One question I keep coming back to while building Berlin Audio Dating is how much importance photos should have.

The obvious answer for an audio-first dating app might be: as little as possible.

But I don't actually believe that.

Physical attraction matters in dating. At least for me it does, and I don't think pretending otherwise would make for a better dating app.

What I find more interesting is how differently attraction seems to work online and in real life.

If I'm actively looking around a room, appearance is usually what makes someone catch my attention first. Someone stands out visually, and only then do I become curious about everything else.

But many real-life interactions don't start that way.

At a party, I might end up talking to someone simply because we're part of the same conversation. I hear her voice, notice how she talks, what she says, how she reacts to other people.

Or take dancing. I dance Salsa, and occasionally a woman asks me to dance instead of the other way around.

At that point I haven't necessarily spent time evaluating whether I find her attractive. How she approaches me, her energy and the situation itself are already part of my first impression.

And I'm much more likely to just say yes and see what happens.

Online dating removes most of those situations.

You're not accidentally having a conversation with someone. You're not hearing them laugh from across the table. They don't walk up and ask you to dance.

Instead, you're given a few photos and asked to make a decision.

And once the photos fail that first test, how many people really go on to carefully read a long bio?

I usually don't.

That's why I don't want Berlin Audio Dating to remove photos.

I want to change when they get their full power.

When someone sends you an approach, you hear their voice before their photo and full profile are revealed. The photo still matters. You can still look at it afterwards and decide you're not attracted to them.

The app isn't supposed to convince you that physical attraction is superficial or unimportant.

The experiment is much simpler:

What happens if the photo doesn't get to make the entire first decision by itself?

Maybe hearing someone speak for 15 or 20 seconds changes nothing.

But maybe sometimes a person who would have been an instant swipe-left gets just enough room for something else to register first.

A voice. Confidence. Humor. Warmth. Nervousness. Whatever it is.

I don't think online dating can recreate meeting someone in real life.

But perhaps it can stop reducing the first impression almost entirely to one sense.

That's one of the things I want to find out.

Berlin Audio Dating — Dev Post #4

There's another part of Berlin Audio Dating that I'm deliberately designing differently from most dating apps: ignoring people is possible, but it shouldn't necessarily be free forever.

That probably needs some explanation.

If someone sends you an approach, you don't owe them interest. You don't owe them a conversation, a match or a date. And nobody is going to force you to listen or reply.

But I'm also not sure it makes sense for someone to accumulate 20, 50 or 100 unanswered approaches while the app continues showing their profile to more people.

Especially when those people can't just tap a Like button. They have to record an actual voice message.

So the current idea is something I think of as inbox pressure.

When you receive an approach, you can listen to it and then either answer with audio, decline with a simple "No thanks", or report it if there's a problem.

If you don't want to do any of those things, that's also possible.

But if unanswered approaches start piling up, the app would eventually stop showing your profile to new people for a while. You wouldn't be banned or punished. You'd simply stop receiving new approaches until there's some capacity again.

The exact limits aren't decided yet. I don't know whether the right threshold is based on 5 open approaches, 10, their age, some combination of both, or something else entirely. That's something I'd rather adjust based on what real users actually do.

The principle matters more to me than the numbers.

I think one of the problems with swipe-based dating is that attention has become almost free to give and free to collect.

Sending a Like costs almost nothing. Ignoring it costs nothing either. So one person can send hundreds of Likes while another can accumulate hundreds of them, and neither side necessarily has much reason to treat an individual interaction as meaningful.

Berlin Audio Dating already asks more from the sender. You can't approach unlimited people and an approach requires actually recording something.

So I think it's reasonable to ask something from the receiving side as well.

Not romantic interest.

Just a tiny amount of reciprocity.

Listen, answer. Listen, decline. Report something inappropriate. Or don't do anything – but then maybe the app shouldn't keep sending more people your way indefinitely.

There's an obvious objection to this:

"Nobody owes a stranger a response just because that stranger decided to approach them."

I agree.

But I think there's a difference between owing a stranger something and accepting the rules of a system you're actively participating in.

If I want other people to spend their time and a little bit of courage approaching me, perhaps it's reasonable that I can't indefinitely collect those approaches without engaging with any of them.

This should work exactly the same regardless of gender or who you're interested in.

And there also needs to be a way to simply say: I'm not accepting new approaches right now. Going on holiday, being busy for a week or just not feeling like dating shouldn't count as bad behavior. A pause should simply take you out of circulation until you want to participate again.

Whether this creates healthier interactions or just annoys people is something I won't know until real people use it.

But the basic idea is becoming increasingly important to what I'm trying to build:

Nobody owes you romantic interest. But a dating app doesn't have to be designed around unlimited attention either.

Berlin Audio Dating — Dev Post #3

One of the more unusual rules I'm currently building into Berlin Audio Dating is this:

If someone approaches you, you don't immediately get to see their photos or profile.

You hear them first.

An incoming approach currently appears with only some basic information such as the sender's name, location and gender, plus a play button for their audio message. The approach itself has to be between 15 and 30 seconds long.

Once you've listened to at least 80% of it, their photo appears and you can open the full profile with their photos, texts and voice answers.

