Meet Willow, The Dating App Where Love Isn’t Based On Lust

In the last year, Tinder packaged the experience of making eyes at someone across a bar and put it right on your phone. But if you’ve ever actually gone through with the eyes-in-a-bar experience, you know it can be hit or miss.

Willow, a new app launching to the App Store, asks users to make a connection based around who you are, not how you look. Instead of showing a feed full of selfies, Willow’s feed is full of questions. Users can ask anything that will be thrown into the feed, and users can respond to questions they find interesting or alluring.

Once a question has been answered, pictures are revealed.

The idea here, according to founder Michael Bruch, is that most dating networks suffer from the fact that it’s hard to start a conversation online with a stranger. In Willow, users are actually connecting by starting a conversation, getting that out of the way right from the get-go.

Like most dating apps, users can set preferences based around location, gender and age, with the added benefit of selecting intentions (casual conversation, friendship, romance, etc.) The app also lets you search questions by category so that you can find someone with mutual interests.

More than 100,000 people downloaded Willow during the beta, and the company is focused on user growth wholeheartedly before making any decisions about monetization. Thus far, Willow is entirely bootstrapped.

To check out the app, click here.