We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Taly Matiteyahu. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Taly below.

Taly, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Some of the most interesting parts of our journey emerge from areas where we believe something that most people in our industry do not – do you have something like that?

Most people in the dating industry believe that the convenience of asynchronous interactions outweighs the benefits of synchronous interactions.

Other dating apps have members set up profiles for others to peruse, consisting of a few photos, stats, and tidbits of information about the person. But profiles are pretty ineffective ways to assess compatibility and chemistry for a few reasons, a notable few include –
1) People can lie, and pretty easily no less
2) People can upload old, inaccurate, or misrepresentative photos
3) People can spend hours crafting their profiles to make themselves someone they think others will be interested in
The reality is that dating app profiles are just an advertisement. And we all know that advertisements can be misleading or false. And yet, daters spend hours looking at these advertisements when hunting for love. Even after daters match, they’re left to message one another (mind you, still complete strangers at this point), a time consuming and often fruitless process.

I’ve thrown that entire model out the window in building Blink. No profiles, no prompts, no places to try to present oneself in a particular light. Blink’s members’ interactions are real-time phone calls through the app, enabling them to quickly get a vibe check. Both research and user feedback has made clear that a ten minute phone call provides a more accurate perspective on who someone is and whether we’re compatible with them than days of texting can. It also gets daters way farther along in their connection and makes it easier to take a connection off the app sooner.

The inspiration for this fundamental shift in how we connect came from an experience eating at one of the few blackout restaurants in the world. It wasn’t the food that made the dinner so special, but the experience of connecting with strangers in complete darkness. Without seeing or being seen, we were able to truly connect with the others at our table, free of assumptions and self-consciousness. In the darkness, we were freed of our biases and our inhibitions. That night sparked the thought: would people find more satisfying relationships if they were able to make a connection with someone before swiping left? And the data from our app beta indicates that people would!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a lawyer by education, but left legal practice for a career in legal operations before transitioning to product management at a legal tech company. In 2020, out of a personal passion and interest in the dating space, I started building Blink (a dating app that eliminates swiping and profiles, instead playing matchmaker and setting members up for 10 minute in-app calls) on my nights, weekends, and spare time. In early 2022, I was able to shift to working on Blink full time.

I’m incredibly proud of a few parts of my journey –
1) Leaving legal practice and transitioning careers. It was scary af and I had no idea if it would work out, but I haven’t looked back once.
2) Taking something from an idea in my brain and building an app. In my wildest dreams, I could’ve never imagined that I would have created something that other people can download from the App Store and use to find love.
3) Having so many incredible people around me who support me and are helping Blink grow. It’s such a blessing and I take pride in knowing that these wonderful humans are just as excited to bring Blink’s vision to the world as I am.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

I don’t have much of a marketing budget at the moment but have wanted to work with micro-influencers. I figured that while I don’t have money or a tangible product (like makeup or a new purse or something) to offer them, I do have something else I could offer: legal services. And so, I started reaching out to creators to see if they’d be down to try Blink and post about it in exchange for help reviewing marketing contracts. It’s been an incredible way to reach new people despite my limited resources.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

I email every single person who goes on a date on the app. Literally every single one. Manually. It’s very time consuming and not scalable / something I can do forever, but opening up a direct line of communication with my beta members has planted the seeds for a community – my members give me the most thoughtful feedback and are so generous in sharing Blink with their friends and family, which means so much to me. I also meet a lot of members at events, which is a really powerful way to foster brand loyalty – so many people are excited to meet the founder of an app and hear the story behind it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.theblinkdate.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theblinkdate/
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/theblinkdate/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@theblinkdate
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@taleesita