It’s always exciting when a new dating app starts to make its mark on the scene. One such dating app is SOON, that recently launched in the Bay Area with some impressive numbers. In today’s interview, our Matt Seymour took the time to sit down with Cora Kyler, the cofounder and CEO of the SOON dating app. The two discussed the challenges that come with launching a new dating app, how SOON is different, how SOON stacks up against the other apps out there, and what we can expect in the future from the brand.
Below, you’ll find a video of the complete interview as well as a transcript if you prefer to read the interaction.
Full SOON Dating App Interview Transcript
Matt Seymour:
Hi everybody, this is Matt from Healthy Framework. Today I’m very excited to be joined by Cora Kyler, the co-founder and CEO of SOON. Cora, thank you so much for joining.
Cora Kyler:
Thanks so much for having me. I super appreciate it.
Matt Seymour:
Sure thing. Hey, let’s jump right into it. Can you tell me what separates SOON from the rest of the dating apps that are out there?
Cora Kyler:
Yeah, totally. Our core intervention is that the first message on SOON is an invitation to meet up for a low stakes date on a spot from our list. So we really solve that match to meet drop-off, and yeah, that’s the whole value proposition of SOON at this stage.
Matt Seymour:
Love it. Excellent. And can you describe a little bit who the ideal customer is that SOON is designed for there?
Cora Kyler:
Totally. Yeah. So we launched this spring, so we’re relatively fresh out the gate, and we are by request access only in San Francisco. So the age group that we really serve is this 23 to 34. So naturally, single, dating, out of college usually.
And then I’d say the sort of characteristics that really speak to that early target audience is they’re curious, they’re bold, they’re interesting. If anything, they’re excited to get in front of someone and see where it goes.
So yeah. And I think even as we’ve tailored SOON out the gate to this kind of specific audience, as we’ve grown even this summer, that experience scales really nicely because it just speaks to a pain point that everyone’s feeling. I mean, dating apps have eclipsed all other ways of meeting a partner in the US in particular.
And although the data leaves a lot to be desired, we estimate on Tinder one in 57 matches result on a date. And on SOON, although there’s a ton of confounding factors as to why SOON is working, that one in four matches result in a date in the first 10 days.
Matt Seymour:
Wow.
Cora Kyler:
So we’re super excited about the progress that we’ve made so far.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah. Excellent. And kind of speaking or piggybacking off of that a little bit, in terms of growth, we’ve heard that one of the most challenging things when starting a new dating app is getting new members. How is your team finding success here and what have some of those challenges been?
Cora Kyler:
Yeah. Well, actually it’s kind of a blessing in disguise in that both my co-founder, Alena, and I, we’re formerly graduate students and so we don’t have a lot of experience with scaling or really even working on anything that’s consumer-facing.
And so we just started doing things that would land with us. So we started interviewing people in Dolores Park, which is a sort of quintessential spot in San Francisco, and making those into short form videos that took off on TikTok and Instagram. We started organizing group blind dates, so we wanted to also give our users another way to date outside of that dyadic structure that is quintessential to all other platforms.
And the whole thing really, it’s of course been… Growth is a difficult thing to hack, and there are problems of course with going for a really tightly-defined initial cohort, but it hasn’t meant that we’ve grown only from organic content and word of mouth.
And yeah, I’d say the reason for that is just because we have a lot of intuitions around what kind of product we would want to use and what kind of content and sort of offerings that would speak to us and get us to download an app. Because frankly, if I saw an ad for a dating app, I wouldn’t download it. But if I knew a little bit more and understood that this is about dating offline, about more conscious connections, then totally that would speak to me and-
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, no, that’s a brilliant way to take it on.
Cora Kyler:
… just kind of run with it. Yeah.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah.
Cora Kyler:
Totally.
Matt Seymour:
I love it. Outside of that challenge of finding new members, are there any other challenges of a new dating app that you’re dealing with, and how are you meeting those challenges?
Cora Kyler:
Yes. So for starters, so other consumer apps of course, they don’t need a large and coherent network capture. So I don’t know, if you make a calendar app, anyone can use it around the globe and that’s awesome. Not the case for dating. Your core focus is getting people on and then getting them a result, like a high quality match and a date in haste.
