleges around the world have signed up.
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS – June 28 – When Ileana Valdez, a junior at Yale University, found out she wouldn't be going back to campus after spring break due to the COVID-19 outbreak, she and her friends created a dating site, OKZoomer. The site matches subscribers based on personality; each person fills out a questionnaire and photos are not included. Every Saturday night they find out who their matches are. Then they go on Zoom dates. "We call it 'Zooking up,'" Valdez said. "They can only Zook up. They can't see each other in person. You have to have actual conversations."
ROLLINGSTONE – Mar 17 – Two Yale students saw that singles were being sent back to their hometowns, where dating pools are limited, so they created a solution – a dating site called OKZoomer. The website connects college students from 200 schools across the country for virtual Zoom dates. Currently, OKZoomer has garnered ~6K signups from students. Its growth is based almost entirely on word-of-mouth and posts on college meme pages.