When Joe Feminella decided to try dating apps, he was hoping for a love story like his parents’, who met at a bar.
After matching with Hannah Feminella on Hinge, he told her, “I think you’re really interesting, but if we don’t meet quickly, we’re never going to meet.”
The pair met that evening. Three years later, they got married.
The Feminellas’ story was partially the inspiration for First Round’s On Me, an El Segundo-based dating app that launched nationwide in late August armed with $5 million in funding. The platform sets itself apart by requiring users to arrange a date 24 hours after matching.
“It kind of was a real proof of concept,” Joe Feminella said.
A tumultuous market
There is seemingly a dating app for everyone – West Hollywood-based Grindr caters to gay men. Venice-based Lox Club is a members-based dating app for Jewish people. Sawtelle-based Three Day Rule offers online tech-enabled matchmaking services. Capital raised in this sector peaked in 2023 with $2.05 billion, according to Pitchbook data.
That’s why, when Joe Feminella started the company in 2020, he and his wife soft-launched the platform in select markets like New York City, Los Angeles and Miami before introducing it nationwide in 2024. During that incubation period, the couple collected feedback from users and hosted events.
“If I went national right away, it probably would have been not saturated enough to create a fire where there’s not enough people, and it would have kind of died on deaf ears,” Joe Feminella said.
First Round’s On Me is operating in a relatively saturated global dating market – 5% of which is located in Los Angeles, according to Pitchbook – and one that users have come to largely distrust. The Match Group conglomerate dominates the sector, with companies like Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid and Plenty of Fish in its portfolio. A class action lawsuit was put forth against Match Group in February for using “predatory” tactics to get users to pay for dating apps’ premium features at the expense of potentially successful dates. Tinder came under fire for its algorithm that ranks each individual based on their desirability and popularity.
“How much can those algorithms really know what you’re about? We’re so nuanced as human beings,” Hannah Feminella said. “Sometimes we have this checklist of what we think we want. And oftentimes the person we end up falling in love with or end up having long standing relationships with are quite varied from that predetermined list that we have.”
Technology’s role in love
If Match Group is trying to drive more users to pay for its apps, it’s not working. Second quarter earnings found that users were dialing back on discretionary spending, including app subscriptions. At the beginning of the year, Tinder downloads fell – for the third year in a row – by 6% year over year, according to Sensor Towers. Bumble shares fell 30% after it missed Wall Street estimates in August.
Hinge is turning to artificial intelligence to boost the app’s capabilities, its chief executive told Fortune Magazine in January. Indeed, plenty of platforms that use ChatGPT functionalities to create cheesy pick-up lines or generate conversation exist.
Will they work? Joe Feminella isn’t holding his breath.
“Why do they keep going the wrong way with the new AI-based features? I’m like, they’re just not getting it,” he said. “People don’t want that. People want the opposite. They want something more real.”