So we have had to think a lot about how to structure growth in unison with ensuring that every single person has a really wonderful experience. And that has been the largest challenge, but the most rewarding thing to solve.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah.
Cora Kyler:
So yeah.
Matt Seymour:
No, that makes sense. I like it. Obviously you guys are newer, but is there one area that you could identify that SOON could be doing a better job on at this point?
Cora Kyler:
So what we have found as we’ve opened SOON up to sort of a larger network is that… And this has been enshrined in the cultural imagination that men in particular don’t get. There’s a cohort of men who do really, really well, and then anyone below, let’s for the sake of conversation, this top decile is kind of like a voyeur. They’re using the platform but they’re not getting matches or dates. And while we haven’t inherited these problems, we’re starting to see foundationally why that’s the case.
And our hypothesis is not that stable matching isn’t possible, but rather it is in fact a cultural problem with respect to men don’t have high quality or really flattering photos that are tailored to the female gaze, whereas women totally have those because they’re far more used to being reduced to images in short form.
Matt Seymour:
Right. Right.
Cora Kyler:
Yeah. And so our new way of going about, because we’re early stage, we can experiment a lot, which is a massive blessing, is that we are starting to do what Airbnb did, which is if we think that you have a profile that just doesn’t represent you in the best possible light, we step in and we offer to take your photo for you.
Matt Seymour:
Nice.
Cora Kyler:
So that’s kind of this new version of SOON where we didn’t focus a ton on innovating on the profile itself, which was a sort of gross miscalculation, because that’s all people are going off of in order to match.
So yeah, I’m super excited about this new, not necessarily change in direction, but making sure that we do really focus on that quality profile. And it happens to be men in particular don’t have those resources to lift themselves up from the situation, then we step in and we do that and then, so.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, that’s great.
Cora Kyler:
Yeah.
Matt Seymour:
You’re doing a good job kind of teeing up everything for me because that leads right into our next question.
Cora Kyler:
Awesome.
Matt Seymour:
Because you touched on this one, but are there any other new features or changes users can expect to see in the coming months of years, which I think you just had an amazing one there about the photo thing, but what else can folks look forward to?
Cora Kyler:
Yeah, so totally. The photo thing is, we call them SOON Stations, soon all over San Francisco. You can go to a SOON Station and get a photo taken. We imagine a world in which these are all over, and I’m excited about that.
And then the next intervention we have is Matchmaker Mode. So we notice a lot of people who are, even our friends, who are hesitant in joining a dating platform just because everyone our age has been burned in some way on these platforms. They’re not serviced, or disappointed in some way. Although it’s well within the Overton window to be on these if you’re dating.
That some people totally want to set up their friends, and it’s a way for us to target a market that is not single, while still being a dating platform. So we’ll have Matchmaker Mode. Let’s say Sam is a matchmaker. She has 5, 6, 7 of her friends which she has a miniature of their profile. And then me, I can go check out Sam’s profile and be like, “Oh, awesome. Sam knows these six pre-vetted people. Let me just go ahead and ask them out on a date.”
So it’s a way to pull not necessarily from mutual friends as it were, but a way to see more of the connections that are possible. And for us, it’s a good business decision because-
Matt Seymour:
No, I like that idea.
Cora Kyler:
… it’s just a large market. Yeah, totally.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah. No, that sounds really fun and cool. And I definitely have seen plenty of friends myself with their own hesitancies about it, like you said, so.
Cora Kyler:
Totally.
Matt Seymour:
So you guys are in the Bay Area. All the buzz in the last six months or more has been AI and AI technology. Is SOON using an AI technology at all? And if not, do you have plans to use it in the future?
Cora Kyler:
We do. So right now we’re trying to model on image data. And that’s where our observation that like, “Hey, these really wonderful people just simply don’t have this resource, which is an awesome photo of them.”
And yeah, so of course we do sort of the conventional thing. We tag image data and that determines sort of where you’re siphoned within clusters on SOON and then who you’re shown in the deck, who is priority queued for you in the deck, which is your discovery mode when you’re swiping.
