
Show HN: Early version of a Speed Dating Community - johnnyb00y
https://fast-bayou-74365.herokuapp.com
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456hdsaq234g
Folks are getting laid for free via Tinder and others. Why would anyone pay
$10/month for a smaller pool of candidates?

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tome
Maybe not everyone wants to get laid.

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luckman212
Maybe, but anyone who would elect to use a "speed dating" app probably does.

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chongli
The point of speed dating is to meet a lot of people quickly in the hope that
you'll find someone who has chemistry with you. It's about personality, not
sex.

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personlurking
Here's my idea for an AI-based speed dating site/app. You fill in the basics
(about you and your preferences), plus 5 things that are important to you in
life, plus 1-2 things you want to absolutely avoid (ex, smokers), your
availability and that's it.

In the background, the AI matches you and sets you up for a quick coffee date
at a location that's not far from either person. Twist: every single person
actively looking for a relationship in each particular city must be on the
site (aside from self-reporting, I haven't figured out how this will be done).

Essentially, you don't peruse the app, you just receive when & where
notifications and then go have a 5-minute coffee to see if you have chemistry,
which no current app can actually tell you.

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InitialLastName
That leaves you essentially only dating people who are within ~10 minutes of
you at some point. Anything more would be a big time sacrifice- a 5 minute
coffee turns into 15 minutes with a 5 minute commute. If that person ghosts
(as online daters will know happens ALL THE TIME) or is suddenly unavailable,
or 5 minutes late or whatever, you're wasting extra time on someone you've
never met and might never met.

As an example, I haven't been actively dating in a bit, but when I last was it
was in a big city with lots of public transit, and my radius was ~10 miles. If
I started talking to someone I liked it was no problem for us to work out a
time to meet, but I was constantly interacting with people who were never
within "random meetup" distance of me.

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chongli
_If that person ghosts_

To get around the ghosting problem you could use GPS to see if the person is
actually where they're supposed to be for the speed date. Essentially, people
would get a notification when >x people are available in the area and they
could go to a coffee shop and flip a toggle which instructs the app to start
sending people to speed date them. If they leave the coffee shop or turn off
their phone or anything else then the app would toggle off their availability
and stop sending dates.

It could be similar to the way Uber manages driver availability in an area.
Except instead of sending you fares, it sends dates.

The beauty of a system like this is that you could go to a coffee shop and
read or do work on your laptop and toggle on your availability. If people
don't show up to date you it doesn't matter because you're not wasting time
anyway.

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personlurking
Nice pivot.

I'm imagining a toggle to alter your visibility too, between showing your
general location within a venue, to something more playful (I'm wearing a
green shirt, when there are two others in the room with green shirts), or even
just 100% visible (here's my picture, I'm sitting exactly here).

Though, I'm now reminded of two r/dataisbeautiful posts [1,2], where - despite
both having faulty graphs - the OP shows how s/he got the most dates when the
women messaged first. Meaning, this imaginary app we're discussing might have
a ton of guys bombarding female users, if it weren't for the AI being
involved, as it will be the one matching nearby suitors for you. A search of
'dating' in the subreddit shows a lot more results.

1 -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7oqygb/my_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7oqygb/my_500_days_on_okcupid_oc/)

2 -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7p73ch/my_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7p73ch/my_180_days_of_lesbian_online_dating_oc/)

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chongli
_might have a ton of guys bombarding female users_

Then perhaps the solution is to make guys be the ones to sit in the coffee
shop and have the women decide who they want to drop in on.

The really beautiful thing about this is that the woman could see the guy and
decide whether she thought it was safe to approach him or not without him even
knowing she's there. She could just use the bathroom or buy a coffee and leave
or anything else, just like any other customer.

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personlurking
Although this is why I continued that statement with "if it weren't for the AI
being involved, as it will be the one matching nearby suitors for you."

Meaning no bombardment will be allowed cause the users (neither male nor
female) won't be the ones sending first contact.

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dido2k
I want to login with my own email and pass. Login with FB and/or Linked In is
not an option for me.

