Last year, Tinder introduced Matchmaker, as a way for users to introduce their Facebook friends to potential matches. Tinder has since phased out the Matchmaker feature, but a new startup, Mashr, is resurrecting the feature as its central thesis. Mashr is straightforward: a user pairs two of their friends together and offers a quick explanation on why they should meet. If both agree Mashr makes the connection much like Tinder.
Mashr primarily competes with Hinge, which connects users because they share a mutual or third degree Facebook friend, and CoffeeMeetsBagel, which restricts users to one match per day in order to make those matches more meaningful. He argues that Mashr’s human matching can do better than other app’s algorithms.
Users on Mashr can pair any of their Facebook friends, even if those friends haven’t downloaded Mashr yet; those friends will then get a Facebook notification, which will drive app downloads.
In addition to the primary one-to-one matching aspect of the app, Mashr has a few gamification aspects to galvanize users to mash their friends together. MashPlay is a timed game where you try to match as many friends together as quickly as possible. MashFeed shows a list of all the mashes people are making–not just the successful ones. This aspect of the app is intriguing, but could backfire. The team hopes it will cause people to check the feed regularly to see who of their friends might be getting matched, but many people wouldn’t want others to see who they’re being matched with.
Full Article on TechCrunch
