I am currently part of an incubator program that is meant to bring promising startups together with venture capital investors. In order to appeal to a VC fund, you need to demonstrate that your company could become a multi-billion dollar business. This pushes me to think very hard about how NoGame could scale into a mass market rather than just serving a small niche as it has until now.

Clearly the problem that NoGame addresses – helping romantic and sexual partners find each other – is omnipresent and eternal. The search for desirable mates is a biological constant: it will always be and has always been a fundamental force in the human species. In recent decades, online dating has become a common instrument to facilitate this matching process. In the following essay I attempt to logically derive why I think that online dating is not the ultimate solution and will never fully replace offline partner search. On the contrary, my analysis predicts that there will be a growing need for solutions that help people (re)learn the skills needed for offline modes of dating.

The essay is based on publicly available survey data and on my own user research conducted over the past months mainly in the form of user interviews. I am also using a startup framework I recently learned which consists of 3 building blocks: insights, beliefs and hunches. Insights are relevant empirical facts that are not obvious. Beliefs are hypotheses that the startup is based on that are not (yet) empirically validated. And lastly, hunches are things one could do to test and validate those hypotheses in order to move closer to a successful product.

Insights

Insight #1

Most people don’t like dating apps and only keep using them because they think there is no other option to meet a large variety of compatible partners.

Dating apps come with many problems that don’t need to be explained here because everyone is familiar with them. As a result, 3 out of 4 singles say they would prefer to first meet their romantic and sexual partners in the real world rather than online.¹ 45% of users report being frustrated with dating apps and 90% do not end up finding a committed partnership². My user interviews indicate that there is just one reason that these people are still using dating apps: They think that it is the only way to meet a lot of compatible singles. Their friend circles are too small or closed off and they don’t think it’s feasible nowadays to meet the right one randomly in the real-world.

Insight #2

Online dating emphasizes superficial criteria, especially physical looks. Combined with the fact that women are more selective than men, this means that average and below average looking men hardly get any matches and dates.

The reality of dating looks very different for men and women. On dating apps these differences are especially pronounced and become clearly quantifiable: Men are less selective and send likes to a broad spectrum of women, while women tend to only swipe right on the men that appear extremely attractive.³ In online dating, this attractiveness is judged mainly on the basis of one’s picture.⁴ Hence, guys who don’t look very good on photos or who suffer from racial bias⁵ fare badly on dating apps. They end up lowering their standards, pimping their profiles with misleading information or outright lies, and paying money to tweak the algorithm in their favour. If none of that works they often end up being resentful and misogynistic with all the problems this poses to the rest of society.

Insight #3

The costs and benefits of approaching attractive strangers randomly in the real world are hugely misestimated by most people. Meeting new people in real life is far less costly and much more rewarding than it appears.

When asked about alternatives to online dating, only 3 of my 20 interview respondents stated that they had ever intentionally and consciously approached an attractive stranger in a public space. The main reasons for this were the perceived risk of getting rejected and the feeling that it would be disrespectful towards the other person. The insight that I personally have from years of experience is that these two factors can be mitigated by developing a particular set of social skills: You can overcome your fear of rejection and you can also learn to start romantic interactions in a way that is extremely respectful. When you have developed that kind of social confidence, the people you approach tend to appreciate your attention and see it as a pleasant compliment regardless of whether they reciprocate your interest or not.

The women I talked to during my user interviews confirmed this view:⁶ They all welcome real-world approaches from men, as long as they are done in a respectful and tactful way. All these women agreed that being talked to by a man in a confident and polite manner is not creepy. Being stared at, cat called or followed is.

Beliefs

Belief #1

People who do not succeed at online dating would be better off learning to meet people in the real world.

The average online dater spends 80 minutes swiping each day.⁷ I believe that this time could be better utilised by going out to social venues and meeting people in real life. There are plenty of localities where strangers can meet, some of which are specifically designed for this purpose. City dwellers have the chance to meet attractive strangers every day on their way to work or on a walk around their neighbourhood. If they knew how to start conversations with those strangers, 80 minutes of socialising would get them a lot more dates than they are currently getting online. And the quality of those dates would be far superior because they would be based on a real-world impression rather than just a photo and some text. This is particularly relevant for men who don’t look good in pictures: in a real-world interaction they can easily display their personality traits to compensate for their below average looks. There are just many more relevant dimensions along which women can judge the quality of a potential partner if they meet in person.⁸ 

Belief #2

The main reason that offline dating is not common is that it is immediately associated with misogyny and pickup artists. This association is an outdated stigma. It can and should be dismantled.

