While one dating trend lets users tap a button and block every Thinking type from their feed, the opposite trend is quietly outperforming it: apps built entirely around matching people by personality type. MBTI-matching apps like Duolicious and So Syncd are two of the fastest-growing names in dating tech this year — one through a scrappy, open-source cult following, the other through a content machine built on personality data. Neither is short on users willing to defend it loudly online, and neither is short on skeptics who think the whole premise is shakier than the marketing lets on.
Two Companies, Two Very Different Kinds of Growth
So Syncd's Content Engine
So Syncd, the Myers-Briggs-based dating app founded in London in 2019 by sisters Jess and Lou Alderson, has built its growth less on the app itself and more on the website around it. A case study tracking the company's SEO strategy found its organic web traffic jumped 823% year-over-year, from roughly 259,400 monthly visits in September 2022 to 2.4 million a year later — and 54% of that traffic came from pages pairing zodiac signs, enneagram types, and celebrities like Madonna with MBTI profiles, rather than from the dating product itself.
Duolicious's Meme That Wouldn't Die
Duolicious took the opposite route. The open-source app launched anonymously on 4chan's /soc/ board in July 2023, built by a single developer who has said it "was only meant to be a meme app." It became one anyway: in May 2024, Duolicious briefly outranked established apps like eHarmony on Google Play's "Top for $0" dating chart, running on a free model with no swiping — matching instead runs off a quiz of more than 2,000 questions.
How the Matching Actually Works — and Why Hacker News Isn't Convinced
Clustering People Who Answer Alike
Duolicious sorts users with a clustering algorithm: answer enough of its 2,000-plus questions and it groups you with people whose responses land in a similar pattern, then serves fresh matches as you keep answering. It's the same basic logic behind MBTI-matching generally — find people who score similarly and assume similarity predicts chemistry.
"Not Looking to Date a Clone of Myself"
That assumption is exactly what commenters picked apart when Duolicious's code went public on Hacker News. The recurring pushback: matching people who answer identically isn't the same as matching people who'd actually get along, since plenty of successful couples are built on differences a clustering algorithm would score as a mismatch. It's the same tension MBTI-based filters run into everywhere — a shared type says two people process the world similarly, not that they'll enjoy being around each other.
The Numbers the Marketing Skips
A 7-to-1 Gender Ratio, Stated Plainly
Duolicious's team has been unusually candid about a problem most dating apps bury: active men outnumber active women by a ratio of roughly 7.32 to 1, and that ratio has historically run as high as 20 to 1. One Hacker News commenter called the disclosure itself "brave" — a rare instance of a personality-matching app admitting its core supply problem instead of spinning it.
Self-Selection as the Real Feature
Not every reaction was critical. Several commenters pointed to the app's crude, 4chan-adjacent branding as an accidental filter — the kind of front door that talks certain people out of downloading it before they waste anyone's time. As one put it, helping "ill-suited users self-select out before they download your product is rare and wonderful," a compliment that had nothing to do with MBTI accuracy and everything to do with honest marketing.
Two Growth Stories, Side by Side
| App | Growth Signal | Matching Basis |
|---|---|---|
| So Syncd | 823% YoY jump in organic web traffic (Sept 2022–Sept 2023) | Myers-Briggs type, plus zodiac and enneagram content |
| Duolicious | Briefly outranked eHarmony on Google Play's "Top for $0" chart (May 2024) | Clustering on 2,000+ quiz answers |
Both companies prove that personality-based matching still pulls people in reliably — the traffic and download numbers back that up. What's far less settled is whether either approach gets anyone closer to a real match than a well-built app without the four-letter framing, and until that's resolved, expect communities like Hacker News to keep arguing about it as loudly as the growth charts climb.
-EditorZ
Post a Comment