Hi all, I'm the Founder of SneakPeek and am excited to share it with the PH community. The reason I built this was because lets face it: photos and profiles can be deceiving. SneakPeek is a live video dating service that allows you to see and talk to your matches in real time. No fancy angles, duck-faces, or misleading personal marketing. What you see is what you get. Have meaningful conversations with people who actually want to meet and get to know you.
We match you with someone who fits your age/gender/location preferences, you have a live 2 minute conversation with them and rather than forcing you to have an awkward "shark tank" style pitch on why they should date you, we provide you a meaningful question to answer. You'd be surprised how much you can learn about someone when the right questions are asked. Only if there is a mutual match after the conversation, will you have access to that person's profile and ability to message them. So you are making the decision based on a conversation, not a too good to be true photo or static profile.
Would love to hear your feedback and hope you sign up for SneakPeek!
@bentossell@fahim305 Hey Ben- I agree with you! The toughest part of our beta tests was to get users over that initial fear of having a live conversation with someone, but when they did do it they were amazed at how much fun it was and how much they learned about the other so quickly. We believe that people frustrated with existing dating apps and that actually want to meet someone would similarly give it a shot and be delighted with this alternative approach once they try it
@fahim305 I can definitely see the value in chatting with someone in realtime. There is so much ambiguity and frustration around messaging someone you don't really know (yet). With video chat apps on the rise, I could see more users feeling comfortable with chatting this way.
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@fahim305 brilliant! This takes away the awkward silence of being a buy who can't come up with some half assed question to keep the conversation going. What made you think of this feature? Was it driven by the users?
@sharefloapp@fahim305 Great question! The inspiration came from several places, including the rise of social trivia games, monitoring of beta test users, Arthur Aron's 36 questions study, personal experiences, and user feedback. The beauty of the questions is not only does it give you something to talk about to avoid the awkwardness of the memorized 'pitch', but also that you can learn a lot about someone and their values when certain types of questions are asked. Our initial beta test users overwhelmingly told us they learned more about the other person in that 2 minute conversation than they had on weeks on other dating apps.
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@fahim305 this is great!! I was able to also hear an amazing talk by the founder of http://www.grindr.com which is a gay dating app, and the interesting thing about men is that they don't want to go through all the questions. They just want to know where there are other people of similar interest in the area..the founder spoke at #launchscale 2015. But I think your technique to ask questions also is brilliant because it opens people up and adds more context for them to respond to. With us having a shorter attention span, just getting a quick snapshot in 2 minutes or less is great!! BRAVO!!!!
interesting product. I've used online dating apps extensively in the past and one of the most valuable aspects is the convenience. with video chat, I'd have to put some effort into "getting ready" and look presentable. I'd imagine women would be equally or even more conscious as well. so while text/photo dating apps are used as a complement to real life dating, i feel like video chat competes more directly with it.
@lenndizzle Hi Lenny, this is very true that the amount of effort will be higher with video chatting as opposed to traditional dating apps, and we think that may not be a bad thing. We have interviewed hundreds of people that have told us their complaints about existing dating apps, and the top reasons were not finding serious people who actually want to meet. We believe that serious users who truly want to meet others and are tired of wasted time on swiping and unsuccessful first dates will be willing to put in that extra investment in these cases, and that it's worth putting the effort up front to have a live conversation to avoid time spent later on back and forth text conversations and first dates.
That said, we also believe that after getting over the initial fear of being on live video, it is tons of fun and most importantly you can learn infinitely more about people than through traditional swiping right dating apps.
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@lenndizzle I think it would almost always make sense to just skype with someone, but the issue is that skype doesn't have a social aspect to it. WOuld be cool if skype suggested conversations of your friends based on interests, etc...
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@fahim305@lenndizzle what do the both of you feel the future of dating is going to be? Will people fall in love with AI??
@fahim305 I commend you Fahim for really what it seems is you wanting to truly provide not simply a different alternative to the norm but something better. Nevertheless chatroulette as compared to say Periscope ( being one sided real time conversation ) is a good example of this not simply being a "simple" issue around duck faces or deception it is a very strong and complex sociological one.
How do you get a female to jump in the car with a strange man and take her to her destination that is not a simple problem to solve ( something uber and airbnb have had to figure out ) and the society was not ready for these concepts early on, it is very sociological and cultural one and technology doesn't respect this so we as the architects have to. Saying that these systems work because their is a digression of duck faces or fancy angles from the user experience is to be clearly misinterpreting society as a whole and seems to lean more toward a more male "focused" approach weather unintentional or not.
How would you combat the variating value perceptions from a male and female perspective. The desires and fears for women engaging in any social setting especially a romantic one are completely different for men thanks to our society. This doesn't make things insurmountable just harder problems to solve. I get that as a society in the 21st century we are more accustomed, and in many cases open to engaging in ways like this but in many ways we aren't especially if the offering doesn't work the way we think it should around privacy and safety regardless if it is an illogical position.
Would love to hear a bit more indepth on how this concept will work to protect women, elevate the quality of conversation and create a great tailored environment in each particular market.
Because in the us this isn't a thing but in south east asia this is already being done...there are even startups that allow you to cold call your data not picture focused this would not fly in America but it makes perfect sense in parts of Asia given their propensity to behave in this way socially.
@nicholassheriff I have similar concerns/questions - honestly, I've thought this every time a dating app has come up on PH that involves video. Given the amount of creepers (or unreasonably aggressive) people on dating apps, I'd be leery of doing video with strangers. But maybe video would actually decrease the amount of creepers/jerks since the person on the other end is more humanized rather than a face + text box on a screen. Either way, I'd be interested to hear what safety measures you're implementing.
@_chelleshock@nicholassheriff Hi Nick/Michelle, great points and questions. One of the reasons we created SneakPeek is because we also heard countless stories that men are overly aggressive and "dehumanized" since they don't see someone face-to-face during the conversation. By requiring the extra effort to get on a video conversation with someone, we believe that this will cater directly to the population looking for more serious people that want to meet up and have a relationship.
We will be enabling a flagging feature shortly as well as Facebook authentication with a minimum of 50 friends, so that users that show any level of inappropriate behavior will be forever kicked off. There are some other advanced technical features that we are reviewing and will implement as necessary. We take inappropriate behavior very seriously, and are a big believer that live video can provide significant benefits versus pictures and text when the right controls are put into place.
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