Today we’d like to introduce you to Harsha Gaddipati.
Hi Harsha, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
One day in November, my friend from Northwestern sent me a link to an event called the Marriage Pact happening at Northwestern. Over 1000 students at Northwestern filled out a roughly 50-question survey and then got matched with their “soulmate”.
Doing some research, I found that dating events like this happened at other colleges like Harvard, UW-Madison, Stanford, etc. Seeing this, I asked around at Georgia Tech to see if we had something similar. Some upperclassmen told me that Georgia Tech had similar things in the past, but they all stopped due to various reasons such as privacy problems or the creators graduating. It didn’t make any sense how one of the biggest computer science schools in the nation didn’t have something like the Marriage Pact, but many other less technology-focused schools did. I mentioned this to my college friends and my surprise, they did not just agree to my shock but told me they would want to help run an event for Georgia Tech. With that, we started working on our initial event – GTDB (Georgia Tech Dating Blind). Word quickly spread around my dorm, and we went from a team of four to a group of over 20 people. We ended up creating several departments, such as question development, logistics, marketing, front-end development, and algorithm creation. You would think I was enthused with all these people wanting to work on GTDB; however, I was honestly quite stressed. Now, if GTDB failed, I would be failing the efforts of 20-plus people instead of just myself. So, I started doing more research, looking at what caused other similar dating events at Georgia Tech to fail and what caused dating events like Marriage Pact and Data Match to work so well at other colleges.
I found that the two biggest reasons why dating events worked at other colleges were privacy concerns and the dreaded ratio. One of the biggest reasons for Georgia Tech not having a dating event was not due to lack of effort but instead because past attempts ended in scandals due to poor data management. For example, one event published everyone’s responses online. Due to this people were scared to do any dating event out of privacy concerns. To combat the first, we talked as a team and decided that we would rather have people know all the nitty-gritty of what we do and feel safe giving us their data than have some sort of “trade secret”. After all, this was a fun project, not a multi-million dollar corporation. The second problem was much harder to crack. To start with, there is no dating app or algorithm out there that does not struggle with having some people left out. Whether it be Tinder where women swipe on ten times as many people as men do, or your local church’s dating scene, age and gender always lead to messy issues. We figured that the best way to approach this problem was to go with the option of giving some people multiple dates rather than insisting on one match per person. After all, the point of GTDB was to get people out into the dating scene, not to find their one-of-a-kind soulmate.
Once we felt we had solutions that worked enough to meet these two areas, we decided it would be good to have a test run. We launched GTDB in February and kept it open for ten days, expecting maybe 100 responses. To our surprise, over 1000+ people filled out our rinky-dink Microsoft form. It was a smashing success by far. From there, we also had a friend-finding event, which still have over 300+ participants even though there was significantly less marketing. In the future, we plan on doing more events with some improved infrastructure.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
As an 18-year-old with only second-hand experience with dating apps, one of my biggest struggles was just understanding what people are looking for in dating. Luckily, I had the GT Match team and my friends to listen to. What one of my professors used to tell me constantly was to have an effective solution you first need to truly live in that problem space. So I did that, talking constantly to people about their romantic lives and what were the roadblocks and struggles. From there I was able to get a knowledge base to understand what people’s needs were. I found that one of the biggest reasons Georgia Tech has a relatively tame dating scene compared to colleges like UGA is just a lack of self-esteem.
It honestly is pretty heartbreaking, hearing so many great people talk about how they feel dating now is out of the picture because they simply aren’t attractive enough. This lack of self-esteem was another thing we struggled with. Initially, people were wary of GTDB. After all, they felt that even if they got a match, they’d be rejected right away because once again, they weren’t attractive. So, we went and did significant marketing to push the notion that like any sort of dating that doing GTDB has no bearing on your self-worth and is just an attempt to find your soulmate. What helped with this was honestly, not something we did, but instead word of mouth that spread around campus. Completely organic, but it helped ease people’s nerves and make them more open to trying us out.
Now finally after GTDB, one of our biggest struggles is transitioning from a group that put on a fun event to being a group that consistently puts on great events. Part of it is just that our team size has shrunk significantly from around 20 to 6 now. With all of us being in college, we lost a lot of people just due to them feeling their lives were taking them on a different path. While in terms of making algorithms and questions, this lack of people doesn’t hamstring us, it does in marketing. With 20 people we could reach all of campus within 2-3 hours, now it takes much longer. Ideally though, this is a problem that gets fixed with time as we slowly become more and more integrated with the campus community so that we don’t need to do any marketing.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are GT Match. GT Match specializes in utilizing modern psychology and algorithms to match people in various arenas such as dating and friend-making. We have plans to eventually expand to Atlanta at large, but currently primarily serve Georgia Tech. Compared to other dating or matching apps like Bumble and Tinder, we believe in a less is more approach. We feel that exclusivity can lead to better and more meaningful interactions. When you’re talking to 20 different people it’s hard to tell if you even have a special connection with one of them. We also feel that physical appearances do not matter in terms of building lasting relationships. A belief that is backed up by research, as scientists have found that while people use physical attributes to filter people, they often have no impact on the quality of relationships formed. With this belief, we try our best to match people based on what matters, items such as personality, life goals, and mutual interests. Along with this, we aim to give our members a chance to experiment and try out algorithms that may be far from traditional, for example, we’re experimenting with utilizing natural language processing (NLP) to decode personality for a future event.
So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
The reason that I started GT Match and stick with it regardless of anything that may happen is that I believe everyone deserves to find happiness. Unfortunately, many people that I know suffer significantly from their struggles in the dating arena. Oftentimes it’s from their own belief that they are undatable, despite them not even going out there and trying. If they did try, they would see they were far from it. Even outside of the dating field, the inability to form close relationships with people is a problem plaguing our generation. It is why many experts worry about the loneliness epidemic engulfing America. Through GT Match, we hope to help fight this epidemic as much as we can, whether it be a little or a lot. If we can even make one person a little less lonely, I think we’ll count this whole experience as a success. After all, no one deserves to be alone.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gatechmatch/
- Email: georgiatechmatch@gmail.com
