Date night on a school night… there’s an app for that. Yesterday Match launched Stir, a dating app for single parents. Match owns over a dozen matchmaking apps, like Tinder and Hinge, which together reach 16M+ paying users worldwide. Now Match is targeting the 20M single US parents.
- Penciling in: Stir’s “me time” feature lets busy parents create a calendar-like schedule so that potential matches can see the best time to meet between work and soccer practice.
- Sans-swipe: Users can scroll from a roster of local singles, but the Tinder-esque swipe is gone.
- Freemium: Stir is free to download and use, but for $40/month you get bonus features like “super likes” to let people know you’re really into their profile pic.
Balancing act… The US has the world’s highest rate of one-parent homes, but it’s a market overlooked by dating services. A quarter of single parents say coordinating schedules prevents them from dating. On mainstream apps, singles with kids have a harder time connecting to those without: over half say they’ve been ghosted after a first date. With Stir:
- Match can grow its Western user base, which is recovering faster compared with Asian countries, where Covid lockdowns have been blocking meetups.
- Match has been building a suite of dating apps based on relationship type (hook up vs. committed), age, race, and religious preferences — now it’s targeting based on family structures.
You can go wide or you can go niche… While rival Bumble is expanding into platonic relationships (like: Bumble Biz and Bumble BFF), Match is going all in on romance with a segmentation strategy. Picture: apps like Hawaya, which caters to Muslim singles, and OurTime, aimed at singles over 50. The timing seems right: last quarter Match’s sales grew 24% — but paid users fell for the first time since the pandemic began.