Coffee Meets Bagel, an online dating service which sends users just one “match” everyday at noon, appears to be doing quite well at the moment: one year in, the service has passed 640,000 matches and is launching in Chicago, DC and LA with a couple of new features.
Originally only available in Boston, NY and San Francisco, Coffee Meets Bagel operates in an evolving, highly competitive space. The service is about creating real relationships; it isn’t as heavy-handed as eHarmony, but is certainly more serious than the hot-or-not style Tinder.
With its expansion, Coffee Meets Bagel is premiering two new features: Mirror Mirror, which gives you a “score” based on how you rank against the rest of the service’s user base, and GIVE, which lets you recommend your matches to friends (if you think they’d be a better fit for them).
As you might expect, the Mirror Mirror feature could prove controversial, so it’s been handled carefully. Co-founder Dawoon Kang details that “we are careful as to how we word [your rating],” ranking users in the “top 20, top 40 and the rest.”
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Coffee Meets Bagel has so far maintained a surprisingly high retention rate, with 70% of its members active and checking matches daily. For potential users, it’s also worth knowing that the service currently has a 60:40 women to men ratio and 71% of its members are under the age of 30.
Online dating is a very difficult sector, and even Kang admits that traditional online dating can be “a very unnatural process.” Kang believes, however, that eliminating the process of browsing profiles — which doesn’t happen away from the keyboard — and allowing friends to recommend potential dates makes Coffee Meets Bagel much more compelling.
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