New User-Driven Matchmaking App Cheers Launches in NYC

Cheers, a new matchmaking app founded by former Instagram engineer Sahil Ahuja, has launched in New York City with an interesting twist on the formula – allowing users to play matchmaker for their friends. This social-driven platform lets users not only swipe through profiles for potential matches but also swipe on behalf of their friends, helping facilitate introductions and easing the pressure of online dating.

In addition to matchmaking, Cheers integrates social media features like unlimited photo sharing, similar to Instagram’s interface. Users can post as many photos as they want, which can help in validating potential matches by featuring friends in the images. Ahuja emphasizes that this approach makes the dating experience feel more authentic and trustworthy, with friends acting as a form of vetting.

While friend matchmaking is not a new concept – Tinder, Bumble, and other startups have explored similar features – Cheers is a much more direct attempt to make interactions meaningful. Users can only invite people from their contact list and are limited to viewing three matches per day, and is currently invite-only as a way to ensure that all users have at least one degree of social connection to the current user base.

Cheers currently has around 150 users and isn’t planned to receive any paid features until it hits the 5000-user milestone, meaning that it’s currently a free-to-use experiment among people to get invited. The platform is limited to New York City for the moment, but will likely expand to other locations in the near future if this initial release is successful enough.