If you could skip to the good part of meeting someone new, it might start with a new dating app called Skip.
Built in Seattle by tech veteran Scott Avy and a small team, Skip skips past some of the things that can make thousands of other dating apps tiresome, including chatting within the app.
Rather than diving into conversation that may lead nowhere, Skip is designed to help people land quality dates more quickly and safely. By removing chat — as well as endless swiping — Skip relies on automated screening, scheduling and communication to streamline things.
“Everyone’s burned out on dating apps. There are thousands of them,” Avy said. “I feel like there’s a new one every day, and honestly they really haven’t changed much in the last 10 years, if you look at like the mechanics of them.”
Skip — which officially launches Sunday on iOS and Android — features the usual profiles and photos of its users, and it does match people who both swipe right on one another. But the match process then moves to “deal-breaker screener questions,” in which a user chooses a variety of questions that their match must answer in order to move things along.
Do you like dogs?
Nope.
Next.
After the user reviews those answers they can accept or decline a date proposal in which the interested party chooses a location and activity based on parameters the user has set in advance.
To deal with ghosting, Skip starts a countdown eight hours before a date is set to start. Both parties must confirm the plans two hours prior to the date, or the app cancels it. Again, there has been no in-app chatting or exchanging of personal contact information at this point.
“We want to save people from that pain of the no-show,” Avy said.
The app does allow the ability to make an in-app call, for the first hour of the date, in case someone is running late or can’t find the other person. And afterward, both daters can leave an anonymous review of the other person — feedback which Skip uses to make the app safer and weed out potential bad apples.
Avy said all other dating app competitors are forfeiting that valuable information by allowing people to immediately chat and ultimately exchange phone numbers and move off app. At least Skip gets people on a date before they make that move.
“It’s almost like a blind date in some ways,” Avy said, except you can still see the person and get answers to a few key questions ahead of time. “Everyone wants that organic meet-up, and we’re the closest thing to that.”
Furthermore, Avy believes that advancements in artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, are only going to make dating app chats more troublesome as it becomes impossible to determine if a bot is at the other end of a connection.
Avy has been working in tech and apps for more than a decade, including in roles at Nike, Expedia and Indeed. In 2021, he launched the short-lived “Limit App,” a social media product which sought to limit the age of people who could use it to between 18 and 25 — and then kick them off at 26.
He’s bootstrapping Skip with a small team of other tech workers with experience at such companies as Amazon, Meta, Zillow and others. Future plans to generate revenue include partnering with date locations and transportation providers; offering options of post-date gifts; and generating leads for dating coaches. A subscription model is also possible.
