On October 13 Bumble agreed to be bought by Ithaca Holdings for $1.3 billion, all cash, $6.05 per share. The IPO price in 2021 was $43. A week before the deal the stock was at $2.54. So the buyer pays more than double the market price, and early investors still lose most of their money. Both are true.

I wrote the full story in simple words, with graphs: who gets the money, why the stock fell 97% while 3.2 million people still pay and more. Read it here.

The short version: stock investors don’t believe in swipe apps as much as during COVID times, and now private buyers are buying them cheap.

The niche apps are making the money

While the big apps feel tourbulence, two “niche” ones grow.

1/ Feeld – kinky dating app (aka ‘app for the curious’) Revenue up 32% in 2025 to £64M, profit £11.4M (from £9.3M), per its UK accounts. Almost 90% of the money comes from outside the UK, with Mexico and Spain growing fastest. Feeld says it has 14 million users. For comparison, in Q2 Bumble’s revenue fell 15.2%. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/02/feeld-dating-app-pays-founders-sales-jump

2/ Grindr – app designed specifically for gay, bi, trans, and queer men. Revenue up 33% in Q2 to $138M. And now it agreed to buy PurposeMed – a telehealth service for HIV prevention. The price: $190M in cash plus $60M in Grindr stock. Freddie expects more than $80M revenue this year and is already profitable. Press release.

So a dating app is buying a healthcare company. Sounds strange, but it’s logical. Grindr already has the audience, and the audience already needs this care. Why send them to another app?

AI: apps add it, and… the scammers use it better

Bumble is replacing the swipe with AI matchmaking, Grindr is testing bot-to-bot chats (your AI talks to their AI before you meet), and Hinge adds optional AI help for profiles and first messages.

Meanwhile a small startup does the opposite of a companion app. Hot Girl Hotline, founded by two sisters in New York, gives young women dating and relationship advice with AI. It often answers with questions, so you reach your own answer. And it ends conversations instead of making them longer, and pushes you to do something in real life. $9.99 a month, no investors yet. An AI product that wants you to use it less. Interesting. https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/05/hot-girl-hotline-is-like-dear-abby-for-the-ai-era/

Now the bad news.

The US Congress Joint Economic Committee investigated Match Group for a year and published the report on October 14. https://therecord.media/congressional-probe-faults-match-group-for-failing-to-stop-dating-app-scams

1/ Almost 1.5 million scammers matched with real users on Tinder and Hinge in the first nine months of 2025.

2/ Profile views of a typical scammer on Tinder grew more than 700% between May 2024 and December 2025.

3/ Internal documents showed Tinder hadn’t updated some of its scam detection models in years. An AI safety expert told the committee they should be retrained at least monthly. (Match calls this “false and misleading”. It also put a newer model in place in early 2026, after the committee started asking questions.)

Also remember? Last month: a network of 20+ fake dating apps, built with Claude, talked to users (also who paid) faking a real conversation.

And one more moderation story. Hinge will now send users who write inappropriate messages through a short mandatory tutorial instead of an immediate ban. A human moderator checks the case first. Less serious cases get a warning and a walkthrough: no comments about someone’s body, jokes shouldn’t become personal attacks, check mutual interest before sexual topics. Serious or repeated cases still get banned. https://hinge.co/en-gb/newsroom/second-chance-education

Rehab instead of exile. We’ll see if it works.

Friends, networking, and meeting in person

1/ Clockout, a New York app to get professionals meeting in person, raised $3.5M. It has 600,000+ downloads and $1.1M in annual recurring revenue, reached 10 months after it started charging. Premium is $99 a year. https://fortune.com/2026/10/02/32-year-old-clockout-founder-3-5-million-gen-z-loneliness-epidemic-professional-networking

(personal note: from my Random Coffee years: making people pay for networking is the hard part. $1.1M ARR in 10 months is an amazing result.)

2/ Airbnb becomes a bit of a social network. In the fall update you can connect with other users, see their trips, and get suggested connections based on where you traveled. There is also a map of where your connections have been or are going (you can opt out). https://www.inc.com/moses-jeanfrancois/airbnb-does-not-just-want-to-book-trip-now-becoming-social-network/91412704

At the IRL Summit in Paris I learned that people pay €1000+ for group trips mainly to find friends. Looks like Airbnb noticed too.

3/ LinkedIn now lets members pay each other. Paid coaching and consulting sessions, an audience dashboard, and a marketplace to connect creators with brands. Btw LinkedIn also says 70% more members added “founder” to their profile over the past year. https://www.inc.com/aman-kidwai/linkedin-is-letting-members-pay-each-other-for-the-first-time-these-3-tools-are-built-for-solopreneurs/91420650

4/ A hiking club for founders. A product director in San Francisco built a community for startup founders around hiking and dirt biking. It now makes her $10K in revenue as a side project. Kudos to all offline clubs big and small, and no, I am not envy for $10K at all :) https://www.businessinsider.com/founders-community-turned-hiking-side-hustle-2026-10

Hope everything goes good in your life personally 💙

GovTech, the agency that normally does digital ID and public services, launched FirstDate, a pilot for public officers aged 21 to 35. You verify through Singpass (the national digital ID, so married people can’t sneak in). You get one match at a time and 72 hours to decide. https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/singapore-firstdate-government-workers-dating/

Why would a government do this? Singapore’s fertility rate fell to 0.87 births per woman in 2025. The median groom is 31. At some point the state looked at the numbers and decided to take an initiative.

