👉 Background: Facebook (owned by Meta) launched Facebook Dating in 2019 as a rival to Tinder and Bumble. Meta claims that “hundreds of thousands” of 18 to 29-year-olds are creating Facebook Dating profiles every month in North America.

‍👉 What happened: But now, Meta has unveiled an AI “dating assistant” that supposedly helps users find matches. You could use a prompt like “Find me a Brooklyn girl in tech”, and Meta’s AI will play wingman. On top of this, they’ve also rolled out an auto-match feature, which is bascially Tinder meets blind date.

‍👉 What else: While there are no plans to bring this AI dating to Australian singletons right now, if successful in the US, you just never know! Especially because Facebook already has the network effects to make this work.

‍What's the key learning?

‍💡Dating apps live and die by network effects. The more people who join, the better the app works because a bigger pool means higher chances of finding a good match... and not being ghosted.

💡For a new company, breaking into a market that’s dominated by Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge is tough because those platforms have already built strong network effects. But Facebook can leverage Meta’s billions of existing users to shortcut the process.

💡This ain’t the first time that Facebook has leveraged its existing distribution to scale into a new vertical. Back in the day, selling second hand goods was the domain of The Trading Post and Gumtree - until Facebook Marketplace came along. And now more than one in three people on Facebook in the US use Marketplace each month.