After online dating’s tremendous 2020 growth culminating in last week’s epic Bumble IPO, a new entrant has tossed its hat into the dating app ring. Snack, founded by Kimberly Kaplan, looks to merge the popularity and format of TikTok with the dating world. Kaplan hails from Plenty of Fish, where she was one of the earliest employees at the dating site. She eventually led product, marketing, and revenue and was on the executive team.
They sold PoF to Match Group for $575 million in 2015. Kaplan said she noticed a specific user behavior among folks using dating apps, particularly the coveted Gen Z demographic. Essentially, folks would match on Bumble or Tinder and immediately move the connection over to apps like Snap and Instagram, where they would watch each others’ stories and more casually flirt rather than carrying on in a more high-pressure DM conversation with the dating apps.
Around the same time, TikTok surged in popularity, showing a shift in the average consumer’s attitude toward creating short-form videos on the web. Snack is a video-first dating app that asks users to create a video and post it to a feed. Other users can scroll through a meal (a la Instagram) rather than swipe right or left on individual profiles, and when someone likes a video, it opens up the ability to comment. Once two users have enjoyed each others’ videos, DMs are open.
The app is still in its early days, so there is no location filtering yet to ensure that everyone who joins it has an entire feed of videos to browse. Kaplan said that Snack is also working on video editing features similar to that of TikTok to let people get super creative with their profiles.
Thus far, Snack has received $3.5 million in funding, led by Kindred Ventures and Coelius Capital, with participation by Golden Ventures, Garage Capital, Panache Ventures, and N49P.
Though we’re still a ways away from monetization, Kaplan says her experience in the dating space should be beneficial when looking to generate revenue at Snack. The startup will likely follow the same playbook as other dating apps, employing premium subscriptions and ads.
There are ten people on the Snack team, and Kaplan says that the group is 60 percent diverse, with 40 percent of employees being visible minorities. The biggest challenge is going up against big players with a lot of capital,” Kaplan said. “Starting is hard, and getting that initial foothold is hard. I fundamentally believe in our product and see this open opportunity in the market. Someone will usurp Tinder, and it will be around video.”
