Because of the nature of my job, I’m always trying to stay on top of the dating app game. Why? Well, if I want my app Dine to succeed, I need to always see what my competition is up to.

The reason we created Dine in the first place was out of dedication to solve a huge issue taking place within the dating app space: high amounts of matches, little to no dates. We only launched 9 months ago and you can read about us in this article Business Insider wrote about us. Lately, the reception for Dine (especially Dine Premium) has been fantastic. I deal directly with my users via support email and it’s always so amazing to hear the wonderful dating experiences Dine is making. Obviously, there are many things that we can always improve on but overall the reception has been great.

How does Dine stack up against the big ones like Tinder, Happn and Bumble?

Getting the name out for a new dating app is tough when you’re battling Goliaths but I knew Dine was something special from the get go. I decided it was time to put Dine to the ultimate test. I wanted to see if Dine was really doing what it was supposed to do, what it was designed to do; get first dates, and do it quickly.

Recently, I was on a business trip in Los Angeles from November 30th — December 15th. Los Angeles, being one of the biggest hubs for dating app users, I thought this was an ideal opportunity to see what Dine is really made of and to my surprise, the results could not have been more amazing and I felt the need to share.

Here’s what happened:

***Note*** Message means I was replied to by a match. Conversation means more than 1 message was exchanged between me and my match.

Analysis

What’s very interesting to note, especially in Tinder’s case, is the large amounts of matches which resulted in zero dates. I was expecting at least 1 out of 10 matches would lead to a real date but it didn’t even come close. The only thing that materialized were 2 conversations that ended up being a dead end like this example I found on the web just to the left (above) of the screen. Bumble? Happn? Not even a single reply which was depressing especially because of all the happn hype and beautiful girls I saw on Bumble. But Dine? 2 out of the 5 matches actually materialized into a real life first date with almost little to no effort. This is big. This is validation. We are doing something right.