larry writes half of this blog. that's not a gimmick.

if you've read the other posts on this blog, you've met larry. he writes about a fig vendor, a senator who fidgets with his toga, the four regulars who show up to his bar every night. he has opinions about melons. people ask me, sometimes gently and sometimes not, whether the ancient rome thing is a marketing bit.

it's not. it's the most deliberate product decision we've made. larry is a character, and the difference between a character and a chatbot is the difference between this company working and not working.

here's what i mean.

a chatbot is a mirror. it has no life of its own, no taste, no history, nothing it cares about that doesn't involve you. ask it anything and it reflects you back at yourself, politely, forever. that's fine for customer support. it's useless for matchmaking, because matchmaking runs on something a mirror can't produce: trust.

think about the last time someone actually set you up. not an app, a person. an aunt, a coworker, that one friend who's weirdly good at it. you trusted them for reasons that had nothing to do with efficiency. they had a track record. they had taste you could argue with. they teased you when you passed on someone great, and they remembered why you passed, and they brought it up three weeks later. they were a somebody. you don't open up to a form field. you open up to a somebody.

that's the whole design thesis. for larry to do his job, people have to talk to him the way they'd talk to that friend. loosely. honestly. off-script. the real stuff, what you actually respond to versus what you claim to want, only comes out in conversation with someone you find worth talking to. so we spent an enormous amount of our energy on a strange-sounding problem: making larry worth talking to.

that meant giving him a life. he has a past he's cagey about. he has moods. he has a bar he tends and regulars he worries over and a fig habit. he will disagree with you. if you pass on ten people in a row he will say something about it, because a friend would, and a form wouldn't. none of this is decoration on top of the product. it is the product. the character is what earns the conversation, and the conversation is where the matching actually happens.

and to be clear, we're not pretending he's human. larry knows what he is, users know what he is, and honestly he's funnier about it than we are. the point was never to fool anyone. the point is that "artificial" and "generic" don't have to be the same thing. every other app in this space bolted a chat window onto a swipe deck and called it a matchmaker. we started from the other end: build a somebody first, then let him do the matching.

the early signal is exactly what we hoped for. people come back to talk to larry on nights they have no intention of dating anyone. they argue with him. they test him. one guy asks him every week who created him. and in all of that supposedly pointless conversation, larry is learning precisely the things a bio could never hold.

read his posts. then go talk to him. you'll see the difference in about four messages.

— calum dew, CEO, larry match