Lessons from building a dating app for older people.

I need to clarify something to start with. I’ve worked briefly on multiple businesses between September 2022 and August 2023 and I hope to write about them all and share with you what I’ve learned from these businesses. I know it is well known that as an entrepreneur you should become an expert at one thing alone and grow bigger in that area, but I promise, there are a couple of benefits of moving from one business to another. With that said, it’s September 2022, and I’ve just landed in Ghana (for the first time) for the MEST training program and met with more than 50 brilliant entrepreneurs from over 10 countries across Africa. And the goal is to run a tech business that tackles one of Africa’s biggest problems.

There is a culture at MEST where you create teams to run a business, they call it a capstone business. The aim is to find a problem space, ideate around it and see if there are possible solutions that can be created to solve the challenge. To be honest, picking just 3 entrepreneurs from a pool of 50 top, crème de la crème entrepreneurs is a hard choice and usually, there tends to be a lot of drama, which leads me to my first learning point

ⓘ It is very crucial to consider who you start running a business with, as these are the people you will spend the most time with working on something, but even most importantly, you want people who resonate with each other no matter the case. (Whenever you see this character, ⓘ, just get ready for some wisdom dropping 😁😀) You want co-founders who are willing to dedicate themselves to the goal of your startup; given that we didn't know that we were going to work on a dating app, it was just by sheer luck that we were all on board with being dedicated to ensuring the elders can find companionship and love. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself 🙊.

As a very resourceful person, I was able to exhibit to my fellow entrepreneurs that it was only a steal to work with me, a man of multiple talents 😎 but I guess I knew and they knew I can bring a lot in terms of experience in leadership, business and technology which is what you want in every single one of your co-founder. Lucky for me I joined a team of ladies who are, to this day some of the best people I’ve worked with by a mile. It was a team of four, three ladies and myself.

Through sharing of experience, pain points and lots of system thinking and employment of different ideation methodologies, we all discovered how most of our elders (people above 50 years) struggled in making social connections with people outside their work or family circles, which tend to become smaller as they keep traversing their life. Their children leave them, and even when arrangements for visits by the grandchildren are made, ⓘ these usually don’t yield long-term happiness. How do we know this you might ask, well we all had proxies (parents and close family members) who were experiencing this issue. And we thought to ourselves, let’s try to bring some freshness to the social connections people at that age make.

The goal was simple, we build a dating app for them to connect with new people with the same interests, same age and same location. ⓘ We envisioned a world where for instance my dad will be able to connect with other dads who love country music and also love discussing politics, link up at a restaurant and just hang out and jam to some country music instead of just going home. I know when people hear about dating apps, they only think about them as being a channel to get a companion. In our case, it didn’t matter whether you wanted a companion, or you just wanted to join a circle of like-minded people with the same interests, as long we could help you meet new people, we counted that as a win.

Now, the question is, where do we find these people? ⓘ Most people think our elders can’t use technology, but to our shock through the research we made, 90% of the people we talked to through calls and interviews (online surveys) were more than willing to use some form of technology to connect them to other people. And they all seemed so happy using WhatsApp groups to talk to their family members. By understanding their familiarity with WhatsApp groups, ⓘ it was only wise that we delivered a solution that was secure but looked like WhatsApp such that there wasn’t a huge learning curve, as this demographic of people is not as tech savvy as us the young chaps.

So we got to work, built a prototype with lightning speed and started testing it with the different people we were able to reach out to. The feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive. I remember we went to a restaurant called Afrikiko, which had an oldies night where it was all oldies, music, dancing and conversations. Speaking to people there about how we could enhance their social life was even more justified. Most of the people we talked to said that they went to Afrikiko simply because it's the only place they knew they could meet people with the same interests and connect.

We then had to find even better ways for people, to connect and link them up for events for socializing. ⓘ These people wanted new experiences, ones that they had never had before. It didn’t matter to them how we deliver the experiences, whether through an app or website or physically, but all they knew was that they need to break from a boring monotonous life. It’s true, the happier and more socially satisfied elders get, the more their life expectancy increases.

Meanwhile, all this talking to potential users, prototyping and talking to more users took us about 5-6 weeks. What we had worked on was moving in the right direction until it came to an end once we finished the guest lecture pitches which happen after about 8 weeks of running your business. This, again is MEST culture where we pitch to the founder of MEST about what we have been working on and right after, we discard all progress, disband the team and then go look for new teams and new co-founders to work on something new, and boy did I work on a new product that I believed could massively accelerate the adoption of technology products. I will write about that in my next article in a few days to come.

But I do believe that this problem space is one, more so for the African space that has been ignored and yet is one where we see our parents or even close proxies face. For us, we decided to use an app, ⓘ but it didn’t matter, all that mattered was that they were able to interact with new people and be happy. Our app simply made it easy for them to reach out to people much easier, faster and more secure way. But if anyone wants to go in this space, it is key to ensure that first, your clients are happy and everything after that is secondary.

I would love to end this article by commending the work and the efforts my teammates at Elixr(that was the name of the product btw) put in, starting with our team lead, Chechi Arinze, a fashion designer and someone who has lots of experience in creating luxury experiences, was very key to what we worked on as we had to deliver quality to our clients but even most importantly, she's on my list of the top 3 best co-founders I've ever met as she strategically mobilized us to work as a team to deliver our promise, which made work so light as we shared the load but extremely fun in the process. Currently, she's working on Waffles AI and also still spearheading her fashion business.

Our chief product officer, Peru Clarice Kibii who to this day I believe was God’s advisor on how to design the beauty that we see in the world. She’s a master at design and boy when it came to user experience for our clients, we delivered a seamless and smooth experience. I’m super grateful to have worked with her and I hope to see what more she can be able to do. As I speak, she’s working on a product to help entrepreneurs get legal support and services and also with her passion for design, she’s here to help everyone understand and get better at design. You can check out her work at Peru designs

And finally, the lady who makes me think I’m using 0.1% of my brain capacity, Ozioma Onukogu. She’s very key on details and has a huge capacity of consuming information and sharing this information with everyone. I couldn’t see any other person who could fit very well as our marketing lead other than Ozioma, as she’s a people person and loves to connect. Her input and her ability to talk to our clients were the biggest sources of feedback for us that we used to improve our offerings to them. She’s very passionate about reading and crypto and if you want to connect with her, you can see what she’s working on profile here. She does have a podcast that you can listen to as well.

If you have any requests or questions, please feel free to drop me an email at paul@katumbapaul.com