People falling out of love with dating apps has sparked local entrepreneurs to take on industry giants such as Tinder and Bumble with a mix of in-person dating events and more delicate tech.
Three million Australians are now, in one form or another, on dating apps, and since their launch just over a decade ago, the technology has redefined romance for an entire generation. It’s also built a global industry worth more than $US5 billion ($7.5 billion).
But app users, who typically spend 90 minutes a day swiping, are souring on the experience.
Customer numbers for the big dating app companies Match Group (owners of Tinder and Hinge) and Bumble have flat-lined or are falling.
In response to growing ambivalence to dating apps, Australian start-ups and event companies are coming up with ways to compete with the behemoths of online romance, which collectively now have 349 million users globally.
Charlotte Vieira and her co-founder, Kara Zervides, last year launched Humpday — named for its in-person events on Wednesdays, and the double entendre is designed to stick in the mind.
Tinder’s advent more than a decade ago, Vieira says, was revolutionary.
“Go onto your phone, swipe through hundreds of profiles and meet people who you otherwise wouldn’t have met at work, in a bar, at church, wherever.”
But the dating app companies took on a lot of venture capital money and had to earn it back. Quickly. “So the experience has become worse,” says Vieira.
In 2023, she and Zervides began their Sydney and Melbourne events for those wanting to ditch the apps, and this year added their own app, giving members one match a day — with whom they can chat online only on a Wednesday.
“We want to be the closest thing to meeting people organically, but we realise that can be limiting,” says Vieira, who hopes their mix of matching on an app and meeting in real life is powerful enough to capture 10 per cent of the dating app market within five years.
She believes having a natural way to meet “re-humanises people rather than endless swiping, where you have this idea there are limitless numbers of people and the grass is always greener.
We’re trying to reduce the number of choices.”
Also in the in-person business is CitySwoon, an events company that now views itself as much as a tech firm as a dating company. It runs more than 600 events in Melbourne, Sydney and other Australian capital cities each year.
Its web-based app prompts you to create a profile when you sign up for a dating night hosted at a venue.
In 2023, they convinced a touch over 20,000 to attend their events — double the numbers of 2022 when there was still COVID-19 wariness.
Singles who come to events are set up on a series of speed dates and then, once the date is done, they rate it.
“[We] can quantify chemistry — you might get a message from the dating apps asking if you met up with this person, but we know what happened,” says Chris Marnie, the company’s chief operating officer.
The person you’ve just had a speed date with is only told it’s a mutual match if you both rate each other positively.
If the vibe is negative, no one’s rating is shown to the other.
“If both give each other five stars, both get told,” says Marnie, who says over the years he has seen an increasing weariness with the dating apps.
Marnie says the mutual matching at his firm’s in-person events is at 85 per cent for at least one of those multiple dates people will go on.
This is vastly higher than on dating apps.
“Dating shouldn’t be a job; it shouldn’t be about setting aside two hours on a Saturday morning to swipe.”
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