Dating app Coffee Meets Bagel is making some big changes, rolling out a “ladies choice” update in the coming days.
The San Francisco-based startup says it has generated 2.5 billion introductions and created more than 50,000 happy couples. But the team thinks it’s time to switch it up from the one-a-day match suggestion and give its members more options.
Going forward, men will have 21 potential matches each day, because CMB research showed that men preferred to look through profiles of lots of ladies. And then women will receive a curated group of roughly five men who already said yes, since their studies showed that ladies are more selective.
“It became clear to us that singles, especially single women, are becoming exhausted with where mobile dating is headed,” said co-founder Dawoon Kang. “Dating has just become endless swipes of photos.”
Coffee Meets Bagel wants to be the place to find love, not hook-ups.
The dating app space is competitive and few have found viable business models. While Match.com has snapped up many of the top services like Tinder and OkCupid, others like Hinge and Bumble have yet to find a home.
Coffee Meets Bagel has found unique ways to monetize, however. App users can pay for beans (coffee beans, get it?) which can buy them anything from additional matches to profile stats.
“Revenue has grown double-digits every month,” according to Osuke Honda, a Coffee Meets Bagel investor at DCM Ventures. But he acknowledges that when it comes to dating apps “the barrier to entry is not necessarily the highest either.”
Coffee Meets Bagel has raised over $11 million in funding from DCM, Lightbank, Azure Capital and others.