Matching runs on the Gale-Shapley algorithm, the “stable marriage” one that won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2012. (Hinge has used the same algorithm for its Most Compatible feature for years. But “Nobel Prize” in a press release is always a good idea, heh.)

Your friends are back in the game

Two launches in one week with the same idea.

1/ Rivet. Taru Kapoor, ex-Tinder and Match Group executive, raised a $10.5M seed and launched across the US. In Rivet you can be a Dater or a Matcher. Matchers rate potential pairs, and pairs with strong ratings get introduced. So strangers play matchmaker for you. https://mashable.com/life/rivet-dating-app-launch-from-former-tinder-match-exec

2/ Tinder Group Hangouts. Launched September 30 in the US and a few other markets. You form a group of three or more, pick an activity, and your group appears in the card stack. When someone from each group likes the other group, a shared chat opens. In tests in Australia 40% of invitations were accepted, and women were 2.2x more likely to like a group profile than a one-to-one profile. https://www.tinderpressroom.com/2026-09-30-Tinder-Launches-Group-Hangouts-A-New,-Low-Pressure-Way-to-Meet-Someone-New-With-Your-Friends

Remember Tinder Social? 2016, groups of friends planning a night out together. It quietly disappeared. Ten years later the same idea is back, and this time with data that women actually prefer it.

Real Roots did this with facilitators, Timeleft with dinners for strangers, now Tinder with your own friends. Dating alone with an algorithm is losing. Dating with people around you is winning?

Anyway!

Paying for marriage

Match’s CFO told investors that Tinder’s monthly users will be flat only by the end of Q4 next year. Roughly five more quarters of decline.

Meanwhile the “serious intent” corner of the market is doing fine.

1/ IBJ, Japan’s biggest matchmaking network. Membership up 50% in five years, first-half revenue around $91M (+44%). IBJ is involved in about one in every 25 marriages in Japan. The rules are strict: no premarital sex, no living together, and a $1,300 fine if you break them. There is also a $1,300 success fee when you get engaged. Same price for the sin and for the success — I like the symmetry. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/business/japan-marriage-matchmaking.html

2/ Liangpei, China. You pay 2,000 yuan (about $275) once. If the app doesn’t find you a spouse within three years, you get your money back. Onboarding is a 20-minute AI voice interview with 25 questions, including your property plans (very practical). The founder says: “We want to get the users off the platform as soon as possible.” Probably the most honest product goal in dating this year. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1019025

In January I wrote about Real Roots charging $280 for a friendship guarantee. Liangpei guarantees a marriage for $275. You do the numbers.

3/ Match relaunched Upward for marriage-minded 18-34 year olds. New feature: “Chivalry Mode”, where men make the first move. This is one month after Bumble dropped its “women message first” rule. So in August women stopped being obliged to start, and in September men got a special mode for it. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/upward-relaunches-as-the-home-of-modern-courtship-302885533.html

Trap: paying for dating without knowing it’s with AI

Anthropic’s September threat report describes a China-based operation that built a network of 20+ dating apps and filled them with more than 4,700 AI personas. They reached at least 25,000 people and generated 2.36 million messages in two weeks. Real humans joined for the video calls, to look legit. The model they used was Claude (through 3rd party token provider, which was blocked by now, but still).

https://www.ksl.com/article/51629533/artificial-intelligence-dating-scams-move-beyond-fake-profiles-to-entire-fake-apps

Five people, face to face

Sanct launched in Singapore on September 28 and in Malaysia and Indonesia two days later. Before you unlock most features, you have to add five close people, ideally in person by scanning a QR code. No public feed, no public profiles, and your network stops at friends of friends. About 5,000 users at launch, so it’s tiny. But I like the onboarding. Most social apps ask for your contacts. This one asks for your people. https://voiceofasean.com/newsroom/sanct-is-now-live-in-singapore-malaysia-and-indonesia-the-social-app-that-asks-you-to-start-with-five-people/

Why those five people matter, in numbers: a Tulane University study of 277000+ adults found that loneliness and social isolation cost men about 5.8 years free of mental disorders, and women 3.7 years. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1144951

This trend pushed the author to try the offline service The Feels: facilitated meetup service for people tired of dating apps. She paid $100 for the first session, then $215 for the next, and in total their service might cost $4,000+ over three months.

I feel disappointment in between the lines describing her experience. And author draws her conclusion not just from personal experience of this particular service, but from a large body of research and her own interviews. I’ll share a couple of interesting quotes below, but the whole piece is worth reading.

