Apps & Software

Dattch: A lesbian dating app that hopes to provide more than just hook-ups for gay women

dattch feat 520x245 Dattch: A lesbian dating app that hopes to provide more than just hook ups for gay women

Dattch, the lesbian dating app, has moved up a level to provide a solid beta for invite-only users.

The earliest version of the app launched last November and Founder Robyn Exton says that there have been weekly adjustments led by the reaction of its community.

The app lets gay women know about other ladies looking for dates in their area. At the moment it has a focus on London but Exton has big plans for international expansion once things are up and running to suit the audience in the UK.

As with most good ideas, Dattch came from personal observations at the right time when Exton was looking to do something new.

“I used to work in a branding agency and we had a dating business as one of our clients so I knew a fair bit about the space,” Exton told The Next Web. “We were in the pub, a friend had just broken up with a girlfriend and most of us had signed up to some kind of online dating at some point but it wasn’t working.”

Exton says that gay women tend to use Internet dating a lot more than heterosexual women because its harder to meet other gay women but that the experience is never quite right. “It works in the sense that you can chat to other people and maybe go on the odd date but they were all faulted quite seriously in a number of different ways,” she says. “I was interested in programming personally and I’d done the dating stuff before, I’d looked at doing other dating apps and I thought this is it, this is the one.”

Exton’s research into the dating app market for gay women revealed some interesting traits. She told The Next Web that gay women tend to use Internet dating a lot more than heterosexual women because its harder to meet other gay women. She also found that although existing services meant that women were able to chat and go on the odd date, many of the services were flawed in a number of ways, not least the issue of false profiles.

“When we started it, there was the problem of helping women find other women they fancy or could go on a date with, but the biggest problem was the number of guys who create profiles on lesbian sites,” Exton explained. “They are full of fake profiles and no one’s taking the time to go in and make sure it is a genuine profile. A lot of the previous lesbian sites were just add-ons”.

WhosAround HI Dattch: A lesbian dating app that hopes to provide more than just hook ups for gay women

Exton says that many of the current lesbian dating sites are an extension of sites originally created for gay men and that this doesn’t serve the intended community.

The idea of men making fake profiles to browse a lesbian site might sound spurious but Exton has been surprised at the rate and extent to which this happens. “Daily, we have about five guys registering for an invite and it’s unsubstantiated but the emails have a guy’s name on them. We’ve seen fake Facebook accounts set up to try and get invites. You’ll see they set up an account yesterday, have no friends but they like Dattch and something like ‘Lesbian and bi girlies of London’. It’s amazing. The fact that people will go to that extent to try and check out gay women or convert them or meet up with them.”

 

Dattch currently verifies profiles manually, so each person is checked out at least to make sure they are female. From here, profiles will be linked to Facebook to see if applicants are women and if their profiles are well established.

Exton assures us that the Facebook links are discreet. Though it would be a fine world if everyone could be out and proud if they chose to be, not everyone wants to be identified by their sexuality. She says that the Facebook verification process is only to check if users are female. Users will be able to pull information from other profiles if they choose, but Dattch doesn’t use or keep any of the data.

The beta testing so far has provided a rich seam of information about the gay female market that will help to fund the app in future. Exton says that gay men have some of the highest browsing figures on dating apps and that gay women tend to want to browse and talk even more.

This level of engagement leads to a strong area for advertising and a targeted group of women that marketers will doubtless have an interest in.

Dattch

[source: The Next Web]

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