Heather Li never thought she would become a matchmaker. But coronavirus changed everything.
She discovered a new way in which people could interact, be attracted to one another, and discover things about themselves without ever meeting or speaking. This thing, which seems so simple yet for some reason not common, is based on a very intuitive concept: hearing people speak and analyzing their voice using social science experts.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
With her career taking a twist because of coronavirus – like many people affected during the pandemic, she found herself laid off – she took it with stride and began to explore her passions.
In what she calls "a creative sabbatical," she ventured to see how people like her were coping with the sudden change the world was experiencing, how loneliness can be a force for good rather than a downward spiral of despair, how interaction can be made extra special when the medium is voice, not in real-time but through messages, using what she called "prompts" (basically, tasks in which both parties have to engage in as a means of getting to know each other).
She discovered that just because people are lonelier and more confused because of coronavirus, it doesn't mean they have lost the basic interactive skills they used to employ in pre-pandemic times. In fact, the pandemic may have honed those skills even further.
That's the setting that led her to create this voice-based match-making program, alongside a podcast that analyzes that experience with input from professionals. The podcast, "It's nice to hear you" has shown just how important, and even crucial, voice can be in forming relations.
"Can the power of voice lead to a deeper connection? Hear what happens in this audio-only matchmaking experiment based on the exchange of voice memos. No names, no direct contact, no pictures," she writes in the description of the podcast. In an interview with Israel Hayom she shares her reflections on how the first season unfolded. Spoiler alert: A second season is already in the works.
Li said she was struck by how this approach has been left unexplored for so long.
"I was very surprised, in terms of why others haven't done exactly this, because other people who have tried to experiment with different modalities or just focusing on one modality like voice from a business perspective, like an app or something to monetize, instead of approaching it from a storytelling perspective perhaps."
Li essentially claims that her success was not just the format, but also how it was simplified to its prospective users. Having come from a business background herself, she may have intuitively stumbled upon a very self-evident truth: In order to attract people to something new you don't have to reinvent the wheel, just make it accessible as possible, and more importantly, easily understandable, or in her words, make it into a "story" that gets people turning pages.
"I wasn't in digital marketing, but I do have a business background. So I could have definitely created an app, but it wasn't really what I was interested in, I didn't have to make a business out of it. I treated it as a creative sabbatical, which is more fun, and I wanted to learn about storytelling anyway and creating content, what it's like to create something out of nothing. It was definitely very fun and fruitful, personally, to have the time to do it."
In other words, the experiment showed that people liked to find clarity and stability in dating just as much as they liked the excitement and opportunity that it carries.
"The thing I learned from this is that if I want people to behave differently, the environment has to be different, so by creating an app, with the same user experience, and the app on mobile on-screen, people are just going to default to their socialized behaviors and our normal behaviors are really not conducive to dating. Just the short attention span, the tendency to filter, and all of these things are, against what social science says, that is required for dating, which is like an investment in time to get to know someone, optimizing, unfolding things without filtering things on a binary basis. It's not for the lack of desire to want to connect with people and experiment. Lots of articles on online dating show that people are drained by it. We deeply desire human connection but once we put ourselves in front of the screen on a dating app that has swipe left and right features, we are automatically going to resort to those behaviors. So I think, I wasn't very interested in doing that for that reason, and it didn't seem like it was evolving the conversation. I did speak to dating app professionals, along the way people have said, just create an app and will give you money through friends and business people. But it was tempting to think that it's not as interesting, I'd rather continue creating the content and not be distracted by that."
Q: You basically discovered a niche of millennial anxiety. I assume those who signed up were really intrigued by how professional it is. Did you notice that?
"I am surprised that larger, more mainstream dating apps haven't really incorporated social science. But I guess given their business model it's kind of contradictory to that, like the main thing that science says is that you need time, and also we are really bad at judging matching for ourselves. There are a ton of studies that say we don't really know what we want, we are not very good arbiters of being able to filter for a match. There is one recent study that said that a total stranger has just as much chance of filtering and swiping for someone that we deem compatible as ourselves, we don't have any additional knowledge or skill of being able to swipe better than any other stranger. And that is kind of antithetical to the dating app premise.
Q: Do you omit parts in which they are angry or reject the matches? Did you sense any of that?
"There is one small segment in which I talk about an Irish pair. An Irish man matches with an Irish girl. I use them to demonstrate that there are other participants that didn't talk every day, they had really strong momentum in the beginning and then one person kind of just goes ... and it's just truly disappointing. And this shows that this alternative method is not better than a dating app. Initially, I thought dating apps were the worst, that there eeds to be a better alternative, and after designing this experiment and hearing the disappointing stories and audibly hearing people's disappointment, like the Irish guy who sends a couple of messages to that girl after not getting a response, you know it's really sad. So hearing that made me realize that this is definitely not better. When it works, it really works, and when it doesn't it's even more disappointing than a dating app. So it's just different."
Q: Do you eventually allow people to take it a step further without you?
"The experiment itself does not extend beyond voice. At the end of the 30 days, there is a conclusion and information does get exchanged if both people opt into it. In the podcast, there is a reveal of what happens to the main characters. But as far as physical interaction during the course of the 30 days, there are other visual elements. That gets introduced through the prompts, that is a big part of the experience for the participants."
Q: Do you think we are heading into a different kind of dating world based on what you have discovered?
"Yeah, totally. I think there is a lot of desire and definitely opportunities. Another thing I'm surprised by is that there are so few alternative experiences. Dating apps started in the early 2000s with match.com and that kind of put dating online and then it's Tinder, which really made mainstream dating on mobile. Since then, there hasn't really been a big revolution and I really think that there is an opportunity to do that. Like dating 3.0 and you know, I talk about not approaching it from a business perspective earlier and now I am working on an experiential dating business concept that is not an app but a different type of dating experience. People date differently and dating is one of the key points of human connections, and people are different, personalities are different, our preferred modes, feels and capabilities of communicating are different. We all have different levels of emotional education so an app experience is not going to work well for everybody, so yes, it's just about introducing an alternative message."
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
