A brand new relationship app referred to as Cosmic needs to shake up the market by not charging for fundamental options like seeing who likes you or undoing your final swipe, whereas additionally making it simpler for customers to construct profiles that higher mirror their personalities utilizing a mix of character quizzes and machine studying expertise.
Now accessible to the general public, Cosmic is the primary product to debut from the startup Pleasant Apps, based by longtime engineer and product designer Michael Sayman and backed by $3 million in seed funding.
The developer has been constructing apps since he was younger — an expertise he documented in his e book, “App Child” — which helped him land roles at Fb, Google, Roblox and, most just lately, Twitter, pre–Elon Musk’s acquisition. At Twitter, Sayman was going to give attention to constructing product experiences for teenagers, however these efforts slowed down after the takeover, giving him the push he wanted to exit on his personal.
The concept behind his new firm is to create a collection of apps with a unique set of values which might be focused towards serving to folks obtain their targets with out being poisonous to customers’ well being, as many modern-day social apps have change into.
To start out, Sayman has determined to sort out the world of on-line relationship — a market he believes customers have grown more and more annoyed by. Right now’s relationship apps could also be simple to make use of when it comes to their consumer interface, Sayman explains, however they’re exhausting to make use of when it comes to really serving to you discover what you’re in search of.
Picture Credit: Pleasant Apps
“Lots of occasions I’ll go on dates with those that find yourself probably not being the kind of particular person I assumed they have been due to the dearth of depth that a whole lot of [dating app] profiles are capable of supply,” the founder explains. “Additionally, I believe, simply as a result of nature of how these apps work, I don’t see a whole lot of us, together with myself, sharing an entire lot of our character — or the way in which that we’re — on the app. We put a bunch of images up and a public bio and that’s type of it,” he says.
Cosmic goals to do issues in a different way.
As a substitute of getting customers create their bio, it presents you with a character quiz that asks you just some questions on your self — like “What do you love to do for enjoyable?” “What’s most necessary to you in life?” or “What are your goals for the longer term?” These solutions are non-public to the tip consumer — they’re not revealed in your profile. When full, the app makes use of your solutions to create a profile for you with the assistance of machine studying (ML) expertise.
Picture Credit: Pleasant Apps
Sayman says he got here up with this concept as a result of he felt that lots of people, himself included, aren’t nice at describing themselves in bios. He says that his bio both finally ends up lacking facets of his character as a result of he doesn’t know which elements to incorporate or which to skip.
He realized {that a} totally different means of making bios might work higher, the place customers wrote open-ended solutions to a character quiz, which ML expertise might then use to generate your complete profile for you.
To work, Cosmic extracts character traits out of the phrases that you simply use within the quiz, together with the pursuits that you’ve, in addition to enjoyable stuff — like what standard track describes your life, the important thing to your coronary heart, or your biggest energy.
Picture Credit: Pleasant Apps
“The cool half about it’s it really tells you much more about anyone than I believe a whole lot of us are capable of write out ourselves,” Sayman says.
The Q&A-powered relationship app differs from one thing like eHarmony, which additionally depends on quizzes as a result of Cosmic is just not evaluating your outcomes to another person’s so as to make a match. As a substitute, it’s utilizing the solutions you present to create your profile and fill in Hinge-like prompts for you.
Sayman coded and designed the app himself with no group, and leveraged a mix of each open supply and proprietary expertise beneath the hood.
Nevertheless, he stresses that AI is just not really writing out a full bio for you, as another apps promise to do. That’s one thing he thinks feels pretend.
“They don’t work. It’s frankly, I believe, just a little bit dishonest,” he says of AI-generated bios. As a substitute, Cosmic depends on solutions to prompts and tags that describe your character, like “artistic,” “tech-savvy,” “bold,” “family-oriented,” and so forth.
The character quiz and AI facets aren’t the one differentiators for Cosmic’s relationship app. The app additionally doesn’t cost for issues like undoing mistaken swipes or seeing who likes you.
“There’s no increase. There’s no subscriptions. There’s no advertisements. There’s none of that stuff,” Sayman says. There are, nonetheless, commonplace options like picture uploads, blocking and reporting, and numerous spam prevention instruments.
Picture Credit: Pleasant Apps
So how will the app monetize? we puzzled. That’s a query the founder plans to determine in a while — after he determines if this mannequin even works.
The app is accessible as we speak within the U.S., Peru (the place Sayman’s mother and father are from), Colombia, and some different nations in South America and Europe. Previous to launch, it has been examined solely with a pair hundred beta customers.
