About Us

The Problem

Online dating has become an increasingly dehumanizing experience, producing a meat market of gym selfies and swimsuit photos instead of actually helping people find lasting love. The problems in the contemporary dating scene are rooted in deep social and cultural trends. However, we believe that culture is downstream from technology, and by creating a more pro-social dating technology, we can also nudge dating culture onto a more prosocial path.

In our view, one of the core problems with extant dating platforms is the primary role that pictures play in the process of deciding who people are interested in interacting with. Physical attractiveness is somewhat "objective", in the sense that there will often be broad consensus among rankers as to whether someone looks good in their pictures. This creates an extremely unequal situation in the amount of attention users receive. Conventionally attractive people tend to receive overwhelming attention (often from people who aren't relevant at all), and less conventionally attractive people receive little to no interest.

If the aim of a matchmaking service is to find compatible matches for everyone, it would be much better to emphasize traits that are more "subjective" in the sense that there is less consensus about how to rank potential matches. For example, if Alice loves camping, she might really like the fact that Bob also loves the outdoors. But Caitlyn, who prefers the comforts of an urban lifestyle, might see Bob's outdoorsy personality as a downside. Matchmaking based on these kinds of subjective traits will generally mean a more equal distribution of attention, and from more relevant people.

Our Solution

To reorient online dating to focus on more subjective traits, we have created a new kind of app experience. Not A Zombie is a text-first platform. Unlike nearly all dating apps on the market, where users are immediately shown pictures of other members, on Not A Zombie, users first see a rectangle with a freeform text-based (yet visually appealing) self-description of the other member, called a Tile. Each user writes 4-7 phrases (~20 characters each) on their Tile that they believe best describes themselves. A user's photos and full profile will only be shown to other members once the other member clicks on the Tile, thus re-orienting user decisions about potential matches to be based on substantive compatibility rather than split-second visual attraction. We will also use the text that members write on their Tiles to find other members they are compatible with, using machine learning and natural language processing.

As in other dating applications, users can answer questions about themselves, but we allow users to submit questions that they and other people can answer, allowing for a much richer set of information that members can use to filter their matches.

Finally, we introduce a feature called communities. Not A Zombie communities enable people who are interested in dating within a specific population pool (e.g. Orthodox Jews, people at the same university, dog lovers) to form a dating community where they can meet like-minded people. Communities will be member-created and can have their own questionnaires that are pertinent to members of that community.

We will also encourage community creators, moderators, and members, to create in-person events (which they can advertise on community pages) to enable people to meet organically, thus enabling our app to encourage real life community engagement as opposed to further enabling atomization.

Additional Info

• Free: The core dating platform will be free for all users. Our main aim is to help people find lasting relationships! There will also be some additional lifestyle improvement features that we will offer to users in exchange for a one-time payment, see below.
• No 'likes', no 'matches'! Most contemporary dating apps have a 'likes and matches' system, where two people have to 'like' each other before they are able to send messages. This creates several problems: likes are non-commital, so often a 'match' does not indicate real interest, resulting in non-responsive matches or ghosting. We also believe that the act of sending a well-crafted first message can prompt interest even if there wasn't already interest otherwise. We therefore prefer the older model where any user can message any other user on the platform. To prevent spamming, we will limit the number of introductory messages each user can send per day. (This limit can be increased in the premium version of the product, see below.)
• Desktop and Mobile Web Interface: We will create the Not A Zombie dating platform web before we release an app. This will enable us to release it on desktop as well as mobile. Finding a relationship is serious business; it's not just about swiping on your phone while sitting on the toilet.