Thursday, a freshly-launched and innovative new dating app that is only active one day a week, Thursday, has closed a £2.5 million investment round. Thursday is already available in both London and New York with the app downloaded 52,000 times. Last Thursday 7500 users were matched to go on a date that very evening.
The £2.5 million investment round, contributed to by Tom Blomfield, the founder of digital-only bank Monzo, will be used to recruit the talent the start-up needs to expand. There will be a particular focus on hiring specialists to work on Thursday’s matching algorithm, with the ambition for it to become “the most efficient and intuitive” on the market.
Thursday was founded three years ago as ‘Honeypot’ before a recent rebranding. The start-ups two co-founders are 29-year-old George Rawlings and the aptly named 30-year-old Matt McNeill Love, who created it as a “bedroom project born out of frustration with what was on offer”.
The app activates on a Thursday, with users given the day to match, chat and arrange to go on a date that evening. The concept is to cut out all the swiping for the dopamine hit of matches that are more often than not never followed up. The idea of condensing activity into a single day is to encourage users to act and go on a date.
Mr Rawlings describes what the co-founders saw as the problem with dating apps Thursday was designed to address:
“People are swiping for the sake of getting a dopamine hit of getting a match, but the interest wasn’t going anywhere. Instead of just swiping through a catalogue of people, which isn’t a novelty any more, Thursday removes some of the admin required with modern dating. It makes dating apps exciting again”.
Exactly how and why the Thursdays-only concept came to be is not entirely clear. Founder Rawling’s LinkedIn profile both suggests it is by design and necessity. He writes:
“People are spending too much time on dating apps and it’s an underwhelming experience”.
And
“Built a dating app that only works on Thursdays because we can’t afford server costs for the other 6 days of the week. Would love some AWS credit.”
Whether by happy accident or clever innovation, the Thursdays-only dating app is showing promise. Thursday was selected as the day of the week the app would work because data from other dating apps indicated it as the peak day of the week for user activity. People often have plans with friends and family at the weekend, making Thursday a more convenient ‘date night’.
Thursday may be early in its journey but ambition is high with Rawlings stating the aim is to be “bigger than Bumble”, the dating app that puts women in charge of initiating contact. Bumble, which went public in February, is valued at over $7 billion.
Investors clearly see potential in the alternative format adopted by Thursday. The start-up initially intended to raise £1.25 million but increased that to £2.5 million after the first total was reached in 4 days. It was doubled by the fifth day with a total of 30 investors contributing, led by seed fund Ascension Ventures and Jägermeister’s investment unit Best Nights VC.
As well as Monzo founder Blomfield, other high profile angel investors participating in the round included Nested and GoCardless founder Matt Robinson and Songkick founder Ian Hogarth.