Blendr is the most high-profile of a series of new location-based dating apps for straight people. It was created by the same folks who made Grindr, the hookup app that’s become ubiquitous in the gay community. In June, Grindr announced it now has four and a half million users (six hundred thousand of them in the U.S.), and that they spend an average of ninety minutes browsing every single day. Contrast Grindr’s success with that of Blendr: the founders weren’t willing to disclose the number of users, opting instead to send me an anodyne statement that they “are thrilled with the pace of Blendr’s growth,” which, they say, “was faster in the first six months of launch than Grindr’s adoption rate during its first six months.” The company declined to say how many of those users are actually, well, using the app. If my own reaction is any indication, it’s no wonder. After my initial session, I only opened the app to show it to friends, scrolling through pages and pages of unappealing men in what resembled a masochistic digital-age performance-art piece titled “Why I’m Single.”
In truth, though, I tried Blendr not to find love, but at the behest of a bevy of Web developers. Around the time that Blendr launched in September, 2011, I wrote a short article declaring that the app was destined to fail. I argued that it didn’t take seriously the concerns of women—safety, proximity, control—even though the founder Joel Simkhai told GQ, “As a gay man, I probably understand straight women more than straight guys do.” Yeah, but probably not enough. Since airing my skepticism, I’ve received an e-mail or Facebook message every couple of months from a male entrepreneur who wants to pick my brain about how to make a location-based dating app appeal to women. “Blendr is generally useless, and there is a huge, untapped market for a hookup app for straights (or everyone other than gay men, really),” one of them wrote to me. “Attitudes towards sex have shifted massively in the past decade or so, not just amongst young people.”
And not just among men. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the founders of every major dating start-up. From the Web-based heavy hitters like OkCupid, eHarmony, and Plenty of Fish on down to newer apps like Skout, How About We, and MeetMoi, they’re all developed by men. This might not seem like a big deal, until you consider one read on why Grindr has been so successful: the app has a “for us by us” appeal to gay men. But when it comes to heterosexual-dating technology, all-male co-founders represent the wants and needs of only half of their target audience. Sure, they can try to focus-group their way out of the problem, but if an app for “straight” people is to get anywhere close to Grindr’s level of success, women have to not just join out of curiosity. They have to actually use it.
by Ann Friedman, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration by Istvan Banyai
