The cold-start problem is still the only launch problem that matters

We look at a lot of new dating apps, and the pattern is consistent enough to state as a rule: the product idea is almost never the reason an app fails. Liquidity is.

A dating app is a marketplace, and a marketplace with too few participants does not deliver a slightly worse experience than a full one. It delivers no experience at all. A user who opens an app, exhausts the available profiles in ten minutes and finds nobody within a reasonable distance does not conclude that the matching algorithm is interesting. They uninstall.

Why it is harder here than in other marketplaces

Three reasons that compound.

Geography is a hard constraint. A thousand users spread across a country is not a thousand users; it is a handful in each city, most of whom will never be plausible matches for each other. National launches routinely produce apps that feel empty everywhere.

Both sides must arrive together, and the composition matters. An app with heavily skewed demographics delivers a poor experience to everyone in it, including the over-represented side.

Retention is adversarial to the product’s stated purpose. An app that works for a user removes that user from the pool. Every other marketplace gets to keep its successful customers.

The strategies, and how they fare

Geographic concentration — launching in one city and refusing to expand — is the approach that most often works, and the one investors are least patient with.

Waitlists convert absence into anticipation and let an app accumulate enough sign-ups to open with density. Effective when the release is genuinely concentrated; theatre when it is not.

Campus and community launches work for the same reason city launches do: a bounded population with natural density and existing social overlap.

Paid acquisition at scale buys users but not necessarily the right distribution of them, and the economics are punishing at the entry price these apps command.

What we would ask any new app

Not what its matching model does. Where it is live, how tightly, and what a user in the third-largest city in that market actually sees when they open it. We ask companies for user figures and report them where they publish them, attributed and dated — and note, as we generally must, that most do not publish regional numbers at all.

An app with an ordinary product and real density beats a brilliant one with none. That has been true for as long as this category has existed and it has not stopped being true.

Coverage here is for adults; the apps discussed require users to be 18 or over.