When I first started using RealTalk , I remember that the experience of using the app had this charged and almost magical feeling to it. It was cool connecting with people I wouldn't otherwise meet, but the magical charge was about much more than that — it was about the way we were connecting. The kinds of questions we asked each other, and the genuine answers we offered, back and forth, led to this sense of real, deep, personal connection — I might not have known anything about the people I talked to, but somehow, I knew them.
And they knew me. Genuine intimacy sprang up out of thin air over and over again, and it was awesome. In my opinion, that's the essence of what RealTalk did best: It was a space where people could easily and safely experience genuine connection and intimacy with new people, in a way that feels far less available in our daily lives.
When we designed RealTalk, we went to great lengths to make it a place that you couldn't use for dating. For example, there were no filters for age or gender, and we would alternate between men and women when showing you new people.
We wanted it to just be about connecting with other human beings and nothing else. We were very against it being a dating app. Olivia had no tech or community background at all prior to working with us — we had reconnected at a ski house and I got great energy from her when telling her about the product. On a whim, I asked her to work on it with us. I was surprised when she said yes. By fall , we were beginning to realize that RealTalk probably wouldn't find product market fit in its current incarnation, and Olivia began advocating for turning RealTalk into a dating app.
She believed that dating was RealTalk's true destiny. I was extremely skeptical at first, but then I started thinking about my own experience with dating apps like Tinder and Bumble and how terrible it's been. Dating apps make me feel bad. They make me question my own self worth.
