M: Tell us about your business. What is your role in it?
Dattch is the first dating app that has been built exclusively for women. We’re a product for lesbian, bisexual and just curious women who are looking to meet each other. I’m the founder and CEO in our team of 4.
M: Tell us more about Dattch. How does it work?
We built the product from the wireframes up specifically for women as most dating products, straight or otherwise, have been designed for male behaviour and interactions. From the outset we optimized everything for women; we check all profiles to filter out the fake male accounts before they can join (it’s one of the biggest problems on lesbian apps), we have user profiles like Pinterest boards so you quickly see who someone is, what they do in their spare time and we make matches with female orientated games like Would You Rather. It’s not always about dating, we get a lot of women just looking for friendships but it’s always about creating the simplest possible experience to get talking.
M: Why is Shoreditch so relevant to your business?
Shoreditch is where the whole business has been focused since we started. I live here, I had the idea for it while in a pub here with my friends, I abused cafe privileges here when I first started working on Dattch & didn’t have an office and I relied on friends here to let me use their spare office space when we started to get a team. Now our whole team lives here and we all work here. So it’s kind of everything to us!
M: What has been the most memorable or challenging part about running your business?
We spent a while trying to use phone calls to validate users, which meant spending a long time talking to straight men looking for threesomes or guys that had failed our automatic checks and when spoke to them, would try things like “Oh no, I don’t actually want to join, my sister does. But she doesn’t have a phone, and she’s on holiday at the moment, so can you just approve my email address?”
M: Where do you like to hang out in Shoreditch?
My favourite places mainly revolve around eating, so Dishoom for breakfast, Ozone for brunch and The Love Shake for millkshakes.
M: What does the future hold?
Next up for us is building the product on to other platforms (we’re iOS only at the moment) and then growing our presence across the UK and getting ready to take it to other international markets.
