Thursday secures $3.5 million for a weekly dating app
Thursday Secures $3.5 Million For A Weekly Dating App
Thursday, a dating app that aims to solve problems caused by excessive time spent on dating apps, raised a £2.5 million ($3.5 million) seed investment — just months after launching its single-matching service in London (in May) and New York (and racking up over 52k downloads).
It claims that 110,000 likes were sent on Thursday (June 17), resulting in 7,500 matches in a single day. However, it is unable to report how many actual dates occurred.
The seed round is more than double their initial goal, with funding from Ascension Ventures, Best Nights Venture Capital (previously M-Venture), Jägermeister's investment arm, Connect Ventures, and early backers of CityMapper, TypeForm, and FIIT (processed via SeedLegals).
Tom Blomfield, founder of Monzo; Matt Robinson, founder of GoCardless and Nested; Ian Hogarth, founder of Songkick; Eldar Tuvey, founder of Wandera; and Henry de Zoute, founder of LookAfterMyBills are among the notable angel investors in the dating platform.
So what is Thursday's twist in an extremely competitive market? The name provides the clue: This dating app is only available once a week.
Specifically, the app becomes available for use at 00.01 each Thursday morning, compressing swiping into a few hours. At 12 a.m., all matches and conversations are extinguished. As a result, users are pressed to act quickly — and to "be a little spontaneous," as the app puts it — if they wish to secure a date that evening.
As a result, profiles are fairly straightforward. Users can upload up to five photos (from social media apps such as Facebook or their phone's camera roll) and share some "topline information" about themselves.
Likewise, the app prompts them to answer a few questions — in order to provide insight into their personality. Also, there is a 'Stories' style feature that allows them to showcase their personalities (again that content deletes after 24 hours).
Matches are made based on what Thursday refers to as a "rough location" — allowing users to determine a convenient meeting location. (The app explicitly states that users' precise locations are never shared.)
Thursday users are encouraged to log on only if they are available to go out on a date that evening.
Using The App
Furthermore, matches are limited to x10 people per day — this is to prevent users from maximizing their chances by swiping to match with every user they see.
Thursday's pitch is that by imposing strict (time) limits on usage, service scarcity can address some of the overuse issues that plague dating apps, such as dating indecision and swipe fatigue. Additionally, they squander a great deal of people's time.
In addition, it believes that by restricting users' ability to book dates to a single day per week, it can reintroduce some of the excitement associated with digital dating. Which, on the other hand, can feel quite transactional at times.
Co-founder George Rawlings stated in a statement, "We're delighted to have a number of notable investors on board who believe in our vision and support this app just four weeks after launching." We have big plans and a clear mission: to change the way people date. This is only the beginning, and we will succeed. Dating apps have reintroduced the element of surprise.”
With their seed funding doubled, Thursday's team intends to accelerate — and, well, there is no way to patent this type of idea, so they will need to move quickly to stay ahead of any fast-followers.
Thus, it's unsurprising that the seed funding plan includes hiring a head of growth and a head of marketing, in addition to other senior roles and a number of technical hires — and developing a "six figure marketing strategy."
Expansion of the app to other cosmopolitan cities is also planned. However, Thursday is only available to singles in London and New York for the time being.
Dating apps are already a diverse group — catering to a range of different priorities, communities, and quirks, as well as incorporating a variety of creative twists in the name of assisting users in finding a match (such as by limiting who can send the first message; or hiding selfies until a few messages have been exchanged to push beyond superficial swiping).
Another intriguing concept is to impose time limits on usage. However, the extent to which this type of 'demand manipulation' affects the resulting dating power dynamics remains unknown. Moreover, it appears noteworthy that both founders are male.
“This is the first version of Thursday and it is far from perfect, so in the short term, we will use this time to polish the app, introduce some new features, and continue to develop our matching algorithm to make it the most efficient and intuitive on the market,” co-founder Matt McNeill Love added in another statement. “We're also going to introduce a never-before-seen, revolutionary feature that will significantly aid in the conversion of matches into dates.”
Thursday clearly needs to pay close attention to user security, given the accelerated usage timeframe and the disappearing messages.
On this front, it states that all users are verified prior to joining — either through the upload of a passport or driver's license. Also, it states that it takes abusive messages "extremely seriously" and will not tolerate hate speech, including racism, body shaming, and misogyny.
The pledge is that such abusive users will be blocked from the site and will be unable to return.
While the app's USP is the 'one day a week' restriction, there is, of course, an option to pay for additional access.
Thursday states that VIP memberships are available on a "limited basis."
Users who pay a monthly fee will have their profiles boosted all day (“x60 increased visibility”); will be able to send an unlimited number of likes; and will be able to use Saturday... albeit they are presumably limited to the pool of other VIP users on the bonus day, as non-paying users are locked out until Thursday.
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