We believe dating deserves better.

The category is broken. The people who use it know it.

Half the single adults in the country are on a dating app. Most of them are unhappy about it. Pew Research, in 2023, found that 51 percent of dating app users said the experience had made them more pessimistic about dating, 78 percent had been ghosted, and 56 percent of women under 35 had received unsolicited explicit messages. The numbers have not improved since.

We hear it every day. Women describe inboxes full of "hey" and "how was your weekend", and the unspoken job of being interviewed in every conversation. Men describe sending a hundred messages a week and getting two replies, and the slow erosion of believing anyone they match with is real or serious. Both describe the same fatigue.

The pain is not an accident. The dominant apps were not built to help you meet someone. They were built to keep you swiping, because that is the metric that makes them money. The mechanic that pays their bills is the same mechanic that wears you out.

What we believe.

We believe dating is a craft, not a sport. Six considered profiles a day will beat five hundred indifferent ones.

We believe verification is a baseline, not a premium feature. The person you match with should be the person who actually shows up to the date.

We believe the first message is the moment that matters. Most of the value in any dating app sits in three sentences. If they are good, the match becomes a date. If they are "hey", it dies.

We believe the people sending messages should have something at stake. A small cost behind every first message turns the inbox from a junk drawer back into something worth opening.

We believe the user is always the editor. The Lab can help you write a profile or an opener, but you always edit, you always decide, you always send. Nothing leaves you that you have not approved.

We believe dating apps should be designed to be deleted. The product succeeds when its users stop needing it. We charge a Membership because that is what pays for the product, not advertising or data, so we are aligned with that outcome.

Where we are going.

In five years we want Dating Lab to be the app people recommend to their best friend. Not because we have the most users, but because the conversations are worth having and the dates are worth going on.

We want "Verified by the Lab" to mean something the same way "Made in Italy" means something on a shoe. We want to be the dating app where, when someone tells you they met their partner here, you believe them.

We are starting with iOS in the UK, US, and EU. Android comes in 2027. We grow carefully, on purpose, because the quality of the people inside the Lab is what makes the Lab work.

Who is doing this.

Dating Lab is a product of Alenoss Inc, a consumer software company headquartered in the United States with a global team. The company is owned and operated by Bill Alena. You can learn more about him at billalena.com. We hire carefully, write things down, and have a clear opinion about what was wrong with the dating category and what to do about it. To reach us about anything, see the contact section below.

Press.

If you are a journalist, podcaster, or producer covering dating, online safety, app economics, or the broader category, we are happy to talk. We share product demos, interviews, and aggregated user research where appropriate.

Careers.

We hire for taste, judgement, and the ability to ship. We do not hire for years on a CV. If this is the product you want to be building, get in touch with one paragraph on why.