And in this week’s episode of “gamified dating apps that don’t necessarily make sense,” might I introduce Floret.
Floret is a new dating app that focuses on a common problem known as the stable marriage problem, which essentially means that elements in a group are matched based on preferences, without any two elements in the group preferring one another over their original match.
Here’s the exact wording from the company website:
Given n men and n women, where each person has ranked all members of the opposite sex with a unique number between 1 and n in order of preference, marry the men and women together such that there are no two people of opposite sex who would both rather have each other than their current partners. If there are no such people, all the marriages are “stable”.
With that principle as the guiding force, Floret takes four girls and four guys and puts them in a ranking game together. After ranking the opposite sex from one to four, Floret tells you who you match up with based on the stable marriage problem. In other words, you always match with someone, but that doesn’t mean you will always match with your first choice.
Players are ranking each other in real time, with a little over a minute to make your final choices from a set of pictures and a short bio.
“If the players in the game were all on a desert island, none of them would ever have to worry about their partner running off with someone else,” said Floret CEO and CTO Milad Moh. Unfortunately, the players are not on a desert island and it’s somewhat demoralizing to be matched with your third or fourth choice in the group.
Oddly enough, Floret doesn’t focus on location the same way that most dating services do, hoping instead to create a virtual world of romance.
When I asked why, Moh simply said, “It’s easier.”
“Having a relationship virtually, through videos and photos and messages, is easier than meeting up in real life,” he said. “That’s why we’re using online communications tools so much right now, anyways, right? Because it’s easier.”
That said, Floret doesn’t seem like the kind of app that will match you with your soul mate. It’s more of a game, paired with the excitement of an online fling. That’s not to say that some virtual relationships don’t eventually become very serious, but I think most people consider IRL interaction a necessity of a real relationship.
Floret is currently focused on user acquisition, with plans to sell virtual goods through in-app purchases somewhere down the road. Floret graduated out of StartEngine, and claims to have an undisclosed amount of funding from a large dating company, though declines to specify which.
You can check out Floret in the App Store here.