Two Chairs

Swiping turned dating into a feed, and a feed is designed to be consumed rather than exited. Two Chairs runs on a weekly cycle instead: you watch a handful of real people from Monday, choose on Thursday, and meet the one who chose you back that evening.

Dating apps make money from the time before a date, which is why they are so good at producing matches and so bad at producing meetings. Endless choice reliably makes people choose worse and commit less, and the interface most responsible for that, the swipe, is the one every product has copied.

Two Chairs removes the mechanic and imposes a rhythm. A handful of people, a decision day, one mutual match, and a meeting the same night, which means the product's success is a date rather than a session length. Launching one city at a time is the correct constraint for something that only works if there are enough people in it on a Thursday.