Slower Dating is about to take its first proper step into the real world.
We're starting in Birmingham, around the University of Birmingham, with our first small pilot timed around the start of the new university year.
We'll be handing out flyers and putting up posters, introducing students to a different way of meeting someone:
No photos. No swiping. One message a day.
Until now, a lot of Slower Dating has been about building the idea, testing it, changing things, fixing problems and trying to make the experience work the way we imagined it should.
Now comes the interesting part.
We're putting it in front of real people and seeing what happens.
We genuinely don't know exactly how it will go.
There will probably be teething problems. Things may break. People may use the site in ways we didn't expect. Some ideas that looked good while we were building them may need changing once real students start using the platform.
That is exactly what a pilot is for.
The important thing is to learn quickly, fix what needs fixing, and keep moving forward.
We're deliberately starting small.
Birmingham is home, and the University of Birmingham gives us a focused place to begin. If students like the idea and genuine conversations start happening, we can learn from that before taking Slower Dating further.
The basic idea remains very simple:
Words before photos.
Dating apps have become extraordinarily good at helping people make very fast judgements about one another.
Slower Dating is an experiment in doing almost the opposite.
Read what somebody has to say.
Decide whether they sound interesting.
Request a conversation.
Then give that conversation a bit of time.
One message a day means there is less pressure to perform instantly, less pressure to keep a conversation going all night, and more space to think about what you actually want to say.
It may work brilliantly.
It may need a lot of refinement.
Most likely, it will be a mixture of both.
But this is the point where Slower Dating stops being only something we built and starts becoming something people actually use.
So this really is the beginning.
A few thousand flyers.
A handful of posters.
One university.
One city.
And an idea we've spent a long time building.
Birmingham, you're first.
Let's see where this goes.
— The Slower Dating team