New San Francisco Dating App Soon Focuses on Meeting in Person

A dating app launched by two friends in San Francisco has already gained 6,000 new members, thanks to its clever hook of getting you to a real-life date as quickly as possible.

Soon works like a traditional dating app, allowing members to set up profiles, swipe and match. But once a match is made, instead of messaging first, the app presents a calendar and list of options for where to meet so you can schedule your first date. The idea is to get you meeting IRL, where you aren’t wasting a lot of time on texting a match that goes nowhere.

The meet-up places are not restaurants, but rather bars, coffee shops, or parks, because as the twenty-seven-year-old co-founder Cora Kyler told San Francisco Gate: “There’s no dinner. That is way too much of a commitment for a first date. We call it a ‘zero width’ date. It’s a vibe check, mostly coffee or a drink.”

Kyler and her friend and co-founder Alena Titova, who handles the design of the app, said the two biggest problems dating app users encountered were messages that went nowhere and disappointing first impressions, according to San Francisco Gate.

Another distinguishing feature of the app is “Glimpse,” where users can record a 10-second video of themselves using a prompt like “a childhood story that captures who I am now” that they can share with a match. If they mutually approve of each other’s Glimpse, they can go ahead to scheduling the date.

Soon also limits the amount of swipes a user gets per day to 12, and for its in-person blind date mixers, only 50-100 people are allowed. When a user returns from a date, they are encouraged to fill out a “journal entry” on the app about the date, so the algorithm can find better potential matches going forward.

The co-founders can be found papering neighborhoods with “Date Offline” flyers advertising the app, and interviewing singles about their dating app experiences and posting to the company’s TikTok feed - which is 32,000 followers strong.

The app is currently available to San Francisco users only, but the co-founders hope to expand.

San Francisco Gate points out that despite the marketing and the demand, people who want to use Soon are screened before receiving access. This is not to create exclusivity based on social media or industry clout like The League or Raya, but to ensure there’s a large enough pool of potential matches based on similarities like age and industry.

The co-founders hope to monetize the app by partnering with bars and coffee shops they recommend to matches. So far, they have only taken about $1 million in seed money from VCs.

For more on this dating service, check out the Soon website.