What is Spur? Spur is a social dating app where people can engage with each other through our interactive Pops. Pops make finding someone fun, allowing people to reply to your profile photos and videos with fun effects, songs, and memes! Spur enables people to create meaningful connections, show insight into their personality, and stand out from the crowd in the most fun and interactive way possible. People can shatter the ice by creating a personalized and meaningful interaction with every person they like.
Who built Spur?
Spur founder Alex Kashi is an elite computer/data scientist and researcher publishing papers at Stanford in some of the most prestigious scientific journals. He was instrumental in developing the machine learning algorithms for the first blood-based diagnostic for ME/CFS. This chronic debilitating disease affects more than 1% of Americans. This is particularly relevant in 2021 during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic where peer-reviewed research estimates that 10% of COVID-19 patients may develop chronic illness meeting the definition of ME/CFS. Alex delayed his studies at Harvard graduate school to turn his focus to helping people make better connections online. The rest of the team consists of Berkeley students and alumni, big tech veterans focused on assisting people to Spur more connections!
Why we need Spur
By analyzing usage statistics on dating apps, Alex found that being engaged is the most crucial factor to setting up quality dates online. The mechanical nature of current dating apps dominated by system 1 thinking makes it impossible to stand out. By creating a profile that activates system 2, the chance of making a meaningful connection increases dramatically. You activate system 2 when you see a profile that causes you to pause and look deeper. Creating a profile that reliably activates system 2 is hard, especially for the average person. One man, Blake Jamieson, achieved this by adding unexpected photo effects and the overlaid text “match of the day” on his photos, getting an astronomical number of connections for the time. While the ethicality of running dating experiments is questionable, it is unequivocal that activating system 2 leads to better results.
How Spur Started
“It is almost like people need to be spurred into action. That’s it I will call the new platform Spur!” Alex said while discussing the low engagement rate on typical dating apps. With the prevalence of swipe-based dating apps connections have become devalued, many people resort to swiping on all of the profiles they can hoping for a match without actively being engaged and trying to form meaningful connections. We bet if you go check your Tinder messages right now you will most likely notice that a large portion of our matches contain no messages, low effort messages like “Hey”, or even worse no responses. The fact is on typical dating apps more than 50% of conversations are unreciprocated, meaning that only one person sends a message.
Dating app burnout is so common online, mainly because of the repetitive nature of other platforms and the constant cycle of going on bad dates. When facilitating matching, most apps depend on algorithms that can easily be manipulated by misleading claims or contain inaccurate information. We believe that people are complicated and that who you are as an individual does not fit in a one size fits all profile. At Spur, we know that authentic human connection and self-expression are the way to make a great match, not a computer algorithm.
What makes a great dating platform
A great dating platform is all about connecting you with amazing people and facilitating genuine conversation. The current slate of apps restricts how you interact online, making it impossible to demonstrate the nuance and personality that would typically come out of face-to-face interactions. These restrictions force people to judge each other on a very superficial level. It shouldn’t have to be this way. Most apps restrict basic functionality behind a paywall making the basic app useless. Spur is entirely free and built to ensure people create the best connections possible without breaking the bank.
How is Spur different
Many new dating apps are simple remakes of an old idea, without adding anything. Spur is built rejecting the current dating status quo, getting rid of swiping entirely, with a new dynamic and highly interactive way to communicate. We enable people to create a unique and meaningful experience with each person they encounter. Eliminating the problems swipe-based dating apps face with unreciprocated conversations. We built a platform where users are highly engaged and demonstrate their personality with fun and interactive profiles. We look to the most popular social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat to understand how to engage an audience and bring many of the features you love from those platforms into Spur.
We facilitate the ability for people to stand out from the crowd, using their personality in funny, unexpected, and amusing ways, activating System 2, and achieving the level of respect they deserve. We recognize that who you are as an individual can not be expressed in a dating profile. We know first impressions matter and encourage you to tailor them to each person, bringing the human element to online social interactions, and not rely on mindless swiping.
Conclusion
So what is Spur? Our definition of Spur is to help people spark meaningful connections in the most fun and interactive way possible. We enable people to show insight into their personalities in a fun and engaging way. We make every interaction unique, so you never get bored meeting new people. We built spur be completely free to ensure you have the best experience possible meeting new people.
Start meeting people!
