Gen Zers don’t think dating apps are fun anymore, but this CEO thinks she’s cracked the code

Tina Wilson, the CEO of Wingman, believes voice notes are the key to engaging Gen Z users.

Gen Zers love a voice note. And one dating app CEO is jumping on the trend.

Tina Wilson, the CEO and founder of Wingman, said her app has a clear USP. It puts the success of your dating life in the hands of your friends or family, who create your profile for you.

Your friends can then leave raving reviews to help get willing singletons to date you.

The company also introduced voice notes, where friends or family leave an audio message about why their chosen bachelor or bachelorette is worthy of a chance.

Focus groups with Zoomer users of Wingman suggest this is a hit, Wilson said, partly because they are turning away from some of the more traditional dating apps.

“The business model of some of these things is that they want to keep you single because as soon as you leave, then they lose you,” Wilson said.

Many Gen Zers have been on social media since they were tweens, and by the time they reached dating age, they were jaded.

“They demand authenticity,” Wilson said. “For me it was like, how do we deliver something that’s authentic and quick and easy to use, but also with the insight of helping somebody else?”

Dating used to be fun

Many people believe dating apps aren’t fun anymore. A Forbes Health survey earlier this year of 1,000 Americans found that 79% of Gen Z respondents said they were experiencing dating app burnout.
According to Statista data, people aged 18-29 now make up only 26% of online dating service users in the US.

Generally, the apps have lost touch with younger users, who think some of their marketing ploys are cringe-worthy. The great “Bumble fumble” of 2024, for example, where the company put up billboards that seemed to poke fun at celibacy, was considered a massive misstep many young users have yet to forgive.

Some say older apps miss the point of what made them fun in the first place — going after profits rather than real connections.

“We’ve just turned dating into more work,” Anna Pompilio, a senior cultural strategist at the brand design agency Marks, told B-17. “Dating is not always fun, but that was an unfortunate byproduct of dating. Now, dating is baseline unfun, and if you can get a few nice dates out of it, that’s actually the byproduct.”

Some Zoomers are switching things up and meeting virtually for first dates to save time and money or wading into the dating world sober.

Others are opting for more traditional means of finding a match, like hanging out in cafés and bars alone or being set up with friends of friends.

The trend seems to be leaving apps struggling. An Axios poll last year of 978 American students found that 79% of respondents didn’t use a dating app even once a month.

Shares in Match Group, which owns some of the big hitters, including Tinder, Hinge, and Match.com, fell 68% between 2020 and this summer amid the dwindling number of paying users. The company also announced layoffs in July.

“People are just actively trying to put themselves back into the real world again,” Pompilio said. “And that’s more fun.”

The karmic reward of having a wingman

Wilson agreed that many dating apps lack the energy they used to have, which is why she thinks the voice note feature has been popular with younger users, both in focus groups and with Gen Zers who use the app (a recent poll of 500 Wingman users found that 69% of Gen Zers used the voice note feature).

However, Wilson said meeting with other industry “bigwigs” before Wingman’s launch in 2017 was a bit disheartening because they told her the concept of friends setting up dates would never work.

“They were like, no one will spend time helping another person,” she said. “Fundamentally, people are too selfish, and unless there’s something in it for them, they’re not going to do it. And I was just like, ‘Well, you must just have horrible friends.'”

Wilson believes these founders were wrong because Gen Zers enjoy the “karmic reward” of Wingman.

“As cheesy as it sounds, people are repaying kindness by being kind themselves,” she said. “Even if they’re doing it for fun or banter, there’s something to be said for wanting to lend a hand or doing that part of somebody else’s journey.”

Having somebody else answer questions about your life leans into the authenticity Gen Z craves because it gives a better snapshot of who you are as a whole, “rather than this very polite, curated voice, which doesn’t actually tell you very much about the person,” Wilson said.

Wilson said that someone’s friendship group tells you a lot about who they are as a person, and she wanted to tap into that.

“It’s like somebody grabbing a mic and saying, let me talk about my mate,” she said.

Having a matching sense of humor is also vital in a relationship, and that doesn’t always come across in a traditional profile.

“Lots of the voice notes, they want to throw them under the bus, but they do it with kindness,” Wilson said. “One of my favorite profiles was a sister writing about her brother saying, I don’t know why my brother Dylan says he’s six foot because he’s not. He’s 5′ 10″ with a Cuban heel.”

Another woman posted a voice note saying her friend had a “banging set of baps.”

“Someone might listen to that crack up laughing and be like, oh yeah, that’s my vibe,” Wilson said. “But if somebody is offended by that and offended by someone’s friend, chances are they’re not your person.”

Of course, the quality of your reviews depends on the quality of your friends. Some may be tempted to lie or exaggerate to land their friend a date, or others may take jokes too far, leading their buddy to attract the wrong type of person.

Overall, Wilson thinks having a “wingman” encourages better dating etiquette because someone is watching.

Social media is full of young people who complain about their dates being a waste of time because the other person wasn’t how they imagined or they didn’t show up at all. Some report their dates becoming abusive if things don’t go their way.

There’s also something charming about getting a glowing review from your grandmother, as one college student recently did.

“He got so much engagement,” Wilson said. “All the girls were swooning.”