HowAboutWe

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

~ the goodbye ~

howaboutwe was a dating site where you did not post a profile. you posted a date. how about we get a coffee at this brooklyn spot, how about we kayak on the hudson, how about we go see a screening at film forum. other users responded to the idea instead of swiping on your face. the founders, brian schechter and aaron schildkrout, were two former public school teachers from new york who wanted dating to feel less like a job interview and more like a plan.

the brand launched in september 2010, raised a series a round in 2011, and added a couples product called howaboutwe for couples in 2012 to keep paying customers after the singles had paired off. iac acquired the dating and media assets in july 2014 for a price that the press releases left undisclosed. iac relaunched the product in april 2015 as an on-demand dating app called tonight where you pressed a button and got a date within five minutes. by 2017 the standalone service was gone, and the howaboutwe.com domain redirected through date hookup into match.com.

howaboutwe did not reach turkey. it was a new-york-coded product about pitching specific bars and venues in specific cities, which is a thing that does not translate. by the time iac killed it, dating apps in turkey were tinder downloaded on a stolen vpn, plus whatever your cousin's cousin set you up with. the activity-first pitch never had a chance to land here because the activity is the part that requires local knowledge, and local knowledge does not scale.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

the user-facing argument was that dating profiles are static lies people write about themselves while dates are real things two people do together. so write the date, not the profile. the business-facing argument was that user-generated date ideas become free seo content. someone googling for fun things to do in brooklyn on a saturday night lands on a howaboutwe page where a real person had already pitched the exact thing. it was a clever growth flywheel until the seo algorithms changed and the flywheel stopped spinning.

~ what iac did with it ~

iac owns most of the dating internet: match, okcupid, tinder, plenty of fish, hinge later on. acquiring howaboutwe was a defensive move against a small startup pulling a different angle on the same problem. iac does not run small startups well. the april 2015 tonight relaunch was a strategic pivot. the 2017 brand absorption was the strategy finishing. by then the founders had both left, schildkrout to uber and schechter to the public sector.

~ what stayed ~

the activity-first dating pitch did not die with howaboutwe. it shows up in bumble's prompts, in hinge's voice notes, in every dating app that now asks you what you would do on a perfect sunday instead of asking you to upload another mirror selfie. the format won. the brand that invented it did not get to keep the win.

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