We Built a Dating Site That Wants You to Leave

The best email we get is a cancellation.

Not every cancellation. The specific kind: a paying member writes to say they’re closing their account because they met someone here and they don’t need it anymore. I’ve described that feeling before as every great holiday wrapped up into one notification, and years later I still don’t have a better way to put it. Pat and I forward those to each other. We have a folder.

I want to explain why that email shaped almost every design decision we’ve made, because this week the blog has been about dating app burnout, and the honest founder version of that conversation is about money.

Who pays, and what they’re paying for

Here’s the thing nobody in this industry says out loud. A product that earns its money from your attention has to keep you inside it. That’s not a villain plan, it’s arithmetic. If the revenue comes from time spent and ads served and the occasional upsell to get out of the queue you were put in, then a person who logs off satisfied after ten minutes is a loss, and a person who scrolls for an hour feeling slightly worse is a win. Nobody has to intend the loop. The incentives build it for them.

LFGdating’s business is a premium subscription: $15 a month, $35 for three months, or $75 for a year. Free members see some ads and premium removes them, but the ads were never the point and they’ve never been the plan. There’s nothing to unlock mid-session. There’s no reason for us to want you in the app at 1 a.m. swiping through your two hundredth profile, because a subscription doesn’t pay more when you do. It pays when you think fifteen bucks was worth it, and the version of that we’re proudest of is the one where you stop paying because it worked.

Pat and I have talked for years about having two bottom lines. The first one is how many people are meeting and communicating on a given day. The second is financial. The order isn’t a slogan. It’s the reason the first bottom line sometimes eats the second, on purpose.

What that changed in the build

When you don’t need people to stay, you build different things.

We serve free members a small set of daily matches instead of a feed with no bottom. I’ve heard the argument that a feed converts better, and I believe it. A feed also produces the exact numbness this week’s posts have been documenting, and I’d rather ship the handful and let people actually look at each other.

We have a human being review every profile before it goes live. That’s slow and it costs real money and it means the pool grows at the speed of a person reading, not a script. It also means the person in your daily set is a person, which is table stakes for a product whose entire promise is other humans.

We answer our own email, from personal addresses, inside 24 hours. I’ve walked out of a date night to do it. Pat has done it during family holidays. That’s not a customer-service strategy; it’s what happens when the founders are the support team, and it keeps us honest in a way a ticketing queue never would, because we hear about the loop firsthand when someone is stuck in it.

And we set the price low enough that the subscription itself does the spam-filtering. A bot farm doesn’t pay $15 a month per account. A person who wants to meet another person does.

The gamer version

You already have the vocabulary for this. There are games that respect your time and games that farm it, and you can tell them apart in about a week. The ones that respect you have sessions that end. They don’t punish you for logging off. They don’t hide the fun behind a timer that resets at midnight. When you put them down, you feel like you played something.

The ones that farm you are engineered around the near-miss. The pull that was almost the good one. The streak you can’t break. The daily that quietly refilled while you were looking at it. You keep playing them and you keep feeling worse and you can’t find the moment it stopped being fun, because there wasn’t one. It was designed not to have one.

Ask that question of any dating app, including ours. Does the session have an ending? Do you feel better or worse after week twelve? Does the company make more money when you leave happy, or when you stay tired? Those three answers tell you which genre of product you’re holding.

A confession

We’ve been tempted by every engagement trick in the book. I’ve sat in front of a spreadsheet and seen what a “you have 3 new likes, upgrade to see them” nudge would probably do to conversion. I’ve seen match screens in this industry that play a jackpot sound. It works. It’s also the thing that makes the email at the top of this post impossible, because a product built to hold you can’t be built to release you.

So we said no, and I won’t pretend that was painless. This is a side business two people have run since a phone call in 2010, a high school English teacher and a Marine officer 4,200 miles apart, and there have been plenty of months where the second bottom line would have loved a little more of the first. We kept the order anyway. That’s the whole essay, really. The rest is details.

The ask

Try it for the length of one loop. Not forever, not “give it a real shot.” One bounded stretch. Download the LFGdating app or make a free profile, look at the handful of gamers we hand you each day, have one conversation all the way through, and judge it by how you feel after, the way you’d judge any game. If it’s not for you, cancel with our blessing. If it is, and you meet someone, cancel with our applause.

We’ll add you to the folder. It’s the best folder we have.

Stay Classy,
Casey and Pat