Go ahead, play with the design, the features, the aspects unique to your product. DON’T LOSE SIGHT OF A DATING APP’S PURPOSEĭating apps are simple, single-purpose products. These lessons, along with the shared knowledge our team has accumulated on a multitude of client projects, can best be summed up in the following points.
The five years we’ve dedicated to continuously improving the user experience and all-around appeal of these apps have taught us priceless lessons. Today, Surge holds an App Store rating of 4.5 based on 10k reviews, has 10M messages sent every month and was rated the best gay dating app of 2019, while Zoe is the best rated lesbian app of 2020 and holds an App Store rating of 4.6 based on 10.9k reviews. It was around this time that STRV began recognizing the potential of more niche-oriented dating apps, which ultimately led to Martin and his crew of fellow engineers founding the STRV-made dating apps Surge and Zoe-for the gay and lesbian community, respectively. We were happy to help and took on multiple projects, including Christian Mingle. As luck would have it, Spark Networks was seeing its users move to mobile-first platforms, and the company was lacking a mobile strategy. STRV ended up selling The Game to Spark Networks, a global dating company. But with Tinder simultaneously releasing their swiping hit, our plans got steamrolled. A user saw three profiles and had to choose one, then came the next three, and so on. That solution? The Game, STRV’s first own venture into dating apps. There was no balance or control over who’s messaging you. For one, it was slow opening up profiles one by one, messaging at random, etc. “Our idea was that users should be able to connect differently than just picking out of a bunch of people,” explained Martin. It was a pre-Tinder era, and something was missing. Some had mobile apps, but they were just heavy, old-school copies of the web platforms. These sites were based on users seeing a large grid of profiles, picking who they wanted to contact, and going in cold. STRV began toying with a mobile-first dating app in a time of dating websites. There are too many client projects to discuss in one article, so let’s focus on the dating apps we’ve made from scratch, and how it happened. STRV Co-founder Martin Stava and Frontend Platform Lead Danny Kijkov STRV FINDS A MATCH IN DATING APPS But before we get into the details, a little about how this dating app craze at STRV began. To gather as much information as possible, we spoke to STRV Co-founder Martin Stava, Frontend Platform Lead Danny Kijkov and Surge CEO Jakub Sedlak. And over the years, we’ve been able to categorize all of these learnings into ten main categories. We’ve seen surprising successes that slowly exposed patterns which we now use as guides. We’ve seen thrilling ideas fail and have had to figure out why. We’re constantly surprised by the ideas that our partners bring our way, ideas that give us new territories to explore in a world we know so well.Īt this point, it’s fair to say we’ve learned a lot. What makes dating apps exciting for designers and engineers is that the fundamental concept is simple yet malleable. As of today, STRV has built a number of its own top-rated dating apps (like Surge and Zoe) and has helped create or expand more than 15 dating apps for our partners-including some big names we’re not at liberty to mention.
We’ve dipped our toes in many fields, but there’s something special about the dating pool.