Kiwi dating app takes on Tinder, Hinge
Christchurch entrepreneur Emily Heazlewood’s own relationship journey was the catalyst for setting up matchmaking business Amor, writes Aimee Shaw.
Entrepreneur Emily Heazlewood, 29, says her love life (or lack of) inspired her to create a homegrown dating app. Fast forward, 18 months and two apps later, the Christchurch woman tells how she has her sights on expansion – namely Japan, where the government is paying its citizens to couple up to turn around declining birth rates.
Amor is a dating app that uses machine learning to match people looking for love. We call it matchmaking for busy people – an app that only matches you with people you would be compatible with.
The idea came to me about a year ago – I was single and kind of frustrated as I found it hard to meet someone that would align with me and my lifestyle. I wasn’t on the dating apps.
A year earlier I was on Hinge, but it was quite embarrassing; I was at a bar and a guy went over to my friend and said: ‘I see Emily is single, do you think I’ve got a shot with her?’. I was mortified by the thought of some random person knowing I was single. It seemed everyone in Christchurch knew everyone in the dating scene, and who was single.
I’ve created an app before, and I thought surely there has got to be a better version of dating apps. Personal experience, dating people with the wrong attachment style was something I thought we don’t really address; so that was the kind of idea that happened last year and what I’ve been working on since. Amor launched two weeks ago. We’ve had 400 downloads since we launched and 300 people have gone through the quiz and sign-up process.
I built the algorithm myself, based on lots of different studies put together and then a mathematical side of it. It works by identifying a personality type with an attachment style and then weighting it to find the match.
Sarah Finn Upton, who is one of the leading relationship experts in New Zealand, looked over it. As we match hundreds or thousands of couples we will be able to see why they are matched and understand where we can better change those dials to create better matches.
Romer [an earlier app that provided recommendations for food and activities] was about how you engage with things.
For example, if you saved lots of coffee spots, we would share more coffee shops with you, whereas this is based on deeper meanings of who someone is and much more quiz-based. A very different app from the back end as well.
We don’t have much competition from local apps. Tinder in New Zealand had about 15,000 downloads per month – you see a lot of downloads and deletes from those major dating groups per month, but when it comes to serious relationship matchmaking New Zealand-made, we didn’t come across much. Theresa Gattung has started doing matchmaking as a service with Compatico – and that just shows that it is a market that hasn’t been addressed well in New Zealand yet. Mainstream dating apps are more similar to Romer; judging off images and what you see, and that works for some people, but I think there is a deeper side to it. There are traditional matchmakers in New Zealand and,two that we came across charged $700 to get you three matches.
How much time and money have you invested?
I work full-time for Snowball Effect, and working on my idea in my spare time over the past year. I Airbnb-ed my house and moved in with my twin brother who keeps the cost low for me to enable me to save up. I have put $33,000 into the company to date.
next for Amor?
The Japanese government has rolled out programmes to matchmake because they have such a decline in population. There has been a bit of a decline in the quick-flick apps. Once we nail the basic app and metrics in New Zealand, to be sure of things like churn and retention, I think we’ll be taking this to Australia next and then Japan because there is a huge opportunity there.
I’d like to see Amor have 3000 downloads that convert to paid members per month by next March.
At the moment 40% of people who do our quiz instantly subscribe to the $30 per month, but hopefully we’ll have better conversion as we become more established.
What’s the opportunity for your business?
From the feedback we are getting, people are loving the app, and I genuinely think this can get really big. We host date nights and plan to run these in a number of regions.
We’ve done two in Christchurch where you get 15-minute dates with your top matches. We’ve already had couples come out of that. I think Amor can make a massive impact on the dating culture and busy professionals that want to find love.
Morgan Stanley predicts by 2030 over 45% of women will be childless and single. There is obviously this massive problem that people aren’t finding people they want to settle down with and children aren’t being born.
Research shows that is potentially women being a little bit too picky. The fairytale movies and social media hasn’t helped us mentally around this.
What’s been the biggest lesson you’ve learnt in business?
Pay for the best people possible – get the best skills around you. That saved me a lot of time and heartache this time round, compared to Romer. We nailed a lot more this time round, like talking to customers a lot earlier for feedback.
Most helpful piece of advice you have received?
Put your map out there. Everyone says don’t do that in case someone else steals your ideas, but the amount of times that I have said I am building a matchmaking app and I’ve been introduced to key people, has been amazing.
It means I have been able to attract a skill set of people we have around us today. There’s also an accountability that comes along with telling people you are doing something that comes with that too.
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