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Platforms looking the other way on fake profiles are fooling users, investors – and themselves

Global Dating Insights is delighted to share a guest post from Brad Jones, the Founder & CTO of Meet Kinksters, a sex-positive dating concept bridging the divide between mainstream and “hookup” markets.

You’ve seen the headlines: “Unicorn social app IRL to shut down after admitting 95% of its users were fake.” “IRL’s Shocking Revelation.” And, most incredulously, “IRL’s ex-CEO says he’s ‘shocked’ about the company’s fake users.

Should anyone, much less the CEO, be shocked? The social-media phenom – a “unicorn” with a billion-dollar value until it nosedived straight to $0 – turned out to be phenomenal only in its scary efficiency at evaporating almost $200 million of investor capital.

The easy-money venture capital bacchanal of the past years explains only so much. Many other businesses of dubiously inflated valuations continue to live, if only on life support and in a sea of down-round financing. Difference is, most of them at least have real customers.

As a founder of a dating industry startup (Meet Kinksters, the sex-positive dating platform) I am particularly attuned to the founder journey in what I can only describe as a ruthlessly difficult industry hostile to new entrants. My waking hours – and many of my nightmares – are focused squarely on the most difficult problem of all for new social startups.

The cold-start problem is the catch-22 that swallows founder hopes and dreams whole, and has no guaranteed cure besides a time machine to tell your former self to found Facebook before Zuckerberg does. No consumer wants to use a dating app where they see no other users near them on their first visit. Meanwhile, institutional capital trained on other consumer app verticals are quick to pass on any platform with less than 10,000 daily active users. The result is a starvation for early-stage marketing capital which mutes the user growth required to feed the network-effects flywheel. And yes, thanks, I’ve already got a copy of the Andrew Chen book.

This is nothing new, and I don’t purport to have the answer to cold-starting. What I can tell you is that there is no way IRL’s disgraced ex-CEO Abraham Shafi didn’t know his platform was full of fakes and spam. If he wasn’t maliciously lying he is guilty of a more grave sin: lying to himself and selling that delusion to his investors – who were willing accomplices in abandoning their due-diligence responsibilities.

I’ve never met Mr. Shafi and don’t purport to read his mind, but I know what it’s like to start a social-connection platform with lofty ambitions. Even at this early stage in my business’ journey, I’ve had ample opportunity to inflate my statistics for easier access to customers, capital and credibility. Call me naive, but I prefer to sleep soundly at night rather than engaging in fake metrics and fake progress markers that – at its most extreme manifestation – lands you in a unicorn-shaped crater.

As CEO, Shafi owed a duty of care to the business and his shareholders and was in a “known or should have known” position regarding IRL’s core operations. In a defensive LinkedIn post doubling down on his denial of any wrongdoing, Shafi inadvertently shares how little he actually knew or cared about IRL’s fraud controls.

“Our app required verified emails and phone numbers. Our team engaged with real users. We expelled millions of bots from the platform.” Any industry trust and safety intern worth their salt can enumerate the failures of email and phone number validation. Nobody is denying that IRL had some real users. Real users are however far more likely to engage with support, leading to this exact kind of over-representation selection bias. The fact their team ousted “millions” of bots from a platform that recently touted 20 million monthly active users points more to a failure of their first-line defenses.

The IRL debacle will no doubt depress the already anemic appetite of institutional money for social-discovery startups – and for good reason. Elsewhere, product offerings from large, established public and privately-held industry incumbents are full of dubious profiles on day 1. They’re just better at not getting caught at “seeding” their databases, or don’t care. Shortcuts to success are popular for a reason.

I’m choosing a different path for Meet Kinksters. I watch my new business like a first-time parent fretting over their newborn’s crib – every new profile goes straight to my phone. When I noted a sharp uptick in too-good-to-be-true female profiles last month, I could have chosen to play into a comfortable delusion that I had finally unlocked the female customer paradox. Fake profiles are easy to spot – unless you prefer not to see them. Perhaps IRL’s team – Mr. Shafi certainly didn’t act alone – chose to not look a similar gift horse too closely in the mouth during their meteoric rise. My course of action was quite the opposite – I instituted a strict new policy to require a real-time “face liveness” check on all new users. The tech costs me a whopping 1.5 cents per session.

Rather than this increased friction slowing my young platform’s growth, I’ve been rewarded with an uptick in paid memberships and quality profiles, especially by women. No self-delusion required. Perhaps IRL’s cautionary tale, paired with a new class of founders concerned with ethics and integrity, can slowly repair this industry’s reputational black-eye.

To hear more from Brad Jones, click here to listen to his insights on The GDI Podcast alongside Senior Reporter Sean Nolan.

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