For the past months, my co-founder and I have been working on a matchmaking algorithm that we’re pretty excited about. It targets the following issue:

Dating sucks for many reasons, but one particular reason stands out. Imagine if today’s dating apps didn’t include the person’s gender. On half of your dates, you’d discover immediately you weren’t compatible because the other person wasn’t your preferred gender, and go home dejected having wasted another night on a pointless date.

We believe something similar to this is happening on most dating apps today, but for things harder to deduce: personality and values. Current available solutions struggle with both, so most of your dates will be with people who you just aren’t compatible with.

Unlike gender, online dating apps struggle to feature this information, and people are reduced to picking up faint signals from a few lines of text and a picture.

Dating apps partially solve the separate issue of value-alignment by targeting a certain segment of users who are more likely to be value compatible with each other than the baseline. There’s apps for christians, lgbt+, and even racists.

OkCupid was special because instead of selection effects, it attacked the value-alignment problem through an abundance of information on each user. Hinge attempts to tackle this problem by employing a recommender system ("youtube algorithm").

While these approaches improve the status quo, they far from completely solve the issue of incompatible values and are still barely selecting for personality.

Personal matchmakers and dating docs

Selecting on personality requires high bandwidth, and the intangible information that multiple choice questions cannot get at. Luckily, there are some options that do this.

Personal matchmakers have lots of information about the people they’re setting up, often also about personality. Matchmakers who are good at their job are very effective at filtering away bad dates based on hard-to-quantify intangible deal breakers that dating apps fail to spot. They are also very expensive.

Dating docs are a high effort attack at these problems. It has high bandwidth through free-form text with the intention of communicating who you are, along with powerful selection effects. As a result, they are able to send a lot of signal to potential partners about the sender.

But dating docs have numerous issues. Most importantly th...

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