You match with someone you’ve never spoken to. You have no sense of their personality or their vibe. Yet, you jump straight into a 2 hour first date, plus commute time, plus getting ready time, plus money. This makes no sense.
You know within 10 minutes (often much faster) of meeting if you’re interested or not. But even if you know immediately it’s not gonna work, you sit there painfully asking about siblings, hobbies, etc. when you don’t care. You’re just waiting for enough time to pass so you can leave without being an asshole, though in reality you're wasting each other's time.
Tenr is a dating app that defaults to scheduling people into a time-capped 10-minute video date (called a Tenr - for a "ten minuter") to evaluate chemistry upfront, before committing time and money to someone. It ends automatically after 10 minutes no matter what.
After the Tenr, you say whether you want to meet in person or not. If you both want to meet, phone numbers are exchanged.
I used Cursor, Windsurf, and Codex (more recently) to write most of the code. It took only a few weeks to build. One of the biggest challenges has been de-stigmatizing video-first dating.
Hope you guys check it out. Happy to answer any questions, and looking forward to any feedback.
You can try it here: https://tenr.co
Deeper thesis behind the app: https://www.tenr.co/whitepaper