Fourplay is an app where friends team up to go on double dates with other singles. Co-founders Danielle Dietzek and Julie Griggs join Cheddar News to talk about navigating the online dating world and creating the platform. 

Between Bells

Meet Fourplay: The App Letting Singles Go on Double Dates

and welcome back everyone to between bells, I'm baker machado in new york. One app is looking to revolutionize the dating game. We're talking about foreplay social was created to be a social network for single friends. Now the apple house pairs of friends to match up with the intent of doing a double date, whether it be a more casual or romantic way, take a look, but if it's me and my best friend julie, we're obsessed with each other. Oh and we're also both single, but dating kind of sucks. So we were like, we should totally double date and then we were like, wait, should we make an app for double dating? So we did and we named it for no, actually we made an app called foreplay, I love it. So joining us now with the founders of foreplay, Daniel, get sick and julie Griggs, welcome guys to cheddar news, thank you for having us so much. We're so excited. Okay, so you guys have been close friends since college and now your business partner, So tell us why you guys decided to create this happened and how did you guys go about it? What made you decide to do this? So in an unexpected plot twist, Danielle and I are actually health care providers who were by no means trying to start a business in the dating space, but when I was in my last semester in grad school, I was placed in Manhattan for six weeks and I was living with Danielle at the time and we were just talking about how it was so exciting to finally be able for me to be able to date in new york, but that I also wanted to spend time with my friends and not have to sacrifice my social life for my dating life. So we decided to kill two birds with one stone and we changed Danielle's dating profile to pictures of the two of us, we wrote swipe right, if you and your awesome friend wanna double date me and my awesome friend and we had a crazy positive response from the guys and three years later, here we are, so congratulations Danielle and being the guinea pig in all of this. So Danielle tell us how foreplay social works, how does this all sort of work out here. Yeah, absolutely. So the way that it works is when users download the app, they're prompted to add a friend, so they add a teammate and it doesn't have to be a friend, right? It can be a coworker or a sister or a cousin. Um and when you create that team, you put photos of yourselves and you put your preferences, so who you want to date the age of the people that you want to date and where they are um and then you can fill out a description of who you are and what you guys are looking for and then when your preferences are set and your team is live, you can actually start swiping through other teams of pairs, so pairs of friends and when you like them and they like you, that's a match and a group chat is generated and you can go on a double date. I think this is so cool and I wish this was around when I was single, so julie, you know, look, there's 1000 dating apps out there, but none of them are sort of highlighting something like this. Do you almost feel like that gives you guys an advantage here? Oh totally. Also, I wish foreplay was around when I was like 22. I feel like I would have really thrived on the app. Yeah, we're still we're still its majority gen z user base. Um but we're still thriving but I definitely think it gives us an advantage. I think people underestimate how complicated and difficult it is to build an app and an algorithm based on four people instead of just two. Um And I think the fact that we are focusing on the experience of being single, not on changing your relationship status, that's what makes us different because we believe that if you're doing single right, it's one of the best times in your life and you should be enjoying it. No, and I think that's a fair and valid point and Danielle to get you into this as well. I feel like when I talk to a lot of my friends that go on a lot of dates, they wish they had somebody there with them, but sometimes it just gets stale sort of just talking to some people that maybe you're not interested in. And also maybe just a security and safety aspect here. Absolutely. And when you go out with somebody and the conversation gets stale and you feel like you wasted a night, you're like, wow, I could have gone out with my friends. It's saturday night and what a waste of time. But if a friend is there with you and then even if it's not a great time, a night out with your friend is never a night wasted, you're gonna laugh about it, you're gonna have a great time regardless. And even if there's no romance, you might even make friends out of it. That's that's a good point because think of how many times you go and tell your friends about a bad date that you went on, but now they actually are physically there to witness it while it's happening. So julie, let's get back to sort of the creation of this because you mentioned you guys came from the medical field, was that transition to creating this algorithm creating this app was that sort of difficult in terms of that transition sort of, know it was super difficult, It was, it was a big, big learning curve. So like full transparency, we outsourced the initial build of foreplay to a company in India um tried to just see if there was even a demand or a need for this product and once we saw the momentum and saw how badly people wanted it and how people wanted it outside of new york and all over the world, we decided to commit full time to foreplay. We hired a full time engineer who's our VP of engineering and we have learned a lot on the job. Ok, so Danielle, I haven't been on too many double date, so I'm obviously not accustomed to any of this, are, how different would they be from a regular date? Like where would you go on a double date? Do you still go to the movies? Do you still go coffee? Like where are some double date ideas that people would go on? Well, I think the bread and butter of dating is going out to a bar restaurant and that's definitely still a staple with foreplay, but you can also do so much more, right, because you can do activities, it's not as awkward if there are four people there. So we've had users right into us and be like I had the best time last night, I went to Golf Sim or we played pickleball or you know, there's, we went surfing windsurfing, right, there's so much you can do when there are four of you. Um it makes it relieves some of that friction in the activity. I love it. So julie. Where does foreplay go from here? What sort of the next sort of steps that you guys are planning to take the company from here on? Well, in the very short term we're redesigning the app right now, really honing in on making it a seamless user experience. And by the end of the year we're planning on launching it at least two more cities, likely Chicago and L. A. Um maybe throw boston in there. We'll see where the demand is. Alright, I can't wait to check this out anytime I get single. I'm definitely on this app. Daniel did sick and julie Griggs, founder of foreplay Social. Thanks so much guys for joining us here on the news.