Three college seniors solved the dating app crisis.
This dating app lets you match with your crush, as long as you "know people."
Good morning everyone. I’m giving up sugar and excessive gossip for lent. How about you?
Today’s letter is a fun one. It includes news about: the dating app Ivy League kids are flocking to, why influencers like Danielle Bernstein and Paige Lorenze keep coming up in my lunch meetings with consumer investors, a rumor I heard about Pat McGrath ten years ago, the in-house influencer New York magazine is hiring, a sign that 2025 might be the year that magazine editors become film directors, and troubling news about your negronis this summer (they might have to be white).
Feed Me’s editorial assistant spent the last week looking into a new dating app that has become popular amongst his social circle of… elite college students. Below is what he found out.
A few days ago, my girlfriend, an avid Feed Me reader and Georgetown student, told me “You should really report on Cerca”. My first reaction was: “What’s Cerca?”, and it was pretty much the same for most of my friends who I later mentioned it to, except for a few kids from New York.
After hopping on a call with one of the dating app co-founders (he took the call from his spring break trip), I realized it made sense that only these kids would know about Cerca, as it’s a mutuals-based dating app launched in… New York.
The requirement to entry is to have over 100 first or secondhand mutuals on the app, which is established through syncing your contacts — when you sync your address book, the app finds all the accounts linked to a phone number that you have saved, and then counts how many people in their contacts are on the app. Those people are all considered secondhand mutuals.
The founders grew up in New York, so most people who currently hit the required number of mutuals to be able to get onto the app are…from the city. Three of the app’s founders are seniors in college:
Willy Conzelman (Georgetown, interned in invest banking at DC Advisory)
Myles Slayton, CEO (Georgetown, interned at Evercore)
Carter Munk (USC, previously founded MO’s Coffee with his grandfather where they raised $250k at a $2.5mm valuation)
Thatcher Shultz (nightlife entrepreneur, owner of Make Believe, Unveiled, and Rocco’s sports bar)
The idea for the app came about last July, while having a conversation around a dinner table that many are probably familiar with: people were talking about their frustrations with dating apps. Myles’ main takeaway was that people simply didn’t feel completely safe on the apps anymore. The team started working on Cerca in September.
“Think of it as a dating app for someone that you find attractive on your friends' stories that you might one day finally run into at a party, it’s meant to facilitate that.”
When talking to Willy, one of the first things he told me was, “My parents met at a bar, my dad went up to my mom, and he shot his shot”
His pitch was that these days, we don’t have as many similar stories, whether that be because less people are going to bars (doubtful) or are less inclined to approach someone they don’t know (likely). The founders wanted to build this concept which is aimed at combining meetings online and in person. Think of it as a dating app for someone that you find attractive on your friends' stories that you might one day finally run into at a party, it’s meant to facilitate that.
When the app was described as a means to combine online and in-person meetings, I was somewhat doubtful. Willy has a background in event planning, and currently, the events take the form of launch parties at Thatcher’s venues and sponsoring frat parties — an approach similar to Bumble’s marketing strategy a few years ago. The latter does usually facilitate hookups. It sounds like their plans in the future are geared towards hosting events such as dinner parties with seating arrangements meant to pair you with a match or a mutual you would likely be interested in.
Something I found smart, which we discussed, is how well-positioned for growth I think the business is. The app cultivates a premium feel (more so than Raya, in their opinion) which is emphasized by the barrier to entry. This makes people want to get on it. Because you want to get on it, you’re more likely to get more people to try and join it, as when you’re waiting to enter the app (have enough mutuals), the only thing you can do is to share it to a lot of other people. There are multiple incentives to this: