What progress have you made since your last update?

• We got 75 people to beta test our compatibility questions! We are focusing on WOMEN right now. The majority of the responses are from single women. You can see and/or share the typeform here: https://shreedasegan.typeform.com/to/dSmutmIr

• Continuing to build and design out the MVP!

• Finished v1 of our pitch deck; found an advisor

What are your next steps?

• Finish the pitch deck

• Get 50+ women in just one city (Austin) to sign up

  • promoted tweets/IG posts

  • guerilla marketing (flyers around town)

  • set up dating event/mixer

Is there anything others could help you with?

• get single women in Austin to do our questions

• donate more money so we can do the marketing in Austin

  • I quit my part time job to focus entirely on this project

• make warm intros to potential investors

This seems interesting and I'm glad someone else is trying it (and glad that those people aren't Manifold, no offense).
One problem: You should probably more-clearly identify your AI-generated accounts as fake and purely for testing purposes? Unless the intent is to actually give the false impression that there are more accounts than there actually currently are.

What progress have you made since your last update?

• built out the minimum viable design for user onboarding

• published more on our substack (meetmeoffline.substack.com)

• created internal brand guidelines

• internal design thinking workshop on profile design

What are your next steps?

• code and build the onboarding design

• minimum viable design for user profiles

• minimum viable branding work

• keep publishing on our substack

Is there anything others could help you with?

• subscribe to our substack (meetmeoffline.substack.com), share and like posts, become a paid subscriber

• recommend single women who would volunteer for user research interviews

• something else? let us know what you have in mind

The "Global Catastrophic Risk" and the "Health and Development" labels here look wrong.

What progress have you made since your last update?

• onboarded our designer & paid her half the funds thus far as upfront deposit

• worked with her to fully document the user journey

• published a preview of our mission and positioning statement: https://open.substack.com/pub/meetmeoffline/p/a-preview-of-offlines-mission-and?r=1ug4n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
  

What are your next steps?

• collaborate on customized design components

• design our pages

• work on minimum viable branding
  

Is there anything others could help you with?

• continue to contribute money or spread the word on this project on X, Facebook, group chats, substacks, etc.

• subscribe to our substack (meetmeoffline.substack.com) and maybe offer to be a beta tester when we recruit those

• volunteer your own engineering or design resources

• recommend single women who would volunteer for user research interviews

• let us know if you live in Austin, TX — we're thinking of launching live there first and then expanding to other cities

• something else? let us know what you have in mind
  

Found the community which catalyzed lived change in the rapid personal growth trajectory I wanted, and was intellectually spring loaded for, after long term isolated study in uninspiring isolated community, via “2011 ok Cupid” so yes; we need that back.

(Unhelpful comment alert) love the intentional(?) GCR, Global health n development, LTFF tags on this project.

Approving this! I think bringing together people and making new relationships happen provides massive social value, and am glad that these other donors agree. Best of luck with development of this dating platform!

Not super optimistic about your chances re: network effects, but if any underdog is worth supporting, it's people trying to make a dating app that's actually good.

The value of online dating networks scale by city or metro penetration, not national penetration. 10% market share in (say) NYC should drive much more conversion and interaction in NYC than 1% penetration nationally would across the board. My humble suggestion is, pick ONE city and nuke it from orbit with marketing. It's the only way to be sure.

We found a designer we want to work with and are very excited. Additional funding will help us compensate her well for her time.

We also plan to raise again in the future for marketing events! Thanks for everyone who has pitched in so far. Every little bit helps.

Really excited to see someone attempting this. It's sorely needed. I'm curious how you plan to get normies to use this like they used to use OkCupid. Are you going to raise donations for marketing as well?

Getting this to a minimally funded stage. Was thinking about if for ages myself. A dating product has to be nonprofit. Lmk if you’ll need help with finding a designer. vernon99 in Telegram.

Cool idea, good luck!

Thanks for the proposal! I've been impressed with Shreeda's writing at Meridian, as well as choice of coverage of on Byrne Hobart, Emmett Shear, and Dwarkesh Patel. I didn't know she was working on this dating site and think it's an important problem to tackle.

I agree that design is critical for a consumer-facing site like this; it's good that you also recognize this. Right now, as a user I would immediately bounce seeing this front page:

as the general UX design and the animal avatars don't inspire confidence, and communicates that this is very much in beta. I would go so far to posit that design is actually a key part of product here, and I'm a bit skeptical that hiring somebody external to help a bit would work (as opposed to having someone with design chops in the core team).

As a funder, I'd be a lot more excited to fund this if you had lined up a specific designer who wanted to work with y'all on this. $1k-$5k is a very small ask, so my main question is on whether you have the ability to identify someone with good taste, and can actually convince them to sign on.

Another major thing that's hard about dating apps is distribution (this is partly what we found with Manifold.love). If you had any kind of proof that you would be able to get distribution, that would bolster this proposal a lot. Even just like, running in person dating events before your website even works would be promising.

Finally, I think you need a clearer story about what tiny audience you can bring on as a beachhead. Famously, startup lore has it stated that it's better to have a thing that a few people like a lot, than a thing that a lot of people want a little. I think that Manifold Love's early targeting of rationalist/EAs was quite good, and that one thing that tanked it was trying to expand too fast with things like online ads -- it just diluted the applicant pool. A focus on serving a few users very very well is a lot more important.