When I tell people that they can approach and get to know attractive strangers randomly in the real world they usually react with skepticism. It’s something most people don’t believe is possible except with manipulative pickup artist techniques. This is a huge misconception. Chatting up an attractive stranger at the bar does not turn you into a pickup artist. It just means you are a social person and have a natural sex drive. That said, there are of course many unethical and toxic ways of conducting real-world interactions.⁹ These toxic methods get a lot of attention and rightly provoke social outcry. This makes it hard to find good guidance in this area without getting drawn into the shady and shameful corners of the internet. If ethical and healthy methods to learn offline dating were more accessible there would be much more demand for them.

Belief #3

The world is moving towards more conscious, intentional and mindful dating.

I believe that as humanity progresses we become more conscious and intentional about all areas of life. Science continually demystifies complex forces that were previously beyond human understanding and left to the realms of superstition or religion. The process of falling in love is one of these seemingly mysterious mechanisms that is increasingly being understood. As a consequence, people are starting to think about their romantic lives more rationally instead of just letting love “happen” without thought and preparation. Soon we will come to realise that finding love is essentially a business problem that can be analysed and solved optimally. One sign of this trend is that we are seeing people date casually for increasing amounts of time to gather information and gauge compatibility before settling down and getting married. Another way this trend reveals itself is the decline of arranged marriage in developing countries. And lastly, as we move forward I also believe that people will want to depend less on alcohol and other consciousness-decreasing drugs to help them find compatible partners. Drugs make it easier for us to connect but they also obscure our judgment and can lead us into relationships we shouldn’t have started in the first place. Who you spend your life with is a major determinant of your personal happiness. People will want to make this decision for themselves, with full awareness and with the best available instruments.

Hunches

If the above beliefs and hypotheses about the future turn out to be true, we will see a major shift towards intentional offline dating during the coming years. There are three broad avenues along which businesses could exploit and shape this emerging market:

Hunch #1: Onboarding

Offline dating has become so uncommon that it requires a major effort to get someone give it a try. For most young people walking up to a stranger in the real world and expressing romantic interest sounds like a crazy idea – they cannot imagine themselves doing it and so they will never get to correct their misestimation about costs and benefits from insight #3. A worthwhile business undertaking would be to make that transition as smooth as possible. This would mean developing exercises and processes that slowly get people used to romantic real-world encounters and increase the challenge along with the acquired skill level.

Hunch #2: Community

Offline dating as opposed to online dating is inherently social. When you go to a bar or club you usually go with friends and it helps immensely when these friends are aware of and help you in your quest to meet interesting strangers during the night. As an offline dater you will experience rejection more often and you will experience it more vividly than online. These negative experiences can discourage beginners from learning the necessary social skills. A community of wingmen or wingwomen is the most effective motivation to keep going even when one feels disheartened by an initial lack of results. Businesses can help create and coordinate these kinds of communities.

Hunch #3: Guidance

Offline dating can easily become toxic and there are already many companies and coaches in the space who promote highly questionable methods. Any business with mass appeal will have to destigmatize the positive aspects of offline dating, while carefully isolating and counteracting the negative tendencies. Respectful, ethical and consensual behaviour needs to be encoded in its very DNA. If there was a method for people to learn how to meet strangers in a way that cannot possibly be conceived as unethical or creepy, it could enter the mass market and move humanity forward.

As we have seen now, all three avenues could inspire a variety of products. We are already seeing many businesses emerge in the space but most of them are not scalable because they require significant input from real humans (e.g. coaching businesses). However, as with all services we will increasingly systemise and automate them to ensure that repetitive and purely logical tasks can be taken over by software. Using the leverage of technology, offline partner search could be disrupted and turned into a vast market that accommodates several big businesses.

Conclusion

I am not yet sure what NoGame will end up being exactly and in all honesty I cannot say if it will ever be a billion dollar company. But if you agree with the main points of this essay, you should be able to see a huge market emerge on the global horizon that is largely untapped. We are currently at a turning point where the drawbacks of online dating are becoming blatantly obvious to every educated observer. There will be a need for innovative alternatives and technology-enabled offline dating is the most promising candidate. NoGame is proud to pioneer this market.

Footnotes

1. Survey by Inner Circle
2. Survey by Pew Research Center
3. This inequality was most powerfully demonstrated by a data engineer at Hinge who calculated the Gini coefficient for the distribution of likes among men and women in their data
4. The rest of the profile doesn’t seem to matter that much according to research from OkCupid
5. Again OkCupid’s data gives us a nuanced picture of racial preferences on the dating market
6. Only the women and the one homosexual male in my sample could talk about what it feels like to be approached. None of the heterosexual men said that they ever got approached with a romantic intent by an unknown woman in public.
7. The dating app badoo measured this for its UK users and published the results.
8. This idea is also demonstrated powerfully by OkCupid’s ‚Love is blind‘ experiment.
9. … just like there are unethical and toxic ways of conducting an online romantic interaction. As often on the internet, the most extreme manifestations get all the attention. With online dating it’s just harder to point the finger at someone because the toxicity is spread across the whole population and happens from behind the veil of virtual online avatars.