In September, at a singles mini-golf event at Holey Moley in the Mission, Sydney Fergason, 34, met a “really cute” guy. “We really clicked … like, I would totally go out with him,” she said.
But Fergason, the founder of offline-dating company Locked Dating, was so busy hosting the event that she forgot to swap numbers. “I could pull his information off his membership form and reach out,” she said. “But that doesn’t feel right.”
Locked Dating, which soft-launched in October, was born from Fergason’s frustration with dating apps. Last January, she’d made a point of dating a person a week via Hinge, Bumble, and Raya. Her strategy was “to attack dating like a sales quota … till I met someone.” She wanted to meet matches in real life right away, before she got too invested over the phone, as it’s hard “to measure attraction over texts.”
She promptly got catfished. Flaked on. Ghosted. Love bombed. “It was a total train wreck,” she said. “It shouldn’t be this hard.” She figured there had to be a better way. So Fergason, who lives in Cole Valley, quit her job at a security services startup and doubled down on creating the kind of dating app she herself wanted to use. “I wanted to facilitate meet-cutes via shared experiences,” she said.
She got started by listing some tentative events on Eventbrite — a wings night, a singles hike — and posting a few Instagram ads. The interest blew her away. She got 500 sign-ups in two weeks. “My events are selling out,” she said. “They’re attracting people who are really interested in making in-person connections. Now it’s time to scale.” In the works: book clubs, group workouts, singles brunches.
But there was a catch to all this success: The single CEO starting these services has no time left to actually find her own special person. And she’s far from alone.
“I’m too busy working on Paloma to date right now,” said Luba Yudasina, a 30-year-old former opera singer, better known for documenting her coding life via Life of Luba on YouTube.
In October, Yudasina soft-launched Paloma, an Andreessen Horowitz venture-backed matchmaking platform, “for people who are relationship-ready,” via IRL single events in L.A. Her Bay Area cohort has SF Date Week this November, which includes Reps and Romance at Barry’s Bootcamp and a singles murder mystery night.
Yudasina built Paloma with the features she personally wanted in a dating service. It vets people, checks their likes and dislikes, and has them weigh in on deal-breakers around marriage, children, and living “in sin.” This is so no-one gets matched with someone with different goals, she said. Paloma also asks people to upload photos of their exes, so as to “get a better idea of the type of people you find attractive.” There’s no swiping involved; Paloma texts users their match, and both users must thumbs up a profile to receive contact details. “That’s to save time and emotional energy,” she said.
Yudasina admits that dating is exceptionally hard in the Bay, citing a preponderance of time wasters, ghosters, and men who drone on about their startups or diet protocols. Even after Paloma’s launch, so far, that’s still the case. Though she has met a lot of great guys at Paloma’s single outreach events, she said, none of them has the potential to become anything more than her friend.
Ram Chirimunj, the 36-year-old, Richmond-based co-founder of the matchmaking dating app Arrange, likewise felt dating apps had failed him. “I needed to create something that solved the problem for me,” said Chirimunj. In March, he quit working at Fizz, a college social networking app, to develop Arrange, currently in beta. He’d love to meet the right person, but Arrange is a big project, he said, hence why he’s “not actively dating.”
Arrange provides a twist on the traditional “swipe and like” — once users have matched, it’s up to their nominated friends to decide if the two should meet IRL. The friends, or “scouts” as Chirimunj calls them, text each other and make the final matchup call. “They can reject it if they see any red flags,” he said. “My prior relationships were all created by a friend’s introduction, and I’m interested in bringing that concept into an app.”
The trusted friend approach is itself having a moment: There are now Bay Area Vouched Dating Facebook groups as well as novel approaches such as the Bookbear Express Matchmaking experiment, courtesy of Ava Huang, a 27-year-old relationship blogger, which matches singles via psychological profile, sans photos.
Other recent dating startups include Luuvly, described as “Not your parents’ speed dating,” which provides host-free dating events, where the call to “switch your seat” is communicated via text message; Thursday, a platform which only works on Thursday; and Chemeya dating, which provides immersive “speed dating popups” and has a “Love Is Blind” event in the works
But even as matches get made using their services, founders might find themselves helping everyone but themselves. Locked founder Fergason has still not met any matches at her events. She tells Locked attendees she’s single, but says she rarely gets hit on; guys view her as matchmaker, not love interest. They ask her to introduce them to other girls. Plus, does she even have time to date when she’s getting the company off the ground?
But there’s hope. Recently, she had an IRL meet-cute in the dog park. “I met a guy … he’s out of my age range so would have been filtered out by the apps,” she said. “It’s only been a few weeks of dating, but it’s fun.”