Dougyster
A Recap and Reflection
Flutter
Flutter was the first startup idea I had, and as with most first-time founders, it was a dating app. Enamoured, we pursued it full steam ahead, unaware that these types of businesses are classified by Y Combinator as "tarpit ideas" – a type of idea that seems particularly attractive to inexperienced founders that tend to not work. After 6-7 months of aggressive development and marketing, we failed to get the traction we had hoped for and pivoted. Here's what the product looked like, and here's what we learned.
A Truly Intentional System
The core concept around Flutter was intentionality. Contrary to the well-known swipe-and-match, spray-and-pray mechanism, Flutter operated on a mechanism where users would send a like and the recipient could either accept or reject the like – a bit like sending an instagram follow request. A chatroom would be opened immediately as soon as a like is sent.
Post-match Engagement
Our signature differentiator – if we could be bold enough to claim we had one – would be our date-setting feature. If a user's like is accepted, the two people could set up a date through the app and get a discount. There was also our attempt at gamification called the FlutPass – where people could unlock better and better discounts the more dates they went on. This later became the primary feature of the app, where users no longer need to send and accept likes to set up a date.
Lack of Value Proposition
How well did we know our audience?
Off the top, there were many things wrong with Flutter: bad UX, lack of differentiation, ineffective marketing ... the list goes on. But if there's one thing I could say about why Flutter failed, is that we failed to truly understand our audience and deliver value. Students – or at least Harvard students – didn't use dating apps seriously, and they were ok with that! Dating is such a saturated market, and people are fine with using Tinder and Bumble for the fun of swiping on people. In a world where people preferred meeting organically especially in the wake of COVID, we just weren't solving a problem people cared about. We stumbled head-first into a tarpit idea.