So we do of course do that. It’s not a crazy intervention, I think. We experimented a bit with people uploading an album and then SOON would select the best image. So that was also like we auto-detected if there’s noise in the background, that kind of thing. And so we did shoehorn a lot of automated kind of upleveling of SOON and came to the conclusion that, “Yeah, it’s totally a resource problem.”
Matt Seymour:
Yeah.
Cora Kyler:
Although, I will say there’s something really cool going on, which is that your tech is kind of personified now, so there’s a lot of lip service being paid to AI girlfriends and these kinds of things, but what we want SOON to be is have this very personal matchmaker or personal dating assistant vibe to it, which is now profiles will be in the third person. So it’ll be like, “Hi Cora, meet Alex.”
And so although that isn’t an obvious we’re using AI, we’re using what AI is introducing to tech products, which is this kind of personal warm intermediary that your quote-unquote, “Tech products,” fundamentally understand you better now because we know how to utilize higher-quality data and make far better predictions based on targeted outcomes. And so we’re giving a voice to that, which I am really excited about and I think it’s really cool.
Matt Seymour:
No, that’s great. And kind of sticking on that same theme but looking more dating industry as a whole, what would you say, are there any concerns for that dating industry when it comes to AI technology?
Cora Kyler:
I mean, maybe this is a good way to put it, is that the sort of juggernauts in the market, which is really starting from 2013, took off in 2017, that’s Tinder, Bumble, Hinge. And then what happened was a market segmentation. So then you get things like The League for people who went to Ivy Leagues, Raya for influencers and celebrities and all sorts of other things. Feeld for those interested in poly relationships.
But now there seems like a new watershed moment happening really in 2023. You get agent-based dating, so that’s this kind of AI girlfriend thing. And then you get a serious turn for the analog world. So with dating docs, there was a New York Times article on people who just are like, “Forget dating apps, we’re going to describe ourselves and our friends will distribute that within their personal networks.”
And so I think these are all tailwinds and I think there’s room for all of them, but we really conceptualized ourselves as, “What if Tinder was for 2023 and we did it really well?” But we also were hyperconscious and dialed in on just giving early users, and hopefully that scales, a hyper-tailored, amazing experience.
And so I don’t know that there are some risks, but there are new things coming up and we’re excited to see people building it alongside our company. See what happens. Yeah.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah. I like it. So switching gears a little bit, romance scams are on the rise, especially here across the US. How does SOON combat this growing problem?
Cora Kyler:
Yeah, we think about this a lot. There’s a lot to be said for because we are request access only, we do do a rough social graph of people who apply. So we’re like, “Okay.” We basically see if you have an online presence. Do you have a LinkedIn at the very least or, I don’t know, an Instagram account or Twitter account, something of the likes?
And we’re just continuing to automate that. So there will still be an approval process by which we make sure that this person in fact exists. It’s not hyper sophisticated, but it’s at least something in which… And then as new problems arise, which they certainly will, we’ll be really conscious about what it means to be a verified user.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah. I like it. Excellent. So last one to take us home here and finish up. Obviously again, you guys are early on, but are there any misconceptions at this point about SOON that you’d like to clear up?
Cora Kyler:
Yeah. Yeah, actually. I think it was quite the choice to do this by request access only in onboarding. And we are moving away from that. So that was a way to dial in on the experience, kind of like a V1 and a guarantee that everyone on SOON would get matches in haste.
But it’s a platform for all. This is a growth strategy. We’re not doing what Raya or The League are doing. It really is a Tinder for a new age. So yeah, I think that’s potentially a misconception, but we’re working on it. We’re opening up the floodgates.
Matt Seymour:
That’s all right. You guys are still so new with everything, so.
Cora Kyler:
Yeah, totally.
Matt Seymour:
Awesome.
Cora Kyler:
Yeah, yeah.
Matt Seymour:
Cora, thank you so much for joining and sharing the insights, especially with you guys. We’re excited to see as things continue to develop and maybe we do another one of these interviews sometime here again in the future and just check in. But we really appreciate your time, and really looking forward to keeping an eye on as things go forward with you.
Cora Kyler:
Oh, thank you so much. And likewise. This was wonderful. I really appreciate it.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, absolutely.