A preview of Offline's mission & positioning
tl;dr: Meet people you want to keep meeting.
Since we’re now raising real money for design, I wanted to share a bit more about how we’re thinking about our project with our fans and supporters. (By the way, we hit $2K of our desired $5K. If you like what we describe below, consider throwing in a few bucks?) This is what we have for our mission statement so far.
🌍 Offline’s mission
Offline helps individuals form meaningful, long-lasting relationships.
There are currently two primary ways of meeting new people: intentionally through dating apps or organically in person. We think meeting your people in person is great but the market of individuals looking to intentionally meet people online is currently underserved.
Today swipe-based dating apps occupy a monopoly. Bumble, Hinge, Tinder — you name it — they all fundamentally are built on swiping.
But swiping removes intention from the matchmaking process. Instead of swiping on someone to genuinely connect with them, we are often swiping based on a very limited idea of who they might be as a person. We might swipe merely to satisfy a sense of curiosity about whether someone else has swiped back.
Offline restores intention to the matchmaking process by encouraging you to more authentically express yourself and enabling you to find genuine matches. How?
We’re built for a long-form-profile-first approach. Gone are the days of just swiping on profiles based on pictures, pickup lines, superficial responses to prompts, and simple demographic information.
We assess compatibility based on a rigorous compatibility test. This isn’t just a boring, generic test you might see at a psychologist’s office. We ask you about things that matter in dating: sexual preferences, matters of taste and lifestyle, and questions about values. We believe our question-set is the best and most up-to-date in the market.
We make compatibility scores transparent so you can filter by them. A big problem with today’s dating apps is that there isn’t enough filtering, period. You’re pretty much at the mercy of the dating app’s black box algorithm and who it shows you next. Offline understands that people who want to date (or find other connections) with intention need to be equipped with enough agency.
Why we’re different / our core assumptions
Longform profiles are a fuckboy repellent. The effort required to properly know and describe yourself automatically discourages some portion of unserious daters from signing up. Longform profiles allow you to better signal seriousness.
There is a demand for better online self-expression. Date-me-docs were an example of this though their fully decentralized nature didn’t allow them, alone, to successfully match people.
Compatibility scores can solve for stated vs. revealed preference. They cut through superficial information about someone, like how they look, and force you to consider deeper compatibility.
Proper filtering removes a false sense of infinite choice. The right filters will get you to a pool of potential compatible partners — enough to date around to find the right person yet finite enough dispel the myth that there is an infinite supply of “better” options one more swipe/match away.
Choice is better than choicelessness. We want to empower users. Be your full expressive self. Take ownership of your dating journey. For instance, if you want to put “Twin Peaks” in your profile because you want to meet other fans of Twin Peaks, now you can — because you’ll be able to search for strings on profiles.
Offline outcomes > online entertainment. Our goal is to get people meeting offline — ideally finding long-term relationships.
Product & community-led growth. We know how to build a better product. What will help us reach success is community-led growth.
Dating companies are better off being smaller. We admire companies like Craigslist who serve millions despite having <=50 employees. Appetite for money and growth at any cost easily disincentivize dating apps from doing right by their users. Offline the company wants to grow intentionally, too.
The basic infrastructure must be apolitical. People’s responses to compatibility scores already will filter out those who are politically incompatible. Our job is to help pair compatible people, not contribute to the already mounting cultural schism of political polarity.
Design and branding really matter. Since this is a consumer product — one that requires a critical mass of young people, including young women to join — this is non-negotiable!
🔎 Who are we for?
Offline helps those looking to date and connect with intention find long-lasting relationships. We hypothesize there may be a sizable market (if not a “silent majority”) of daters who are frustrated with current market options for dating apps.
#1: The unconventionally attractive dater
Conventionally attractive people are often successful at dating since they’re presented with so much choice as a default. What about those who are unconventionally attractive? People who might not be conventionally physically attractive, say, but have a lot to offer in terms of other attractive traits like intelligence, emotional maturity and compassion, and so on? Or those who even are physically attractive yet prioritize other qualities when looking to date?
“Unconventional” is not an insult. It happens to encompass the sets of people who are above-average across a variety of traits as well. These are people who might be too intentional, too intelligent, too creative, too open, or too focused for wasting their time on weaker dating apps!
These are often people like nerds, highly intelligent people, members of subcultures, artists, entrepreneurs, free-spirits, and so on. Anyone who doesn’t fit enough within “normal” to take chances just dating anyone random off a dating app.
#2: Those who have some specific ideas of what they want (i.e. are intentional) and are serious about finding it
We’re best for those who know enough about who they are and what they are looking for such that they can make the most of our features. Longform profiles and compatibility questions are best utilized by those who know who they are. Compatibility scores, reading the profiles of others, and filters are best utilized by those who know what they are looking for!
One also might argue Offline isn’t as simple to use as other dating apps since we’re optimized for long-form profiles. We might not be as simple in some ways, true. But that means that anyone who is on the site is more likely to be serious about dating in general. Plus, the more effort you put into your profile and questions, the more likely you are to find compatible people. Finally, the effort scales. You just have to write your profile and answer questions once.
🧑💻 Why we are the right people to build this
Two of our cofounders are veterans from the brief era of good online dating sites. We have seen, firsthand, the success of “legacy” OkCupid (OkCupid prior to being acquired by Match Group) as unconventionally attractive daters ourselves. We have also seen the rise and demise of current mobile, swipe-based dating apps from their very first days.
All of us are or have been “terminally online” despite also having strong in-person relationships. Many of our closest friendships and most formative relationships, including romantic ones, were initially forged online and then transformed into offline ones. We are the original people who made friends and connections online before it became mainstream for everyone else. And we are frustrated with how dating apps have deteriorated despite knowing, with certainty, that it does not have to be that way. Since it did not used to be.
Fortunately, since we have remained online and in touch in some capacity or another, we understand how culture has shifted from the 2010s into the 2020s. Many of our friends or people we know became the first adopters of date-me docs. Our collective online presence encompasses a huge network of people across subcultures, like e/accs and EAs, trads and trans people, rationalists and TPOT members, leftists and conservatives. We believe we know how to reach a sufficient cross-section of adjacent subcultures to recruit enough users who are similar yet not identical or already aware of one another — something that already distinguishes us from competitors that focus on too narrow a community.
We have strong backgrounds in marketing, content, and engineering. We have an obvious design gap and are raising money for that.