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johnnyb00y
I dislike social profiles like the next person and would like a better way of
verifying...

I just had an idea whilst thinking about how I was going to respond to this --
perhaps I could do e-mail signup but instead verify the user through the
clearbit/fullcontact api. Need to look into that

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Rjevski
How is a Facebook or LinkedIn account considered “verification” when spammers
routinely use thousands of fake accounts to astroturf fraudulent pages & ads?
Surely this means any malicious actor targeting your platform can do the same.

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fsargent
The problem with dating isn't lack of meeting people, it's lack of heuristics.
Speed dating just makes it faster to judge, but it doesn't actually do any
work for you. One of the big benefits to OkCupid is that the heuristics are
relatively good. Improve on that, and you're golden.

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draugadrotten
one of the problems with good heuristics is that almost all the desire is sent
towards the 9's and 10's. Yet obviously most of the site users are 8 or less.
So the 9-10s gets swamped, and leave early. The remaining users gets bored
because nobody replies.

The problem here is not that heuristics of finding "your best match" is bad.
It is quite easy to figure out who is attractive and matches you. The problem
is that most people wants to trade up, and few people (on dating sites) have
the desire to end up with someone their own score. Fewer yet wants to date
someone less attractive. Hence the dating market ends up being a sort
mechanism which works poorly because none of the sorted numbers wants to be
where they are.

OkCupid had some great blog articles about the statistics behind this
unbalanced matching phenomenon. Read them.

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charlesdm
Not the dating market, just the online dating market

People date up and down all the time, and attraction isn't just limited to
good looks. People are attracted to different things in an individual (good
looks, ability, wealth, intellect, power or status, etc) -- it's just that
those don't always show well on dating profiles. They are much easier to spot
in the real world.

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osrec
Interesting concept. How do you aim to verify people?

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johnnyb00y
Currently, * unless someone has a better idea * it would be through manually
checking any social profiles including git profiles. The aim is not to turn it
into a 'club' but just be selective enough that there are alot of like-minded
individuals.

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mxwsn
A comment on design: I'd recommend removing the large buttons for "How it
Works" and "Queue up" on the landing image and instead using some visual
indicator to scroll down. Scrolling down vs. clicking buttons (that just
automatically scroll you down) seems redundant to me.

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klez
I saw this trend recently on various websites. Maybe it's born out of
(unjustified?) fear that people don't scroll below the fold?

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johnnyb00y
Possibly unjustified fear, that is why the current website has it at the
moment...

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xor1
I really like this concept OP. I think your biggest non-technical hurdle is
going to be dealing with the classic issue of there simply being significantly
less women than men. I'm curious to know how you plan to approach that after
you introduce a proper business model.

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probablyfiction
Former speed dating entrepreneur here. In person, at least, women are much
more open to the idea of speed dating than men. Much of our marketing revolved
around how to appeal to and attract men to our events.

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xor1
Interesting, I'm curious to know what kind of speeddating events/services/apps
are out there. I've never used any.

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amelius
Sounds a bit like chat-roulette.

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Trufa
Yeah, the real effort is this site not changing into that.

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amelius
The problem is that it can become insincere very quickly.

Like when a group of people decides to have some fun by laughing at other
people who are hoping for a date. This could happen even on a "genuine"
account, because intentions of people can change. And people don't act the
same when alone versus with friends.

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gremlinsinc
Or pervs getting on naked, and totally not expecting it...

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foobaw
How about a company that facilitates physical speed dating meetings? That'd
target an older demographic.

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werber
The queue up button does nothing on my phone. iPhone x, 11.4 in Safari

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johnnyb00y
just fixed it, thanks for that!

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massens
Looks very cool! :)

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johnnyb00y
Much appreciated, thanks alot

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hidiegomariani
queue up does not work

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johnnyb00y
just fixed it, thanks for that!

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wangii
it's not going to fly. I think the problem of this kind of ideas is that
dating is actually a by product of social interactions, not suitable for
engineering.

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noso
It may not fly or it may rocket! Either way, encouragement costs nothing. I
wish them all the success. Good luck!

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johnnyb00y
Thanks!

