According to CrunchBase the St. Louis based dating platform Approach Dating raised $45K in debt financing this month. This falls hot on the heels of the company’s Beta being made available in the Google Play Store and the Apple App store in June.
The two-person St. Louis startup was founded in 2020 to take on the saturated dating site marketplace by addressing an ongoing problem faced by the major players.
“The current options… connect you through messaging and you can spend up to several weeks messaging with another user” and only 30 percent of connections end up meeting face to face at all, CEO Allison Cousins told the 4thEst8. That’s why Approach brings locations into the equation. “Bars and restaurants, coffee shops, ice cream parlors – any place you would have a first date with somebody — we are integrating those into the app so they can offer a safe place for our users to connect.”
Cousins says having a proposed meeting location as part of the early discussion will move things to the real world faster. Partner locations can also offer incentives to have that first date at their location too.
“We are recruiting users right now and in that recruitment process we’re collecting a lot of data,” Cousins said. “What features do users like? Which features will improve our product? From there we’re going to offer referral incentives for users to refer a friend.”
This fall Cousins expects to launch a premium version of the app that integrates the referral incentives and greater functionality. And on the business side they’ll be able to tell partner businesses how many people are being sent to their business, how many connections are in their area (missed opportunities) and what specials are most successful at drawing in customers. This month the company moved its headquarters into the Spark coworking space in downtown St. Louis.
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