by Hannah Frishberg
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Category: Once
Slow Dating App Once Acquires Pickable
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Pickable: New Dating App That Emphasizes Women’s Privacy
LEAD – Apr 2 – Pickable is a new dating app where women do not have to register and create a profile. Founder Clémentine Lalande (also a co-CEO of French dating app Once) sees a great potential in her new concept, especially in Germany.
Q: Why do we need another dating app?
A: We need a new dating app because singles are tired of the swiping culture. Some users, mostly men, use bots to swipe right in order to get more matches. Women get too many messages at the best, investing too much lifetime.
Q: And in the worst case?
A: Aggressive messages or obscene pictures.
Q: What's Pickable doing differently than Tinder?
A: I chose a very radical approach and gave women 100% of control. They are completely anonymous and do not have to reveal any information. Women pick out the men on Pickable and decide for themselves what they want to share with them.
Q: Why do you see a great potential in Germany?
A: Our studies have shown that German women find swiping a lot more stressful than others. 25% of women feel uncomfortable, but in France or Italy, for example, only 10% of women feel uncomfortable about swiping. That's why I have high hopes for the German market.
Once Launched Once Again, a Dating App for Users 50+
LADN.EU – Apr 1 – Slow dating app Once is launching a new app for users in their 50s. The app is called Once Again. 88% of Once users who spend more than 30 minutes a day on the app are over 50 years old. The fifties also represents 34% of the user base of the app.
Dating App Once: “A Slower, Quality Over Quantity Approach to Dating”
THRIVE GLOBAL – Feb 22 – Jean Meyer is the CEO and founder of Once, a dating app that selects one match a day for its users, focusing on quality over quantity.
Q: What brought you to this specific career path?
A: I was studying at Columbia Business School in New York. Whilst there, I made a website 'Date My School' for people to connect from different schools. It was huge and I became a dating entrepreneur overnight! I decided to go back to Europe and focus on creating a new style of dating app.
Q: Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you?
A: When I was trying to raise money to launch Once, I got in touch with a private banker who had a wealthy client who was interested in investing in me. I went to Nice and took a cab to his property and ended up in a meeting with a mob guy! Another funny moment was right at the beginning of setting up my company, and I wanted to raise money. I only had two employees so I wanted us to look bigger than we were. I hired actors to look like my employees, so when investors visited the office we looked bigger. It worked.
Q: What do you think makes your company stand out?
A: Once champions slow dating. Once isn't a "swiping app with a marketing twist", it is different. You can have the best idea you want but you need the right people to make the idea a reality — ultimately, I have the best team around every day making Once a reality and grow.
Q: What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?
A: Ownership: give people ownership. Trust them and delegate tasks accordingly.
Q: How do you define "Leadership"?
A: Three words: sharing, trust and work.
Q: What advice would you give to other CEOs about the best way to manage a large team?
A: You can't manage more than five people. Create smaller teams within the company who have direct reports.
Q: What are your "5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became CEO" and why.
A: 1. It's going to be much, much harder than you think.
2. Be careful with who you bet with.
3. Take the time you need to hire your team, especially the first person.
4. Do first and think after; try lots of things and make mistakes. This is how you learn.
5. Work more.
Q: Can you give us your favorite "Life Lesson Quote"?
A: J F Kennedy, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." I love this quote because the harder the problem, the less competition there is!
by Fotis Georgiadis
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What Will Online Dating Be Like in 2030?
MASHABLE – Feb 14 – Online dating isn't going away any time soon. If anything, it's likely to become further integrated into even more people's lives. "Online daters are exhausted," said Dawoon Kang, co-founder and co-CEO of Coffee Meets Bagel. "Machine-learning and AI may be able to help. People, a lot of times, don't know what they want. Better machine-learning could tailor your matches to your actions, rather than your stated desires", Kang said. Loveflutter, a UK dating app, has AI that matches people based on personality traits it decodes from their tweets. It also plans to use AI to coach users through meeting offline after analyzing their chats. Jean Meyer, the founder and CEO of European dating app Once, doesn't think the dating industry will crack the AI code. "The optimum for a dating service is to show you profiles of people that might be good enough, but not perfection," Meyer said. Pheramor, DNA Romance, and Instant Chemistry all analyze users' DNA to make matches. Video will play a larger role in dating apps, execs said, but how, exactly, is still unclear. Virtual reality in dating apps will also take cultural change.
by Brittany Levine Beckman
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Why Millennials Are Burnt Out on Swipe-Based Dating Apps
MENSHEALTH – Feb 6 – Hinge's user base grew by 400% in 2017 after it eliminated its swiping feature. Once, a dating app that sends users one suggested match per day, reached 7M downloads last May. Still, swiping or not, some are giving up dating apps altogether, opting for offline dating and matchmaking services like Three Day Rule, which doubled its revenue in 2017, and now serves 10 cities in the U.S. "The online dating thing never came naturally to me. I found the experience quite overwhelming," says Tina Wilson, CEO and founder of the matchmaking app Wingman. "Trying to describe myself for a profile gave me anxiety." Eventually, Wilson's friends got involved. "They had way better insight into who I should be dating and loved to tell me so," she says. She realized her friends could play a vital role in helping her meet a compatible partner, so she created Wingman, an app that allows users' friends play matchmaker. Text-based apps are also on the rise. A spin-off of the popular Instagram account @_personals_, the Personals app will allow its lesbian, queer, transgender, and nonbinary users to post old-school personal ads.
by Sofia Barrett-Ibarria
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Once Founder: Slow Dating Could Be a Perfect Fit for USA
Dating App Once – Founding Story
LA DEPECHE – Dec 30 – Jean Meyer launched his dating app Once in 2015. It claims 2M users in France and 8M globally. "Our turnover in 2017 was 12M Eur, "says Jean Meyer. In 2011, during his years at Columbia University, he started a dating app for students, called "Date". "We were compared to Facebook; we even had an article in the New York Times. Then Tinder arrived and broke us down." While traveling in Korea, Jean discovers a new successful dating app that focused on the quality and not quantity of matches. Jean brought the recipe back in his luggage and launched a similar app in Europe with his team. Once is currently in 30 countries. The app is launching Once Places, which is a selection of romantic places proposed to users for their dates.
Slow Dating Is The French-Invented Hack
COSMOPOLITAN – Nov 5 – Dating app Once launched in France and recently made its way stateside. Instead of passively swiping through profiles, Once introduce each user to only one person, per day. If the users both like each other, they start a conversation and see where it leads. If not, they have to wait until the next day to meet someone new. But what if all potential matches are bad? Jean Meyer, CEO of Once, says making good matches is a concern, obviously, but he's more focused on cutting down absentminded app time. "Even if your match of the day is crap, it's okay," Meyer says. "Maybe you're not going to talk to that person, but at least you're going to put the app away, and you may even put your phone away and do something else with your day. You can put 100% into another task that's not swiping on ten-thousand profiles." The League, which only serves users a few matches per day, operates on a similar premise as Once. And when Hinge redesigned to eliminate swiping and force people to slow down a bit, users grew by more than 400%.
by Hannah Smothers
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