they met their partner over an app, double the figure from a decade earlier—and up from almost zero a decade before that. Alex Hofmann, an early TikTok executive, thinks he can do better still.
In considering a direction for his new dating app, Spark, “The feedback we kept getting was, Why isn’t there something that truly makes the dating experience more frictionless?” Hofmann says. “Something that allows people to spend more time on a date versus trying to find a date.” Spark launches today in the U.S. after a pilot run in Ireland and the Netherlands last year. A day after those launches, Spark had reached No. 1 on Ireland’s Apple-download chart and No. 2 on the Netherlands’.
Spark does away with Tinder’s swipe function in favor of a browsable grid—much like something you might see on an e-commerce site—and hoping to speed up the process of finding someone. Its algorithm prioritizes active users, and the app’s setup rewards not only logins but also consistent interaction with other users. Hofmann promises another feature will arrive in a few weeks “that really will make us significantly different from everything that is out there.
The dating-app industry is heavily concentrated in the hands of a few giants: Tinder and other Match Group apps and Bumble, which collectively enjoy over $27 billion in market value and $3.2 billion in revenue. Hofmann has experienced the pressure around combating deeply entrenched opponents as the first president of North America at Musical.ly; the Los Angeles startup that sold itself in 2017 to Beijing-owned ByteDance and eventually turned into TikTok. He had joined Musical.
Spark is one several apps that Hofmann and his cofounder, Joe Viola, are working on at 9Count, their three-year-old, Los Angeles-based startup. They’ve