Thomas Kovacs
Software Engineer and Founder of personly and astateful
Although it has been some years since the shutdown of the personals section of Craiglist, there has yet to emerge a true replacement for a modern take on anonymous personals. The standard dating apps out there feel too formal and public, in which exhibiting a bit of anonymity and privacy (either through lack of profile pictures or usage of nickname) is viewed somehow as a social stigma. The existing personals websites, while having been around for years, still rely on the same basic and formulaic processes which make the entire experience very uninteresting and unevolved.
Enter personly. Faced with the mounting frustrations of using modern dating apps and archaic personals websites, we decided to opt for a new approach. At the core of our concept is the idea of a tokenized personal, in which the amount you spend per personal correlates to how many people you want to see it. We hope that this new approach can function as a tradeoff between standard personal matching, in which one receives too many matches, and modern dating apps, in which one feels like he or she is not matching anybody. The goal is to ultimately feel connected.
Please stay tuned for future updates in this space, where we will be posting regularly about dating culture and especially international dating culture. Thanks and hope to see you soon, but anonymously of course!