No matter what city you live in, it’s a universally acknowledged truth that the current dating scene sucks. Everyone has a story. And everyone is dissatisfied.
Let’s take the example of Miles Slayton. He completed a banking internship in New York City and witnessed how he and his friends struggled to find love in the city’s ruthless dating scene. “We’re using our phones more than ever before,” he told TechCrunch. “I thought, ‘Why are dating apps so bad?'”
He thought this was not a problem with the dating apps themselves, but rather with the way modern products work. While many popular dating apps are built with millennials in mind, he said his generation, Gen Z, operates in a completely different way. This is a throwback to the way dating used to be. People of this generation meet “through people in common, through people in their social circles,” he says.
Just a few months ago, he teamed up with friends Willie Konzelman and Carter Munk to launch Cerca, a dating app that matches people with people already in their social circles. The company announced a $1.6 million seed round this summer and is already generating some buzz. The app has about 60,000 users, primarily located in New York and several universities.
The company is part of the Startup Battlefield and will be showcasing its technology at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 in San Francisco later this month.
CEO Slayton said there’s a reason Gen Z is regressing to older dating methods, and it’s because of the internet and the coronavirus pandemic. “We simply don’t trust strangers,” he said, adding that people are very afraid of rejection.
Cerca’s products seek to address this. Users create a standard dating profile, sync their contacts, and from there, only friends or friends of friends who are already on the app will appear as potential matches. “My fear of strangers is gone,” Slayton said. All likes are anonymous, reducing the fear of rejection. Users do four swipes a day in hopes of eliminating swipe fatigue and putting more emphasis on match selection, he said.
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“A world where you see 100 profiles a minute doesn’t exist,” he said. “You should think long and hard about each profile. These are real people.”
Profiles show mutual friends first, then backgrounds, then photos. “For us, it’s not all about looks,” he said. Users receive a notification that someone has liked their profile, but they don’t know who. The Cerca algorithm enhances the profiles of people who like the feeds of people of interest and can decide whether to like the feeds of people of interest in return.
Every night, the results are published, but no one knows who made the first move.
Having mutual friends makes it easier to scrutinize your safety because you can gather information about who you’re dating just by texting them. Users can also choose which and how many contacts they want to share with Cerca, as well as prevent certain people from viewing their profile. “You can also filter for words like dentist, doctor, etc.,” he said. “There are no screenshots or screen recordings. Safety is a top priority for us.”
Beyond the online world, the company also produces merchandise and hosts events.
Slayton said he and his co-founder decided to apply to Startup Battlefield and know founders who attended the event. “I think this is a really good opportunity to have America and the world see who we are and represent dating in a positive way,” he said.
If you want to learn directly from Cerca, see more pitches, attend valuable workshops, and make connections that drive business results, visit here to learn more about this year’s Disrupt, taking place in San Francisco from October 27th to 29th.
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