You can stop listening whenever you want. Nobody is forced to sit through an approach they don't want to hear. But if you stop early, the profile stays hidden.

There is one obvious exception: you might already have come across that person in Discover before they approached you. I'm not trying to artificially make people forget someone they've already seen.

The idea came partly from thinking about what actually happens when someone approaches you in real life.

Sometimes you see the person coming. But sometimes someone starts talking to you from the side or from behind and the first impression you get isn't their face. It's their voice, what they say and how they say it. Only then do you turn around and see who is talking to you.

Online dating usually works in exactly the opposite direction.

The photo gets an almost instant veto. If it doesn't pass, everything else about that person becomes irrelevant. Their voice, confidence, humor, personality and even the fact that they took the time to approach you personally never get a chance to matter.

I want to experiment with reversing that order.

Voice obviously doesn't make dating non-superficial. You can find a voice attractive or unattractive just as you can a face. But it gives you a very different set of information about someone. Confidence is difficult to show in a carefully selected photo. It's much harder to hide in your voice.

There's another difference I find interesting: photos can be old, heavily edited or selected from hundreds of attempts. An approach in Berlin Audio Dating is something that person has just recorded specifically to contact you.

And yes, there is a pretty obvious downside to all of this.

On Tinder or similar apps you can look at someone for two seconds and decide you're not interested. Here you may spend 15 or 20 seconds listening to someone only to reveal their photo and immediately think: Nope.

That's intentional to some degree.

I'm not sure an online dating system can give every user maximum convenience while also preventing people from becoming disposable profile cards. If approaching someone requires some effort from the sender, I think receiving an approach can reasonably require a small amount of attention from the recipient as well.

Whether people actually accept that trade-off is another question.

For the first version I'm sticking with the principle approach first, profile second. The exact numbers aren't sacred. 15 seconds minimum, 30 seconds maximum and the current 80% listening threshold can all be changed once there is real feedback.

What I don't want to change before testing it is the experiment itself:

Before you decide what someone looks like, give them a few seconds to speak.

Berlin Audio Dating — Dev Post #2

I've tried quite a few dating apps over the years and at some point I realized that most of them made me feel pretty much the same.

When I first tried Tinder, it was actually exciting. Here was this seemingly easy way to meet women I would otherwise never run into. Swiping itself could even be fun when I was bored.

But the novelty wore off quickly.

Getting a match meant going through lots of profiles and sending lots of likes. After a while the individual person on the screen started to matter less. Swipe, swipe, swipe, maybe get a match, maybe write something, maybe get an answer.

What bothered me wasn't simply that I wasn't getting enough matches. The whole process felt less and less like actually approaching someone.

Real life is very different for me.

I'm not particularly good at walking up to an attractive woman in a café either. It makes me nervous and sometimes I simply don't do it. But when I do approach someone I'm genuinely interested in, there is a certain excitement to it. I have to make a decision, overcome that little bit of fear and actually say something.

I've done this quite a bit at Salsa events. Sometimes after dancing with someone I'll simply tell her that I like her and ask whether she'd be interested in going for a walk or having a tea sometime.

Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes it's no.

Strangely enough, the answer isn't even the whole point. Getting myself to actually ask can feel good on its own. I've even had women who weren't interested in a date tell me afterwards that they appreciated me being direct about it.

A few years ago I found a German dating app that did something very different. It doesn't exist anymore, but profiles had photos, text and voice recordings. If you wanted to approach someone, you had to record an audio message.

I still remember recording those messages.

I'd look at the profile, listen to her voice, think about what I wanted to say and then record my approach. Especially in the beginning I might discard two or three recordings until I liked one. Hearing my own voice felt strange. Sending it required a little courage.

And that was exactly what made it fun.

One or two good approaches could leave me feeling better than an evening of swiping through hundreds of profiles. Once I got into the right mood it became easier, just like approaching people in real life becomes easier after you've done it once.

Unfortunately, that app also made some decisions I really disliked. If I remember correctly, listening to an approach or the reply required a subscription of something like €10–20 per month. You were asked to pay before you'd even experienced whether the concept worked for you. It also tried to analyze voices and use that to determine who supposedly matched with whom, which never interested me much.

But the basic experience stuck with me for years.

That's where much of the idea behind Berlin Audio Dating comes from.

I'm not trying to build an app that promises to find your perfect partner. I'm interested in a different question:

Can online dating keep the convenience of being online while bringing back some of the excitement of actually approaching someone?

You could be sitting at home at midnight, not dressed up, not at the right bar, not waiting for the right person to happen to walk past you. You could discover someone you would probably never meet in everyday life.

But if you want to approach that person, you actually have to say something.

Not swipe right. Not send a like.

Speak.

I also suspect that the higher barrier might solve another problem almost accidentally. Sending 50 likes takes seconds. Recording 50 genuine approaches doesn't. If a few approaches feel more meaningful than hundreds of swipes, perhaps an online dating app doesn't need people to throw thousands of likes at each other in the first place.

That's the experiment I want to make with Berlin Audio Dating.

Berlin Audio Dating — Dev Post #1