Shed Simove: Meet The Man Who Started A Dating App With Only One Male User, Himself

In dating apps, most men feel like like they are just another drop in the bucket. Landing a date can be challenging, but scoring a serious relationship is damn near impossible. One London man has found a brilliant way to increase his luck finding a Valentine’s Day date on dating apps – by simply creating his own Tinder-like dating app and making himself the only available bachelor. He’s even gone as far as to give the dating app a slogan – “Quality, not quantity”.

Shinder is the latest dating app creation from author, performer, entrepreneur, and motivational speaker Shed Simove. Simove is also the man behind the books What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex : a book that contains two hundred blank pages — and Fifty Shades of Gray : a book that contained two hundred blank pages, except they vary from light gray to dark gray (with four pages for each shade). Note: I use the word contained because Random House, the publisher of EL James’s racy Fifty Shades of Grey, sent Shed Simove a cease and desist letter in 2012 threatening legal action unless he stops selling the book.

As for his new dating app, which has been dubbed “Tinder with a twist” — Simove used it in order to find a date for Valentine’s Day. “I’ve anticipated the scarcity of potential matches will create increased demand, and with that more chance of dating successes,” he told The Mirror in an interview in February 2017. “I’m now a big fish in my own pond.”

Shinder works very much like Tinder — just create your profile, add a few pictures, and start swiping. If the user swipes left on Shed, the app will say, “You dodged a bullet there, Shed is extremely high maintenance.” If you swipe right, Shinder proclaims that it will notify you if Shed matches back with you. If he likes you back, the application generates a chat box for the two of you to communicate through.

Shed Simove came up with the idea after constantly getting rejected on other popular dating apps. “I thought, if you can’t beat them, maybe create your own competition where you’re the only person in the competition, therefore, you will then by de facto win,” he says. “You will win! In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I thought I would try to create my own pond, so that then I would naturally be the biggest fish.”

Related: 18 Residual Ideas & Opportunities For Aspiring Entrepreneurs →

When asked about the legitimacy of his dating app, Shed Simove is quick to point out the time and effort required to create such an application. “I spent nine months and a huge amount of stress,” he says, “a huge amount of time, three different coders that I failed with … it’s been highly stressful and any software build is difficult, but crikey, for a quick user experience, the backend is massive.”

Shed Simove’s list of inventions does not stop at Shinder — he has actually launched dozens of products including the Martin Loofah King, Cock-A-Doodle Pad, and the iNotePad. You can view a full list of Shed Simove’s products on his website.