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In a world redefined by convenience, LA's newest dating app, Whim, is bringing instant interactions to the dating world. CEO Eve Peters is bringing her experience from Match.com and OkCupid to create an app that allows singles to skip past the awkward small talk and go straight from online to offline. The catch? Users will enter the mobile site—soon-to-be app—looking for a date that same night.
The site aims to be instantaneous: after a quick sign up through Facebook, Whim immediately matches users for a date for that night, as long as the single mingler signs up by 4 p.m. that day. The platform, built with Ruby on Rails, uses a sophisticated algorithm to match users based on deal-breaker and bonus factors. It then spits back several options for a date, which the user has to narrow down to one. However, for a date to occur, the users must mutually choose each other.
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But Peters and her team, which includes Director of Marketing and Partnerships Katey Nilan and CTO Todd Blose, don't want unmatched users to go home alone that night. Instead, they take the dating experience a step further by working with bars and restaurants around the city to offer drink specials for the group of unmatched singles. In the two and a half weeks since their launch, Whim has seen over 250 users, and close to 50 users attended each of the first three group date nights, in addition to the one-on-one dates.
Since Whim's launch on June 26, the team has been able to look at increasing amounts of data to see where the match process might need to be changed. For instance, instead of just choosing 'yes' or 'no' for a possible match, the user might instead be asked how interested they would be, in order to downplay any pickiness factors.
As Whim expands its user base, Peters said she believes that there is no better way to improve than to constantly ask for feedback from users.
"The best way to grow," she says, "is to adapt as you go."
