Pandemic-weary singles are bored of Hinge and Tinder and desperate for new exper...
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Pandemic-weary singles are bored of Hinge and Tinder and desperate for new experiences. A new batch of apps are helping bring them together IRL.
New dating apps like Thursday and POM are testing in-person events in London and New York.
There's a growing desire among singles to meet people in person again, Thursday's CEO told Insider.
Dating apps must adapt to in order boost customer satisfaction, a dating expert told Insider.
Jessica Sultoo broke her collarbone at the last singles event she went to.
A man she had met there picked her up on his shoulder and in a drunken stupor, dropped her.
She was at an event in London hosted by Thursday, a dating app that has been running meet-ups for singles at bars across the city every Thursday since it launched in July last year.
The experience was clearly an accident that would be enough to put anyone off.
But Sultoo, 30, is certain it was an isolated incident, and it hasn't deterred her from coming back to the app's events.
"I'm very single and ready to mingle," she told Insider at one of Thursday's events on March 3 at a bar called Tonight Jospehine. "I've got four [dating] apps on my phone and they're not working!"
Sultoo's sentiments capture a growing frustration with popular dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge, which many exhausted during the pandemic. Tapping on screens was the only way to meet someone new when confined indoors, and video chats or socially distanced walks the only dates of choice.
Tinder reported 2020 as their busiest year yet, with its users also setting records for usage in early 2021. Hinge tripled its revenue from 2019 to 2020, and doubled it from that in 2021.
The surge in dating app use spurred many of them to roll out a spate of new features such as video chats.
But as the pandemic wanes, people are getting out again — and hoping to meet someone in person. Now a new crop of dating apps are leaning into that desire.
"[During lockdown] people had saturated Hinge, Tinder, Bumble," Matthew Love, CEO of Thursday, told Insider.
"It's kind of gone back to the old school way where people don't want to be online and glued to their phones," he added. "They want to be experiencing something in real life."
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