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Looking for a food-based dating app? Enter Dindr, an app that encourages people to get off their phones and meet in person that night. The app is available for download right now and is scheduled to go live in Austin on Friday, January 26.
Dindr co-founder and CEO Zachary Casler, as a dating app user himself, told Eater that he wanted to create an app to make dating manageable, actionable, and more respectful. “We want our community to spend less time on the screen, and more time face-to-face,” Casler said.
Dindr combines features inspired by several other apps. Users get access to matches in ten-minute rounds that occur three times a day at noon, 3 p.m., and 7 p.m. (much like HQ Trivia). During the rounds, users swipe on different profiles (much like Tinder), but only have access to one match at a time, which will expire if plans are not made for that day (users can manually expire the match if the other person isn’t responding).
Dindr speeds up the planning process by providing conversation topics and three restaurant options halfway between the users’ locations. Restaurants are currently suggested via Yelp, though Casler told Eater Austin there are plans for curated date lists from local bloggers and publications and sponsorships. The full restaurant line-up isn’t available yet.
Dindr originally started in Houston as a way of helping users choose restaurants, allowing participants to swipe on pictures of food and make informed suggestions of restaurants to try, and then shifted to enable meetups. However, after discovering that people were most often meeting for dates, the company switched focus to a dating app.
“It’s how it’s been done for generations,” Casler explained in a press release. “Sharing similar tastes helps form strong relationships; when you share a meal, you connect in a way that has withstood the test of time.”
