The innovative app ripping up the rulebook on dating

George Rawlings wanted a girlfriend and a business. The best way to do both? Start a dating app. The idea began in the back of a car. Rawlings had recently broken up with his girlfriend and was forced to take his childhood friend, Matt McNeill Love, on his pre-booked romantic skiing holiday.

Newly single, they were talking about the world of dating apps and concluded that the current landscape was “irritating and unexciting”.

Having met at school, they remained close friends; McNeill Love spent seven years in the army, whilst Rawlings dropped out of university and dabbled in entrepreneurship with Agent VOX, the video email platform.

With a comic smile, Rawlings says, “I had literally been sharing a bed with Mr McNeill Love and that's how honeypot, which eventually became Thursday, came about. We wanted to completely reinvent the wheel”.

So heading to London in 2018 to find a new girlfriend and a new business proposition, Rawlings and McNeill Love started honeypot, a location-based dating app. It allowed users to check into areas and see who was free for a date, hoping to encourage fellow singles to convene in fun spots around town.

With only 10,000 monthly users at the time, Rawlings admits the uphill struggle that comes with trying to launch something new in London, even with guerilla marketing campaigns. He tells me of the “awful” nights he sat around waiting for honeypot socials to liven up, and the moment he realised he needed a dramatic change if he wanted the idea to take off.

“When we ran out of money with honeypot, I sold my flat to fund a rebrand. It’s one of those things your parents tell you not to do, but I took that risk anyway”, he explains.

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Using this money, he did his research and examined the honeypot data, ultimately landing on the answer: “When we looked at the data, we saw a spike in usage on a certain day. That got us thinking, ‘What if we could get rid of all the headaches of dating apps by limiting it to that one day of the week?’.” Enter Thursday.

The concept: by giving users a limited time frame (24 hours every Thursday), the app injects a more romantic, spontaneous and almost serendipitous nature back into dating.

You still have a profile and matches, but you have just one day a week to act on it; the app will then shut down for the next six days. The gimmick aims to remove the time-consuming elements of app dating, and “bakes an element of Fomo into it”. Indeed, it is this “fear of missing out” each week that also means, on average, 39 per cent of users are using it every Thursday to land a date.

What is really interesting about their offering is that they also actively discourage singles from using it if they aren’t actually free to date that day. It connects people who are in the same frame of mind at the same time, thereby removing the stagnation that often occurs when users sit on matches and ignore messages with no real pressure to make a real-life date happen.

The app is currently live in London and New York, with around 60,000 monthly users (55 per cent female), and a demographic of “time poor young professionals”. Calling dating a “numbers game”, Rawlings and his team believe that their app is empowering singles to put themselves out there in order to meet their Mr or Mrs Right.

And despite new niche dating apps emerging every week (whether it’s for vegans, pet owners or gin enthusiasts), he believes that none of these alternatives are truly changing the game.

The beauty of Thursday is that it is taking ownership of a day, and in Rawlings’s words, “making Thursday the international date day every week and the day you want to be single”. This has lent itself to some elaborate marketing tricks.

From billboards mocking their competitors, to an intern handing out 1,000 literal “dates” (as in the fruit!), Rawlings says their marketing strategy is “the more ridiculous the better”.

As a start-up, they are fascinated by viral marketing, and while it hasn’t been an overnight success, Thursday has around 550 new downloads a day and millions of impressions a week without investing a penny in digital marketing. As the fourth biggest dating app in London, they’re ripping up the rulebook.

But aside from viral content, what strikes me is their authentic understanding of the problems of dating apps, especially for women. Their recent partnership with Strut Safe, the volunteer phone service dedicated to walking people home safely, is testament to this. It demonstrates a clear awareness that sometimes the world isn’t a romcom waiting to happen.

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Additionally, the fact that they require all users to verify their accounts with IDs applies a layer of protection to their community. However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, and Rawlings is very candid about their difficulties.

We discuss their failed launch back in June this year, where the app worked for only one hour, sparking outrage across the 120,000 mailing list they had invited to the big reveal. Regarding it as “one of the worst days of my life”, he sees the past few months as a huge learning curve.

“It is a lot harder than you think to make an app work one day of a week. Everyone is hitting it at the exact same time, so it’s hard for the servers and databases to always get it right. The launch sent it into meltdown”, he explains. Having worked three and a half years on a product, he felt completely deflated and considered completely giving up...

Nonetheless, like all great romances, there was a happy ending after a bitter test: Rawlings woke up on Friday morning with a message from a venture capital offering him the first cheque of $250,000 (£183,000). The app also worked the following Thursday.

Even now, Rawlings concedes that his product is still in the “minimum viable product” stage, with technical glitches occasionally popping up. As such, Rawlings and his team are keen to pump their recent $3m seed funding into making their system more robust, and scaling across the major European cities.

Rawlings also sees offline interaction as an essential part of the future community. Whilst he keeps his cards close to his chest about the exact details, he envisages a “hybrid model”, where Thursday creates fun physical spaces for single people, as well as virtual interaction.

When I asked him what the more general future of dating would be, he boldly said, “dating apps will die out”. A daringly strong claim from a man building one.

He continues, “Not in the fact that they are working so well and everyone is in a relationship, but in the fact that their novelty is already wearing off. I think dating is going to become much more sociable. It will be about hanging out in different places where everyone is single… but I don’t want to give too much away with what we are working on!”

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Despite being a self-professed hopeless romantic, Rawlings confesses that he has never been in love. “I am no expert on dating, but I do think about it constantly. I am fascinated by why two people are attracted and why they fall in love”, he explains.

Jokingly (I think), he hopes to be invited to all the successful Thursday weddings that emerge in the coming months and years, and he is clearly passionate about helping users find “the one”.

When asked if he uses the app himself, Rawlings says that they’ve created a company policy that they cannot mix business and pleasure, deeming it morally wrong to use the product he so tirelessly built. “I know Thursday started with the goal of finding a girlfriend, but now that's the last thing on my mind, to be honest!” he jokes.

So, like all great relationships, Rawlings and his app have had some ups and downs. There have been trials and tribulations. Tests and roadblocks. But while he may not have found a girlfriend just yet, Rawlings certainly has fallen in love with Thursday.