Whitespace for the taking

Posted on May 10, 2011. Filed under: startups, venture capital |

I want to build an app that let’s you share your dating life with your friends. I would estimate that conversation about dating and pursuits of the opposite (or same) sex represent a higher volume of conversation than just about any other topic. When you catch up with anyone you haven’t seen in a while, the order of questions is basically: 1) how are you (served by Facebook, Twitter, Blogs), 2) how’s work? 3) how’s your love life / are you dating anyone / are you getting laid.? Beyond that, maybe we touch “how’s your family” “what did you do today/last night/this week and a few others, but especially in small groups of friends ranging from 13-35 years old, the details of our romantic pursuits occupy a huge portion of our overall interaction. Typically, web products come along that tend to productize the most frequent of our offline interactions, but there seems to be something of a “whitespace” around this type of sharing/conversation.

The app that I envision is a forum for you to share and discuss your love life with your friends. I want to be able to send a photo of a girl that I really like or one that I just went out with for the first time. I want to tell a story beneath the photo, or just a short note that says “so pretty, but soooo boring” or whatever captures my impressions of this temporal but potentially permanent new entrant into my life. I want to make it easier to communicate my experience to my friends when I am not sitting in the same room as them and therefore capable of answering the all to frequent request “show me this new girl on Facebook.” I want to tell a story, get advice, brag, laugh, and maybe even lament with the people who I share these conversations with everyday, weather they live down the block from me, or across the country.

I want to leverage the best of the web, and API’s and pull in photos from facebook, the native app on my smartphone, or any other environment where content or representations of the characters in my dating life exist. If I’m explaining to my friends from college why this girl is so interesting and deeply thoughtful I want to send a link to her blog, and write a note on top of it, and include a photo, and see their responses and I don’t want to do it in a mass email. Similarly, I want to follow my friends as they go through the most fundamentally human pursuit on earth. I want push notifications that say “your friend Tim just went on a date with this cartoonist” or “your friend Brett just fell in love with this girl from the subway.” I want to auth with every major dating site and enable people who are dedicated to dating to share that strange and exciting odyssey with people. “Look at this kindergarten teacher I’m about to meet” and the follow up with “He was really sensitive, but his breath was fucking terrible. No go.” These are the conversations that we have every day, I want to enhance them with richer forms of media and concepts of following/updates/and mobility that the web and mobile web can deliver.

I want these conversations to be strictly private and I want them to expire within 24 hours. Shared only with the people who I share with in the real world. I want to grant access only to a small group, and request access from those who I care about. I want to let my friends who are now married live single life vicariously through me, and at the same time, perhaps provide a forum for them to share matters of the married heart. I want to build this app, but I don’t have time to build it. If you are a builder or designer and want to build this app with me, I might be able to give you some desks and some money . Holler.