From Match to Plan: What's New in TANGO

We've been experimenting a lot lately here at TANGO, and we wanted to talk about what our findings have been over the past couple of weeks.

One of the biggest friction points we found with singles was making the final decision. For a lot of our singles, we were able to match them with people that found common interests. The only problem was getting singles to make that final hurdle of making their final pick. The issue we found was that singles didn't know when the details of the date plan were going to be, as it could be anywhere in the range both people agreed to. Naturally, the easiest option seemed to just coordinate what both people would like to do instead of relying on the date plan system.

We are experimenting with something completely new for what it means to TANGO and how singles are matched.

Date invites: one person picks the place, the other picks the time
Firstly, Singles now send a date invite by planning the location that both people would like to go out to. This still relies on both people having the same preference in locations, whether that's at a coffee shop or at a restaurant. We leave the person sending the invite the opportunity to pick where they would like to meet. However, we felt that the person who is receiving the date invite should be able to pick when the date would occur. Both people now get a say, and nobody has to guess when or where the date is. We hope that both users being able to have control over how the date is expected to go would lead to more people going out.

Events: More reasons to go out
Speaking of going out, We are looking at expanding TANGO with a new feature set called Events. There's a lot going on in College Station outside the restaurants and venues that we normally cater to, and we wanted the students to be able to plan around these events as well. Whether it's a gardening event happening at the A&M Gardens, a cooking class happening at Ronin, or a Romantic Music event happening at the Liberal Arts building, we wanted to cater to individuals who felt that going to a location didn't provide enough incentive to go out. This update is for you.

We are constantly monitoring for what's happening in the Bryan College Station area now for venues that are promoting their events. Our current goal is to match people with anywhere where groups of people are meeting, so no one feels left out.

Other than the big features, we have been behind the scenes taking the functionality of the apps on both IOS and Android much more seriously. Over many cups of coffee (100+), we think we have cleaned up some of the most annoying parts of the apps to feel much more intuitive and bug free. Some of our biggest improvements were related to sending chats to one another, whether it's in a friend group or to someone new for that first date.

For couples, we spent a lot of time trying to clean up the extra UI clutter that made it more difficult to open the app and get a new plan made. We already have a really good idea of what both people like, but having to spend 5 minutes in the menus getting something actually set up didn't feel right to us. So we spent some time cleaning up the UI and making the plans feel more frictionless.

And speaking of friend groups, we wanted to look into making friends feel much more welcome on the apps. We get it, it can be hard to pitch our app to your friends when dating is one of the core functionalities of the app. To that end, we are planning a new experimental phase for our apps where we are branding as the app that helps people go out, not necessarily as a dating app. Dating is still one of our primary missions and goals (we are NOT a fan of how dating apps handle love behind subscriptions), but another primary goal is to just get people to go out and find new things to do with new people they love to spend time around. So whether you are trying to find something new to do with your significant other, or whether you're trying to find someone that gives you butterflies in your stomach, or just trying to find some new friends that have common interests, TANGO is here to help you out.

Check out TANGO today and let us know what you think. We think we will surprise you with what we have accomplished over the last couple of weeks.

Cheers!
Kyle Stallings