The strain of chauvinist bro culture running through the tech world may have attained its fullest expression at Tinder, where an ex-executive claims she was called a "slut" and a "whore" and hounded about the details of her sex life, among other indignities alleged in a recent lawsuit.
But that kind of behavior, beyond the pale as it may be in the corporate world, isn't that far off from the sort of thing women encounter every day on Tinder and other online dating services, according to Brian Freeman and Andrew White, the cofounders of a new love-finding app called Wyldfire.
As its name suggest, Wyldfire owes more than a little of its inspiration to Tinder, which Freeman and White first experienced a year ago when, both fresh out of long-term relationships, they signed up to restart their dating lives. Comparing notes, they each observed that most of the women they encountered there seemed excessively wary.
"We'd get in these chats with them and it would just end very quickly," says Freeman. "We hadn't even had the chance to say anything creepy or insane to get them to abandon us."
Intrigued, they did some research and learned that most dating apps and sites have more male users than female ones. They then surveyed female friends about their experiences with online dating, who told them the biggest drawback was the indiscriminate and explicit come-ons they received from guys. "That got the wheels turning in our heads," says Freeman.
The idea that emerged: an app-based service that men could only join if invited by a woman member. Essentially, every guy on it comes pre-vetted with a "Not a Total Creep" stamp of approval from an actual woman. There are a few other peculiarities -- for instance, chats are limited to 20 messages to avoid wasting either party's time -- but on the whole it's basically a lot like Tinder, as its cofounders freely admit. "Without Tinder, we wouldn't exist," says Freeman. "We've taken their idea and spun off something we think is super highly valuable off the core concept."
In public beta since June, Wyldfire only has about 6,000 users so far, but that group tilts 60:40 female, a ratio Freeman says shows they're on the right track. "We've done a little bit of the impossible and created a heterosexual app where there are more girls than guys," he says.
A cynic might say that sounds less like a safe space for men than like a frat party, especially considering who's behind it: two 30-year-old dudes from San Diego. (Both Freeman and White have backgrounds in design; Freeman was working in sales previously and White in real estate.)
"We are two guys," acknowledges Freeman, "but I think we picked up early on that in the world of dating, women, in essence, run the show." Five of the 11 members of the launch team are women (although none of its three engineers), along with "three or four other girls on our go-to advisory board," and they're hoping to hire another woman as director of marketing. "We've kind of surrounded ourselves with women because otherwise we'd be making the same mistake we feel everyone else is," says Freeman.
Sarah Cardey, Wyldfire's operations manager, says she and the other women on the team often weigh in to "tone down the voice" of Freeman and White. "They're still guys, so some of their ideas aren't necessarily on par with the way a woman would look at things," she says. An example: Freeman and White thought it would be cool to publish the internal score assigned to each user in the matching algorithm; the women on the team convinced them to make a "Trending" feature but leave out the number.
Backed by $150,000 in angel money, Wyldfire is ramping up with the help of a mobile-first accelerator in San Francisco called Momentum. Already in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, it's launching in five new cities this week: New York, Chicago, London, Washington D.C. and Boston.
For a startup with limited funds in need of publicity, the recent events at Tinder couldn't have been much better timed. While insisting that "we're not reveling in the misfortune of another business," Freeman allows that it's a boon. "It actually, ironically, speaks to exactly what we're trying to do which we think they don't do, which is care about the women's perspective on dating."
