FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

This Developer Used His Tinder Matches to Get Feedback on His App

It was a pretty ballsy move, but one that worked surprisingly well.
Rachel Pick
New York, US

Tinder is proving increasingly useful for more than just getting laid or finding love.

When Jacob Catalano was developing his app Peek, he wanted valuable feedback from people about its functionality. But real, honest feedback is hard to come by, so he had a novel idea—why not ask his Tinder matches to give it a try?

It was a pretty ballsy move, but one that worked surprisingly well. "Most of the time, people just don't respond. But the times that they do respond, they give pretty solid advice," said Catalano (who, despite being just 21 years of age, knows all about the similarly named character on 90s TV show My So-Called Life).

Advertisement
1-zrtlzAgIHSHMQXbUDoywjA.jpeg

Peek helps Snapchat users discover celebrities and notable personalities to follow on Snapchat, which has a pretty woeful interface when it comes to finding people to follow. Lots of famous people have chosen usernames that aren't as straightforward as their real names, making them harder to find if you're not in the know. (You can view a demonstration of the app here.)

Catalano went so far as to get some of his matches to download Testflight (an app that allows permitted users to test apps still in development) and give Peek a try.

"I probably got 40 or 50 people off Tinder to give me their emails [for Testflight]," Catalano told me. That seemed like a pretty high number to me, so I asked him if he matched with people he wouldn't normally match with to get more possible respondents. "In general, my Tinder strategy is pretty much 'always swipe right'," Catalano explained. (This is a common Tinder strategy that people use to save time.) He also notes that he subscribed to Tinder Plus to access a broader pool of test subjects.

This isn't the first time Tinder has been used outside of its intended purpose. A few weeks ago, Amazon used Tinder to try to recruit engineers with a fake profile belonging to a made-up person named "Amazononian." Interested parties were instructed to swipe right, like they would on any other profile. Ad agency Havas Worldwide also used it to recruit summer interns. And one woman (who deserves a MacArthur Genius Grant, in my opinion) used it to get guys to send her free pizza.

I asked Catalano if he thought his feedback might have been skewed, because it's hard to be harsh when you know you're talking one-on-one with the creator of what you're being asked to critique. He doesn't think so, saying it was easy for him to spot when people weren't being honest. "People do start going into that realm of being overly friendly, and they're just trying not to hurt your feelings," Catalano said. So he could tell when he was getting honest feedback, and when he wasn't.

Catalano posted screenshots of some of the most illuminating conversations in this Medium post. Unfortunately, he didn't end up going on a date with any of the people he surveyed, but it seems getting the feedback was worth it.