TrueView Stuff

TrueView - How we are reinventing online dating

By Damo ( Our Tech Ninja )

TrueView is the product of 3 guys and their journey through the Wayra Academy. After winning investment back in March 2012 from Telefonica and being given the opportunity to join the academy in Tottenham court road London they decided to give up their day jobs and set up a mobile dating application in an attempt to reinvigorate and reinvent the world of online dating. Using one of it’s founders as it’s case study, and after many failed attempts at online dating himself, Andrew Ibbotson decided enough was enough. It’s time to change this stale and stagnated industry once and for all.

The problem TrueView solves is one of honesty. Real people. Real conversations. Currently online dating is full of fake profiles, seedy sex seekers and enough inflated blurp and gas to sink a hot air balloon. Work that one out! The real problem often lies within the application process and brand premise. Users are encouraged to create their profiles in such a way they end up sounding more like sales people quite distinct from themselves. We all know how annoying that can be. In the most absurd cases a lengthy psychometric test is required and a complex algorithm is sold on the basis of guaranteed future chemistry. As if a computer can really understand human behaviours and emotions. Lets face it computers are dumb and need to be told what to do. Even the cleverest AI cannot understand the complexity of human swagger and charm. The dating industry hasn’t changed for more than 15 years. This is why TrueView exists.

Online dating is expensive with an average cost equal to the average utility bill per month. 9 out of 10 dates are a failure since the person or persons who turn up are not the person they purport to be and the conversations are often awkward with very little common ground or real knowledge of ones potential date. After being sold the perfect match the level of expectation is extremely high and therefore the level of disappointment is even higher. At TrueView we wanted to solve these obfuscated and archaic problems.

We do this by using social mechanics. Mechanics such as status updates and checking in. These are common on all of the top social networking platforms such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. Indeed TrueView plugs into the Foursquare location API for local checkins. Understanding the needs of our customers, however, meant that we were persuaded not to share peoples GPS location. Instead we opted to remap Foursquare categories. In other words when you create a status update and optionally tag it a location we are only interested in whether or not that location was a food venue, a cinema, a gym, a museum etc and not it’s particular GPS spot which we never share with anybody. So remapping the locations allowed us to tell through frequency of a users checkins whether they are sporty and love japanese food or love museums and mexican food or just love a good old rave up. Overtime their profile evolves into a rich set of distinct interests. At TrueView we call it the Interest Graph. This builds a much more honest profile since it’s predicated on the things you actually do and not what you say you do. Using social at it’s core it’s much harder to be dishonest about yourself and therefore create a fake or over inflated profile. People are interesting enough. They don’t need to sell themselves. We’re simply providing the tools to allow them to be themselves.

So we match people based on the things they do. The checkins they create through our app in a diarised fashion. We then find common interests between potential matches and produce a recommendations list of profiles that the user actually has things in common with. Music, sports, film, culture and any combination of tastes since we believe that taste is very important when it comes to building longevity in a relationship. Indeed recent studies have shown that couples who have long enduring relationships more often than not have at least one common interest and that that interest reveals something unique about that person. It’s something their partner respects about them from the outset and that they themselves find fascinating. Whilst it’s true that it’s no guarantee of future chemistry, indeed the old adage of opposites attract comes to mind, assuming we’re not just talking about lust, at least you can be sure that when you finally get that date you will have something to talk about and that that feeling of awkward dissociation will be lifted as will the high expectation of success. In fact success is implied since you have real insight or knowledge about that person from their TrueView profile and therefore the date selection process is geared toward success rather than failure. Even if you end up just having a good old friendly chat and a nice night out everyone’s a winner.

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