humhum
Born out of my lived experience, and extensive UX Research and market research, I founded humhum — a mindful connection and coaching platform for healthy dating. Originating as an in-person dating experience, through ongoing UX Research and iteration, humhum evolved into a dating service offering online guided dates, group dates, and coaching online. With significant traction on our virtual service, which employed a no-code MVP, we were ready to scale our guided date experience. We designed, built, and shipped the humhum web app in 2023 — it is in market and generating revenue.
humhum inc.
Founder, CEO
September 2019-Present
process
I founded humhum in 2019, created the initial brand and website, and rallying participants to host the first experience pilot in New York with several unacquainted friends of friends. I share more about humhum’s origins and inception story in this Cheaper Than Therapy Podcast Episode.
After the first event, I launched a newsletter and began selling tickets for future events. I created a survey to collect feedback data following the first event to inform the experience design and continued this process for several events. After selling over 150 events tickets over several months, the pandemic hit New York. And on the same day the city shut down, three of our community members asked if we could make humhum a virtual experience. In that moment, I got to work, and launched the first virtual humhum dating experience, and six months later, we had our first angel investor.
✏️ Designing the Web app
By the time we began designing the webapp, we’d already launched a guided 1-1 date offering to deliver value to our community in between events, as well as pre and post date coaching sessions to offer support to daters as they digested their dating experience.
The core offerings had been tested and generating money for nearly two years before we built our webapp and we wanted to operate at scale. We were moving from a high touch, pay-as-you-go service to a self-service, subscription based tech platform to support the growth of our 1-1 date offering. Streamlining our technology would enable us to host far more dates per week. We needed to design the minimum viable product (MVP) for our webapp.
Goals
Identify essential flows and experience features for success, understand how behavior and expectations will change as we transition from a high-touch service to an automated digital experience on the app. Design challenges:
How might we maintain our brand values of humanness, and intentionality with a more automated experience?
How might we continue to encourage a mindset of dating as a practice, and discourage fixation on the date outcome while there is behavioral conditioning connected to dating apps around swiping, and seeing profiles?
How do we discourage flaking on dates? The cost for the other dater, and for us is high.
Approach
Conducted several in-depth video-call interviews across member, prospective member, and former member segments.
Hired a UX/UI designer and in collaboration, created a fresh visual identity, and mapped out core user flows and elements with flow diagrams in Figma.
Concept tested initial app designs with clickable Figma prototypes and walkthroughs.
Hired an engineer and mapped out our tech stack and product requirements.
Brought on a product advisor to support us in keeping the product lean and staying on schedule for launch.
In collaboration with a UX designer, and product advisor, we identified edge cases and solutions.
Insights and Solutions
Dating is Seasonal — There are peak active periods and slower or more passive periods. The needs and desires are different with each season.
The desired cadence of dating fluctuates for a person. It maps to the ‘season’ they’re in, and can change in relationship to life events (the micro) as well as broader literal seasons (macro).
humhum’s initial product is best suited for people who are “getting back out there, or gently exploring.” humhum’s app in beta can service a slow to moderate cadence of dating. For participants wanting a higher volume of dates, we made it clear this isn’t for them. This illuminated new offering possibilities as we expand.
Profiles were a point of contention for many users. People felt stressed creating them, and limited by what they conveyed to others. We kept onboarding simple, and dates were blind, with no visibility into their date’s or other members’ profiles — a departure from traditional dating apps. We invited members to lean into the practice of dating — where each connection is an opportunity to learn, grow, and connect authentically, and the repetition is part of that practice.
Our customers experience our brand as human, and the ethos of humhum as creating a culture of kindness and accountability. We decided to keep a live facilitator in the first app launch, rather than automate the entire guided date. A guided date is already a new experience for folks, and people recognized the stakes were higher, and were on better behavior when there was a live guide in the first section of the date.
🚀 Launching the Webapp App
In April 2023 we were selected to participate in cohort 29 of the Launch Accelerator, and received pre-seed funding to help launch our app. We grew our team, launched our web app in Beta, and were laser focused on ramping up our membership base.
Goal: Inform launch landing page messaging and design, provide clarity on what the offering is, create a simple path to conversion and hone in on the pricing for the membership, we conducted research.
Approach
Conducted several in-depth video-call interviews across member, prospective member, and former member segments.
Used a “think out loud” method to concept test our landing page.
Used a ranking exercise to hone in on value proposition.
And a storytelling exercise to hone in on which pain-points and solutions to highlight.
We analyzed the language our community used to describe humhum, so we could repeat it in our product communication, and marketing and learn what needed clarification.
We used a survey method to assess how our community learned of humhum to inform our acquisition strategy.
Strategic mapping of acquisition and engagement strategy
Language analysis informing onboarding copywriting concepts
Insights and Solutions
The word “dating” evoked a contraction response for many — we used this to inform the messaging and branding of the humhum app using a strikeout of the word dating. Our community loved it!
What humhum offers is quite a departure from traditional swipe-based apps. Education is critical to set expectations in onboarding, and our marketing material.
We needed to clarify in our language and product that were were not matchmakers, and that curation was not our core focus.
Outcomes
We converted 7% to the community to the waitlist which required a payment method within the first month of launch. We previously had not offered subscriptions.
💡A Pivot
In March 2024, based on feedback from our community, we simplified the app with the aim of getting more of our members on dates. It worked! Really well actually — we tripled the number of members who went on dates each month.
Our churn was unsustainable for the rate we were growing. One of the most commonly reported reasons for churn was that we hadn’t been able to book members on dates, or it’s taken too long to do so.
Goal
Increase dates per members per month. Reduce churn.
Approach
Data Analysis — We looked at the most commonly requested date times to assess what windows to offer dates within, and ran an analysis to assess the number of possible new matches we could create if we simplified our user preference and matching algorithm).
Customer Interviews with a ranking exercise to learn which preferences were deal breakers, and to assess potential impact of simplifying preferences to unlock more matches for members.
Product Revision — We tested our hypotheses by implementing a reduced booking window, and simplified preference flow.
Insights and Solutions
Scheduling is a blocker to dates getting booked. We simplified scheduling by reducing the window within dates are booked, automate weekly availability update reminders.
Nuanced preferences are a blocker. They over complicate pairing and reduce the matches we could make for viable dates. People were content to simplify preferences. We honed in on the most critical preferences where daters would both feel excited by and comfortable to meet someone blind, and adjusted our pairing algorithm.
The waitlist wait time was too long and people were dropping off. We remove the waitlist as a function of simplifying preferences and could get more people on dates.
Outcomes
2x subscribers: We doubled our subscribers in one month.
40% waitlist conversion: By removing our waitlist, and announcing our product updates, we converted a large percentage of folks stuck on the waitlist. This unlocked more matches for members and new viable date options.
3x bookings/ week: We tripled our average number of scheduled dates per week since launching the matching algorithm and onboarding preferences update.
10% reduction in churn: By Increasing dates per user per month, and booking discovery calls with new members, we reduced churn by 10%.