Over 30 million Americans have used an online dating service or mobile dating app, according to Pew Research Center. Yet Black online users face apparent bias: Data collected from 25 million OkCupid accounts demonstrated that when users rated their matches they penalized Black men and women. Bae: Before Anyone Else, a mobile dating app created by Jordan Kunzika, Brian Gerrard and Justin Gerrard, hopes to make online dating a better experience for Black people. Bae founders cultivated their user base by going directly to the communities they believe need the app. They hosted an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) tour, which consisted of parties and mixers where people who matched on Bae could meet in person. All attendees had to have Bae downloaded to participate. Within a few weeks of their April 2015 launch, they reached 17,000 downloads, and have grown over ten times since. Bae’s founders are from the community they are building for–an essential dimension of their success. Jordan Kunzika, CTO of Bae and senior at Dartmouth College, is a first generation Angolan-American who often was the only Black person in his computer science classes. Throughout his journey he had few role models of color to look up to. “I quickly realized that it was up to me to either let this negatively affect me, or let it motivate me to be successful, so that people who come after me will have role models who look like them” says Kunzika. He is a Google Generation Scholar and has done internships with Microsoft and Intel, but when deciding what to do after graduation he chose Bae. “I was honored to get full-time offers from Microsoft and Google before even turning 21, but I knew that I could serve a higher calling to represent a paradigm shift in what a tech entrepreneur could look like,” he says. Kunzika met his co-founders Justin and Brian Gerrard in his junior year and quickly joined the team after they pitched Bae to him. Bae has reached users all over the globe. They are even listed as a Top 50 Lifestyle app in twenty African and Caribbean countries. Similar to other dating apps, Bae users swipe right for those they’re interested in and left for those they’re not. According to the founders what makes Bae different is their proprietary algorithm built by Kunzika. “What users like the most about Bae,” he explains, “is the quality of the matches and that it helps you find those you’re most interested in”. Source: Tech Crunch |