A brand new relationship app known as Cosmic needs to shake up the market by not charging for primary 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 persona quizzes and machine studying expertise.
Now obtainable 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 not too long ago, Twitter, pre–Elon Musk’s acquisition. At Twitter, Sayman was going to deal with 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 thought behind his new firm is to create a set of apps with a special set of values which can be focused towards serving to folks obtain their targets with out being poisonous to customers’ well being, as many modern-day social apps have turn 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 pissed off by. Right this moment’s relationship apps could also be simple to make use of by way of their consumer interface, Sayman explains, however they’re exhausting to make use of by way of truly serving to you discover what you’re in search of.
Picture Credit: Pleasant Apps
“Loads of occasions I’ll go on dates with people who find yourself not likely being the kind of particular person I believed they had been due to the shortage of depth that numerous [dating app] profiles are in a position to provide,” the founder explains. “Additionally, I feel, simply as a result of nature of how these apps work, I don’t see numerous us, together with myself, sharing an entire lot of our persona — or the best way that we’re — on the app. We put a bunch of images up and a public bio and that’s form of it,” he says.
Cosmic goals to do issues in another way.
As an alternative of getting customers create their bio, it presents you with a persona 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 desires for the long run?” These solutions are non-public to the top 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 points of his persona as a result of he doesn’t know which elements to incorporate or which to skip.
He realized {that a} completely different method of making bios might work higher, the place customers wrote open-ended solutions to a persona quiz, which ML expertise might then use to generate your whole profile for you.
To work, Cosmic extracts persona traits out of the phrases that you just use within the quiz, together with the pursuits that you’ve got, in addition to enjoyable stuff — like what well-liked tune 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 truly tells you much more about any individual than I feel numerous us are in a position to 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 just isn’t evaluating your outcomes to another person’s in an effort to make a match. As an alternative, 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 and not using a workforce, and leveraged a mix of each open supply and proprietary expertise below the hood.
Nonetheless, he stresses that AI just isn’t truly writing out a full bio for you, as another apps promise to do. That’s one thing he thinks feels faux.
“They don’t work. It’s frankly, I feel, a little bit bit dishonest,” he says of AI-generated bios. As an alternative, Cosmic depends on solutions to prompts and tags that describe your persona, like “artistic,” “tech-savvy,” “formidable,” “family-oriented,” and so forth.
The persona quiz and AI points 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 enhance. There’s no subscriptions. There’s no advertisements. There’s none of that stuff,” Sayman says. There are, nonetheless, normal options like photograph uploads, blocking and reporting, and varied spam prevention instruments.
Picture Credit: Pleasant Apps
So how will the app monetize? we puzzled. That’s a query the founder plans to determine afterward — after he determines if this mannequin even works.
The app is available today within the U.S., Peru (the place Sayman’s dad and mom 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.