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Mobile · Consumer

A dating app engineered for real conversations

Swipe-based matching, realtime chat and trust & safety — built to turn matches into conversations rather than dead ends.

A dating app engineered for real conversations
Client
Consumer social startup (Europe)
Industry
Consumer social
Timeline
5 months to public launch
Platforms
iOS · Android
Overview

Dating apps rarely fail at matching — they fail at the moment two people are supposed to start talking. We built a product where the matching model, the chat experience and the safety layer are designed around one metric: matches that become real conversations.

The challenge

The founding team had validated demand but their prototype stalled at the conversation step. Matches piled up and went cold, moderation was manual, and realtime chat buckled whenever a campaign drove a traffic spike.

  • Fewer than one in five matches ever exchanged a message
  • Manual moderation could not keep pace with reports
  • Chat dropped connections under concurrency spikes
  • No signal on which matching factors actually predicted a conversation
Our approach

How we built it

  1. 01

    Model the conversation, not the swipe

    We re-scored matching on signals that correlate with people actually replying — shared intent, activity windows and response history — instead of proximity and photos alone.

  2. 02

    Make the first message easy

    Prompt-based openers seeded from each profile removed the blank-message problem, with expiring matches creating a gentle reason to start.

  3. 03

    Safety as a product surface

    Automated image and text screening, in-chat reporting, block-and-vanish and a moderation queue with clear escalation paths.

  4. 04

    A chat layer that holds up

    A WebSocket gateway with Redis presence and fan-out, offline queueing and delivery receipts, load-tested well beyond expected launch volume.

What we shipped

In the delivered product

Preference and intent-aware matching queue
Realtime chat with typing, receipts and offline delivery
Photo verification and automated content screening
Report, block and moderation console
Push notifications tuned against notification fatigue
Subscription tiers and paid boosts via in-app purchase
The outcome

Results

2.4x
More matches becoming conversations
4.7
Average app store rating
<120ms
Median message delivery
85%
Reports auto-triaged before review
More work

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