“Over 30 million Americans have used an online dating service or mobile dating app, according to Pew Research Center. Yet Black online users face apparent bias: Data collected from 25 million OkCupid accounts demonstrated that when users rated their matches they penalized Black men and women,” writes Kaya Thomas ’17 in an opinion piece for the website TechCrunch.
Now, she says, a new mobile dating app created by Jordan Kunzika ’16, Justin Gerrard, Tuck ’16, and Brian Gerrard “hopes to make online dating a better experience for Black people.”
“Bae founders cultivated their user base by going directly to the communities they believe need the app,” Thomas writes. “They hosted an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) tour which consisted of parties and mixers where people who matched on Bae could meet in person. All attendees had to have Bae downloaded to participate. Within a few weeks of their April 2015 launch, they reached 17,000 downloads, and have grown over 10 times since. Bae’s founders are from the community they are building for—an essential dimension of their success.”
Read the full opinion piece, published 3/25/16 by TechCrunch.
