Dating apps, and the connotations along with them, mean something different to everyone. There are the casual users, the users looking for their one true love, the creeps, serial chatters, the needy Nancy’s, the aggressive swipers, and everyone in between. In the end, it’s about as personal or impersonal as you decide to make it.
However, there’s a new dating app called Schmooze, and they want to move away from the typical algorithm towards one that brings people together through, get this, memes. The world already has dating apps that connect the 1%, farmers, and even bacon lovers, but it was, apparently, in need of one to match desperate meme lovers.
The founder of the app, Vidya Madhavan, believes that memes deliver a point of view filtered through your sense of humor, and that will unquestionably bring people together through a shared connection. Madhavan noticed how Gen Z interacted with dating apps and built a new platform surrounding these entertaining images with an algorithm she creatively coined as a “humor algorithm.”
To find your perfect match, you begin by simply swiping left or right on memes that you find funny or not. Then, once the app has determined your sense of humor, it matches you with someone with similar taste in memes. The app will then show you other dating app user’s images, and you can either “schmooze” or “snooze” their profiles just as you would on any other app.
While the app has already created 90,000 matches and recently closed a $270,000 deal in seeding money from Ulu Ventures, the app has countless competitors. Memes are great and all, don’t get me wrong, but it seems like you could do this within apps that are already flourishing on the market instead of creating a whole new app. No need to reinvent the dating wheel. Plus, if you ask me, I want to know how funny someone is without using a joke that’s been, well, prefabricated.