Founder Kim Kaplan (L) and the Snack app (R) (Source: Snack)
Alexa, play Chris Lane’s song with the lyrics: “What’s your name, what’s your sign, what’s your birthday?”
Now, imagine people using this song as part of their dating profile. Think, a teen guy dancing to the song while a text pops up, showing “his name, his sign, his birthday.”
Meet Snack: A video-first dating app with users doing just that. It’s only a few months old and has already raised $3.5M.
The Hustle recently spoke with founder (and former Match Group executive) Kim Kaplan to get the scoop.
On most dating apps, the sequence of events is similar: swipe right (or left) on various profiles. Then, feel the pressure to immediately start a semi-witty conversation via DM.
However, younger users, like Gen Zers (today’s largest generation), are doing things differently; once matched on Hinge or Tinder, 2 users then start engaging on Snapchat and Instagram.
Kaplan realized that “users didn’t want the pressure of starting a whole conversation. Instead, they wanted to watch each others’ stories, comment, and casually engage over time.” AKA a white space in the market.
First, users create videos and post them to their profiles (similar to TikTok). Users can then scroll through a feed of other peoples’ videos (similar to Instagram). Once two users have “liked” each others’ videos, direct messaging is enabled.
Users are incentivized to keep posting new videos so that other users see more of their personality and have more content to engage with.
So, dancing for love? Let’s go.