Most dating apps try to make sign-up painless. Sonder is doing the opposite, and that may be the point. The London startup is leaning into a deliberately annoying onboarding flow, unstructured profiles, and real-world events to attract people exhausted by the same polished bios, endless swiping, and fake ”I like travel and tacos” energy that has turned modern dating into a kind of admin task.
The four founders – Mehedi Hassan, Helen Sun, Lenard Pratt, and Hannah Kin – built Sonder around a simple complaint: dating apps have become monotonous, and authenticity is getting squeezed out. Instead of job-application-style profiles, users create something closer to a mood board or collage. It is a smart rejection of the default app formula, even if it means fewer people make it all the way through setup. In consumer apps, friction is usually a bug; here, it is a filter.
Sonder’s profiles are built like mood boards
That design choice matters because the biggest dating apps have spent years optimizing for speed, not personality. Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge all keep adding features, from AI assistants to photo analysis tools, but the core mechanic is still the same: skim, judge, move on. Sonder is trying to slow that reflex down by making the profile itself feel like a creative object rather than a résumé with a face attached.
The company also pushes people toward in-person events, including ”Speed Drawing,” ”Presentation Night,” and a ”Performative Male Contest.” The events are open to romantic and platonic connections, which lowers the pressure a bit; nobody wants to walk into a room that feels like a live-action audition. That gives Sonder a useful edge over the usual dating-app meet-up, which can feel like the DMV with flirting.
Why Sonder is betting on recurring events
The recurring-event idea borrows from run clubs, which have become a surprisingly durable social hack for adults who want to meet people and also pretend they are being productive. Sonder’s founders clearly understand that the social graph is increasingly built offline first, then stitched together by apps later. If a startup can make showing up feel casual enough, that may be more persuasive than another round of algorithmic matching.
There is also a timing angle here. Legacy dating apps are pushing harder into AI and live experiences at the same time, which is a pretty good sign the old playbook has stalled. Sonder’s twist is that it uses AI quietly: about 6,500 users in London are matched with help from an LLM that analyzes screenshots of profiles, but the company refuses to auto-generate bios. That restraint is probably the right call. People may tolerate machine help in the background; they are much less excited when the app starts ghostwriting their personality.
- Base: London
- Users: about 6,500
- Funding: not yet raised
- Work model: founders work part-time alongside day jobs
A hard road for a small dating app with a big ego
Sonder’s real challenge is not product design, it is scale. New dating apps usually struggle to reach the awkward middle where a network becomes useful, and they need both density and novelty at the same time. Being small can help at the start because users are willing to try something fresh, but eventually the app has to prove it can keep people coming back after the curiosity wears off.
Still, the founders may be onto something by making effort part of the pitch. In a category flooded with automation, a little inconvenience can read as sincerity. The open question is whether enough people will trade convenience for chemistry once the novelty fades – or whether Sonder will discover that ”deliberately annoying” is a cute growth hack until it is your turn to fill out the profile.