Date With Intent

With Intent started with a very simple question: If I were looking for a partner, what would I personally need a dating platform to do for me? Not what would get me to swipe more. Not what would keep me subscribed longer. Not what would make me open the app 14 times a day. What would actually make finding a compatible partner easier? That question led me to build a dating model that I think has the potential to create a pretty significant moat. For starters: more women than men. Then a financial model where paying a small amount each month makes sense because you're not paying for access to an endless sea of strangers. You're paying for access to prescreened, human-validated people who have already demonstrated that they're serious about finding a relationship. That's a fundamentally different incentive structure from the existing dating-app economy. Most dating apps measure success by how many people they can convince to spend money. My model measures success by whether people can look at what they're paying for and think: "Yeah. This is worth paying for." I don't want With Intent to make money because we've figured out how to manipulate people into staying on a dating app. I want it to make money because we've figured out how to make the dating pool better. That's the bet I'm making.

One of the questions behind With Intent is deceptively simple: What does a successful dating app actually measure? Most platforms can tell you how many people you showed a profile to. How many people swiped. How many matches happened. How many messages were sent. But none of those numbers tell us whether two people actually understood each other. Or felt safe enough to be themselves. Or discovered that they had the kind of connection worth exploring. Or eventually built something that lasted. We've become very good at measuring engagement with dating. I'm interested in figuring out how we measure — and more importantly, how we support — connection. That's one of the problems With Intent was designed to solve. I don't think the solution is simply a better algorithm. We need to rethink the experience from the ground up. What would you measure if you were designing a dating platform around relationship quality instead of engagement? That's the question this platform is building around.

What if the problem with dating apps isn't that they're badly designed — but that they're designed around the wrong goal? I'm building With Intent, a new kind of dating platform. Modern dating apps have become incredibly good at getting people to swipe, match, message and keep coming back. But are they actually helping us get better at the part that matters? Building relationships. With Intent is being designed around emotional intelligence, intentionality and the human experience of dating. Instead of asking, "How do we get more matches?" I'm asking questions like: What do people actually need to recognize a good connection? How can we take some of the pressure out of meeting someone for the first time? How do we make emotional intelligence part of dating rather than something people have to figure out after a relationship starts falling apart? And perhaps most importantly: What have we lost by turning something as human as falling in love into a user interface? I'm still building. That means I'm deliberately asking these questions before I start locking the answers into technology. I'm testing ideas, building a community, looking for collaborators and preparing for real-world user testing. If you're interested in technology, social innovation, relationships, emotional intelligence, human-centered design or simply rethinking systems that we've accepted as "just the way things are," I'd love to have you follow along. This is With Intent. We're not building another dating app. We're rethinking what online dating could be.