Hater

» see haterdater.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Hater launched in February 2017 with a premise that reads like a sketch, which is what it had been. Brendan Alper had left an analyst job at Goldman Sachs to write comedy, and the app started as a bit about dating apps before he decided it might work as a product. You were shown a card with something on it, from slow walkers to cilantro, and you swiped in one of four directions to place it somewhere between love and hate. The app then matched you with people whose map of dislikes overlapped with yours.

The reasoning underneath it was not invented for the pitch. Research on how strangers bond had found that people connect quickly when they have a third thing to jointly run down, and that agreeing something is bad carries more specific information about a person than agreeing something is good. Alper leaned on that in every interview. It gave a joke app a straight face to wear, and it is genuinely the more interesting half of the idea.

It moved fast at first. Over 200,000 people signed up within weeks of launch, and the press wrote it up everywhere because the hook fit in a headline. Alper took it to the ninth season of Shark Tank and asked for 200,000 dollars against 5 percent. Mark Cuban countered with 200,000 for 7.5 percent plus 2.5 percent in advisory shares, and Alper took the deal on the floor. Cuban made himself a profile on the app afterward to push it.

None of this reached here. Hater ran on American cards, and the mechanic depended on already knowing which mid-tier celebrity or breakfast cereal you were being asked to rank. Turkey in 2017 had Tinder and Instagram like everywhere else, and a version of Hater that worked here would have needed a completely different list of grievances written by somebody who lived in it. Nobody built that. By the time the name reached me it was already in the past tense.

~ the record ~

~ the joke ~

The problem is visible in the numbers Alper gave on camera. Two hundred thousand registrations against eight to ten thousand people opening it on a given day. A novelty app converts curiosity into a download very efficiently and converts almost none of it into a habit, because swiping on whether you hate cilantro is funny exactly once. Hater had no subscription tier and no advertising at the time of the pitch, and neither the premium product nor the ad product it had planned ever shipped.

~ after the tank ~

The money from Shark Tank was smaller than the attention from it, and the attention is what the app actually ran on. Downloads reached roughly half a million after the episode aired. What a television appearance cannot supply is a reason to open an app on a Tuesday in March, and Hater never found one. It left both app stores during 2019 and the social accounts stopped, which is how a small consumer app usually goes: no announcement and no final post, only a listing that is quietly not there anymore.

Alper moved to Stockholm and built Everbloom, a video app for creators that raised around 3 million dollars. The domain did not die with the product. Today haterdater.com serves a live content site under the same name, publishing dating advice and reviews of rival services. That is the ordinary second life of a name with search traffic still attached to it.

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