COSMOPOLITAN - Nov 5 - Dating app Once launched in France and recently made its way stateside. Instead of passively swiping through profiles, Once introduce each user to only one person, per day. If the users both like each other, they start a conversation and see where it leads. If not, they have to wait until the next day to meet someone new. But what if all potential matches are bad? Jean Meyer, CEO of Once, says making good matches is a concern, obviously, but he's more focused on cutting down absentminded app time. "Even if your match of the day is crap, it's okay," Meyer says. "Maybe you're not going to talk to that person, but at least you're going to put the app away, and you may even put your phone away and do something else with your day. You can put 100% into another task that's not swiping on ten-thousand profiles." The League, which only serves users a few matches per day, operates on a similar premise as Once. And when Hinge redesigned to eliminate swiping and force people to slow down a bit, users grew by more than 400%.
VANCOUVER SUN - Oct 7 - Already live in 34 American cities and London, Paris and Toronto, The League is launching in Vancouver. The exclusive dating app bills itself as "a dating app catering to the intelligent, educated and ambitious". It was founded by Amanda Bradford in 2014, after the entrepreneur had an epiphany: Tinder can help you sidestep the unattractive, but it does nothing to protect you from the indigent, and under-employed. Already boasting a wait-list of 3K, The League plans to launch with 500 selected users. "We authenticate with LinkedIn," said the app's spokeswoman Meredith Davis.
LINKEDIN - Sep 19 - Dating app The League has just launched in Paris. This makes city number 37 for the selective dating app, dubbed the "tinder for elites," which is aimed at young, successful individuals.
STANDARD.CO.UK - Aug 22 - Selective dating app The League, which is aimed at young, successful individuals, launched in London last summer. The San Francisco-based club is gearing up to open in Paris next month, and in the lead-up has just hosted 70 of its users on a week-long boat trip in France. They mingled over morning yoga, long brunches, and an all-day free bar while cruising down the Seine in Paris. The League screens applicants wishing to join the app on a number of different criteria, including job title, education and industry. To help vet prospective members, users must sign up using their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. And the selection process for the cruise was just as meticulous. "We had ~5K applicants for the trip," said The League's CEO and founder, Amanda Bradford. The majority of guests reserved private balconies and private studios, she said, which averaged at ~$3,500 each, plus flights. And according to club, three couples have already sprung from the trip.
BUSINESS INSIDER - June 30 - This August, dating app The League is hosting a weeklong cruise in France, in conjunction with U by Uniworld. ~80 users will mix and mingle in the hopes of finding love; the itinerary includes touring Versailles and biking along Seine. So far, ~2,600 League users have applied. Depending on the type of accommodation, the price of a flight and a room is ~$3k.
DAILYMAIL.CO.UK - May 11 - The League, a dating app for career and educated-minded adults looking for a relationship, has revealed that users who include a picture with their mothers have a higher match rate. Most of the users with photos of their moms are men (55%). In addition to showing that someone is family-oriented, it can indicate that a man treats his mother well - and is likely to treat women well in general. For a woman pictured with her mother, it can offer men a peak into what she might look like when she gets older.
BLOOMBERG - Apr 17 - The League connects educated, affluent millennials. The app initially targeted Bay Area singles, and has now 300k active users and a 500k-person waitlist. The app has expanded into Pittsburgh, Tampa, and Orlando. The League has no shortage of competitors. Luxy bills itself as the No. 1 dating app for millionaires. Raya calls itself a "private, membership based community." Sparkology describes itself as a "curated dating experience for young professionals" and accepts members only by invitation or referral. More Americans are seeking spouses with similar levels of schooling, a pattern known as assortative mating. Couples in which both members had at least a four-year degree made up 14.7% of all married people in the U.S. in 2015, up from 1.9% in 1960, when far fewer women attended universities. by Jeanna Smialek See full article at Bloomberg Businessweek
THE PLAIN DEALER - Apr 10 - A handpicked group of 500 Cleveland-area singles, chosen from a wait list of 3,000, received full access to The League dating app and were able to receive their matches selected by the app's algorithm. Every day, members of The League receive the profiles of two or three potential dates on their phones. Send the most interesting person a "heart," and if one is returned, the app opens into a chat function so the two people can arrange a date. The League now has ~1M people on its wait list in 30 cities.
BUSINESS INSIDER - Mar 22 - Dating apps are starting to offer fewer, more curated matches. Dating app Once delivers users one match per day. Then, users have 24h to decide whether they are interested. Once has been available in Europe since 2015; it launched in the US in Feb 2018 and now has 200K US users. Coffee Meets Bagel, which launched in 2012, also presents women with one "bagel" (match) a day. (Men receive up to 21 matches every day and select the people they like, so the app chooses women's bagels from among the men who indicated they liked them.) The League, which launched in 2015, is a more selective dating app for ambitious professionals. Then there's Happn, which debuted in 2014 in Paris. Users who subscribe to Happn Essential get 10 chances to "Say Hi" to another user every day. It's possible that daters and app-developers alike have begun to observe the effects of what social scientists call "choice overload" or the "paradox of choice." The more options you have, research suggests, the less likely you are to make any decision at all.
