So how did online dating miss the lesbian community?
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Everyone and their brother has their own dating app, and investors often aren't interested in this space," Kay says.
"Even if you had a team working really hard for a year on building the best LGBT app out there, but even after all of their work, they only had 1,000 users — then due to that small pool, users probably wouldn't get great matches, and they'd hate the app and not refer their friends, and then it would die."Andrew Chen, an advisor/investor for tech startups including Dropbox, wrote on his blog that in general, it's hard for any dating app to attract interest from investors.
"We talked to a lot of people, including founders of other dating sites, and gay women we were friends with," Tessler says.
When Tessler decided to start online matchmaking service The Dating Ring two years ago, she couldn't get nearly enough gay women to match with the few gay women who had signed up for the service.
Daatch's Google page reports primarily one star reviews, with one commenter saying, "The most useful thing about this app is finding all the lesbians complaining about it (me included)" and another saying, "Poor app, wouldn't let me upload pics and wouldn't save text, even had trouble to close my account. " The app later received $1 million in funding from investors and was rebranded as Her, which CEO and founder Robyn Exton says currently has just under one million users, and a much-improved 4.5 star rating on i Tunes.
The only other dating app for queer women to get much press at all was Scissr, whose rating in the i Tunes store is comprised only of 1 and 2 star reviews with one user saying, "Good concept but most users are inactive and the filter options don't work," which sounds like every queer dating app I've ever encountered.After all, she says, it's easier to ask all of your friends what that cute girl's situation is when they all know her and probably have for years.While that's obviously the same in straight dating, straight people don't have to figure out just how straight someone is, worry about navigating a relationship with someone who's not out, or potentially have to deal with someone using them as an experiment.The wide range of identities of women-seeking-women not only makes it hard to sign up for apps that only have three options (straight, lesbian, bisexual) but could also explain why the majority of the queer women I spoke to say they prefer to meet dates through friends."I build everything on trust," my friend Valey, 27, who meets other women through friends IRL, told me.So, of the hundreds of dating apps that exist, why isn't there a better, queer-women-friendly dating app yet?