Many dating apps match people through swipes, but a new app called Firefly seeks to match college students up in a more compatible way, just in time for Valentine’s Day. The app’s inaugural Valentine’s Project, which was launched in January at three Bay Area universities, aims to help students find their most compatible matches on their campus through quizzes and the option to write up to 10,000 characters about themselves.
Each Valentine’s Project participant will be matched with one other person on their campus on Feb. 13 at 8 a.m. The project’s quiz submissions close a day before and users choose to answer fifteen quizzes out of a selection of over 200.
“Traditional dating apps, like Hinge, offer the bare minimum in pre-qualifiers — such as checkboxes for ‘wants kids’ or ‘is religious’ — but dating needs more nuance than that,” said Daniel Mossaband, Firefly’s founder and San Francisco State University alum.
Mossaband said that he’s always thinking of ways to improve existing software and websites as a hobby. He found out that Match Group owns many dating apps and has been converting them into swipe-based apps and felt that he could make something better.
The app began two and a half years ago when Mossaband made a simple version of Firefly just to see if people would like it.
“But then in the past, like four or five months, I realized like, ‘okay this is actually like — there’s a chance that this could do well and it would be foolish for me to just try it on my own,’” Mossaband said.
He said the biggest difference is that users are matched through quizzes instead of swipes. Users answer a variety of quizzes ranging from trivial questions like “cats or dogs?” to more serious questions such as “do you believe people can change?” and the quizzes allow users to elaborate on their responses.
“Using that, we have an algorithm, like it produces a match percentage score and so it’s more than just your looks and a few sentences,” Mossaband said. “Then the match percentage score is what helps people gauge whether or not this person is actually a good match.”
Judith Wang is Firefly’s marketing strategy advisor and came up with the Valentine’s Project, which is also available at UC Berkeley, the City College of San Francisco and the University of San Francisco.
Wang came up with the idea after hearing about the Aphrodite Project at the University of Waterloo.
“I live in Canada,” Wang said. “A lot of my university friends who went to Waterloo knew about it and it was kind of a similar idea that didn’t really have an app for, but they used a questionnaire and they also matched it. So I thought that it would be something great to bring into the San Francisco area which is a place that Firefly was born out of and we’re kind of focusing on right now.”
Wang said that the dating environment is difficult, especially now, with so many dating apps that can provide many matches.
“There’s a wealth of choices that maybe creates this ‘analysis paralysis’ for a lot of students,” Wang said.
Mossaband said that focusing on the quality of a match is better than connecting users to many poor matches.
Wennie Ye, an SFSU student and Firefly user, had mixed feedback for the app.
“I like that the app has privacy settings for the sexual questions, but I wish it was for all the questions,” said Ye, who also mentioned that the fifteen quizzes required for the project didn’t seem like enough.
Ye also liked that the app allows users to elaborate on their responses to the quizzes but prefers a bulleted list.
Ansley Bergado, a third-year visual communications design student, said the app sounded interesting and that she’d try it if she weren’t already in a relationship. Bergado also said people would be more likely to try a dating app that matches users based on longer responses rather than swipes.
“I just feel like you get to know more about that person other than just looking at their face and taking them at surface value,” Bergado said. “I know on Hinge, you have the prompts, but I feel like you don’t really get to know that much about them based off of that. If you get a whole prompt paragraph, then you could get more of an idea of who they are.”