MASHABLE - Mar 22 - Since news broke about Cambridge Analytica's "hijacking" of 50M Facebook users' data in a bid to influence the U.S. election, people are thinking about deleting Facebook. But deleting Facebook will also prevent them from accessing their existing Tinder account. They can sign up for Tinder using phone number. This will, however, create an entirely new profile. With Bumble, it's a little different. Bumble currently requires you to have a Facebook account in order to sign up for the app. But, if users deactivate their Facebook, they can still keep Bumble profile and access it as usual. That access will end, however, if they log out of Bumble. Bumble is less than a couple of weeks away from releasing an update that includes a non-Facebook login. User of The League would need to upgrade to a membership option if they want to cut ties with Facebook. Hinge also insists on users having a Facebook profile. far too many dating apps are tethered to Facebook. It's high time they offered users another way to sign up.
OPW - Feb 20 - Every year we take a look at who scored the most press summaries on Online Personals Watch. We look for top tier news and summarize what we think is most interesting to you, our audience of Internet dating industry leaders, app designers and marketers.
OPW - Feb 4 - If you missed iDate, you missed a great business conference. This was the best iDate Internet Dating Conference for a few years. Marc pulled together a great line up of speakers and show. Meetme's co-founder Catherine Cook gave an amazing talk to demystify video in the Internet dating context. Amanda Bradford gave an awesome talk on the future of Internet dating. Super impressed with both of these talks. We had the COO of Spark, a super-affiliate, an OKCupid data scientist, a gay dating expert, an A.I. guru... Anyway, check out my little vlogs of the event.
Day 1
Day 2
The next iDate is in Los Angeles in early June. This is the Mobile Dating Conference, so is focused on mobile dating apps. Beyond that, this particular conference will focus of the emergence and applications of Artificial Intelligence in Internet dating. Who's doing it, and what we could do in the future to use A.I. to vastly improve our services and value. Hope to see you there. ;-)
WWD - Jan 31 - In the spirit of Valentine's Day, the retailer is getting into the dating-mating game. L&T hosted an event at the Andaz bar in New York with The League, a social and dating mobile app. The event hosted TV personalities Dean Unglert, Eric Bigger, Amanda Stanton and Ashley Iaconetti from "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette." 23 women and 23 men from The League were invited to participate. Founded in 2015, The League has a selective admissions-based model, and uses data and social graphs from Facebook and LinkedIn to fuel its proprietary algorithm.
OPW - Jan 26 - The 2018 iDate Awards winners were announced and provided trophies at a ceremony during iDate (Internet dating conference) this week. The iDate Awards are the dating industry's most recognized awards, highlighting the best and most innovative aspects of the business.
AOL.COM - Jan 18 - Along with CheapCaribbean, the dating app "The League" is hosting an epic Valentine's Day bash called "Paired Up for Paradise." People looking for love in both NYC and San Francisco can attend the singles party to meet with potential suitors. One lucky new couple from each bash will be sent on a 5-star getaway to the Caribbean that exact night.
WEBWIRE - Jan 18 - Amanda Bradford, CEO of The League, will discuss "The Future of Dating" at iDate Internet dating conference that is taking place next week - Jan 24-26, Delray Beach, Florida. Amanda will discuss what dating will look like in the future.
FINANCIAL TIMES - Nov 27 - These exclusive dating apps promise a more refined, exclusive and ultimately fruitful experience.
Raya - an "exclusive" dating app that offers access to another echelon of society. According to members, entry into the club is a semi-arbitrary process that depends on users' status in the celebrity hierarchy, looks and following on Instagram.
The Inner Circle - it was founded in 2012 in Amsterdam by David Vermeulen . "We try to focus on people who are inspiring and ambitious," he says, adding it has ~500K users worldwide. The site uses Facebook and LinkedIn to help vet applicants and runs events.
The League - aims at the same demographic. "You're joining a community of triple-vetted people who are ambitious and intellectual enough to have a LinkedIn account and you're seeing what they do and their background," says founder Amanda Bradford, who started the company in 2014 and says it now has 250K MAU.
HARVARD LAW TODAY - Nov 9 - Amanda Bradford, the founder and CEO of The League, a dating app aimed at ambitious young professionals, joined the Harvard Association for Law and Business (HALB) for a Q&A. The app was officially launched in early 2015. After raising money largely from female investors during the early stages, she was able to get other venture capital firms on board. Bradford advised students in the audience considering startup work in the future to surround themselves with the best-in-class people in the industry and get experience doing the unglamorous tasks that drive the company forward. Bradford's work at Salesforce and Google taught her important lessons about product development, marketing, and building a strong internal culture that guide her as a CEO today.
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