“And yet, for many people, singlehood is at once eminently normal and entirely unwanted. Even an unhappily single person, Cohen said, is a sign of progress; at least they haven’t been forced to partner with someone they don’t want to be with. But that’s like telling someone with a cavity to be grateful for modern dentistry: completely correct and a little annoying.”

or another observation:

In 1960s it was common for partners to marry first, then pool resources and work toward stability together. Since then the shift is “I work till I can afford being married”, marriage is now seen as a final reward. As stable jobs have become rarer, pooling finances with a partner feels more like a risk than a help.

Two more articles resonate with this.

“Loneliness Influencers” term has appeared: people who accept their loneliness instead of posting fun parties on social media. They post how they spend Friday and Saturday nights — alone, and actually enjoy being with themselves. Both the article and the blogs of these people stress the same point: this isn’t advocating for giving up social life, just finding joy in your own company. But still kinda making life alone look sexy.

Finding joy in other people’s company is getting harder, and the frustration in Reddit threads makes sense:

“We were supposed to be the most connected generation, yet why are we more lonely than ever before.”

The conclusion is roughly this: thanks to tech, I hit like to a photo / reels, but it doesn’t create a strong bond, and the places where those bonds used to form — third places, like cafes and other places for shared activities — are slowly disappearing from Gen Z’s life. It’s simply getting too expensive to go to restaurants or other entertainment.

Beyond the money problem, expectations have gone up in almost every area of life, and it’s unclear where relationship-building even fits in when you’re also managing a career and trying to build financial stability in a tough economy. And building a relationship between two people hasn’t gotten any easier — there’s just less energy and fewer resources for it. Plus less belief that it’s worth the effort at all.

🔗 Article: ‘Loneliness influencers’ have no friends, but they say they’re happy. What they can teach us

🔗 Article: Lack of third spaces is making Gen Z lonelier: Why having more digital connections is not the same as having real friends

🔗 Instagram: Sarah-Jane, loneliness influencer

So what we have in short

combining insights from this newsletter + previous issues

1. The numbers

The trend of declining numbers for these apps in US has been visible for a while. Now here’s news from the Netherlands: Bumble usage dropped 9% year over year, and Tinder goes down by 15%. The only app gaining popularity is Breeze: there you can’t swipe endlessly or chat. You get sent just a few profiles per day, and if you both like each other, you skip the chat and go straight to a date.

🔗 Dating apps quickly falling out of favor with Dutch users

It looks like people find other ways that swiping. Eventbrite reports trivia nights up 403% year over year, mahjong up 235%, along with pottery, plant swaps and bird-watching meetups. Eventbrite’s own research found that 58% of young adults want socializing to be a secondary part of the experience.

🔗 Dating Apps Are Dead. Here’s Where Singles Are Meeting in 2026.

2. Bumble removes it’s core positioning feature

It was a whole chain of announcements from Bumble recently. After CEO changed, they said they’ll be doing in-real-life events + AI matchmaker “Bee” inside the app is a new thing.

In the last newsletter issue I mentioned unconfirmed rumors that the company is preparing to sell, and this month the main pillar Bumble was built on took a hit. Previously, only women could send the first message, meant to stop men from flooding their inboxes, something that usually happens because of the gender imbalance on most of the dating platforms. But according to Bumble’s internal data, 66% of women want men to be able to start the conversation, so Bumble is becoming just like every other dating app.

🔗 Bumble ditches its rule that kept men from making the first move

Probably the new bet: Bumble Best Friends IRL events created in New York rose 55% between April and June 2026, and 71% of surveyed Gen Z women said structured group settings make meeting people easier.

🔗 Pop-Up Bagels and Bumble BFF are teaming up to help you make friends over free carbs this weekend

3. Other new bets on how to bring people together

1. Crowd judgement. CrowdMatch opened a public waitlist ahead of a New York launch, with members voting on whether photo pairs look compatible before receiving matches of their own. The model copies what people already do in group chats, and the company says it will avoid attractiveness scores and leaderboards.

   

2. Shared activity as the filter. Dating app Surf and fitness brand Hyrox are taking their "Blind First Dates" worldwide. They match single strangers to compete as partners in fitness races. After big success in the US (“millions watched online and thousands applied”) they're expanding to London, Dublin, Rio and more. Plus, 90% of the couples kept talking after their race.

   

3. Small private groups instead of feeds. Yope raised $12.3M (total funding $20M), for a social app with no algorithmic feed and no ads. It reports nearly 15 million registered users. AI is used for mini-games and meetup suggestions (not content).

Missed the June update? Here it is: https://relationshiptech.substack.com/p/relationship-tech-news-and-trends-fb4

1. Tinder’s first rebrand in a decade

Unveiled mid-July with New York studio Porto Rocha. All-caps wordmark, a sharper flame, an expressive serif, and blue and green added to the red-pink gradient. Imagery mixes couple photos with anime screenshots, oil paintings and memes. The swipe gesture itself became a design device: swiping reveals type and images underneath.

https://www.creativereview.co.uk/porto-rocha-reveals-first-tinder-rebrand-in-a-decade/

The real change is the voice. At the centre sits “T”, a fictional dating columnist — part Carrie Bradshaw, part Dear Karen from 90s UK Sky Magazine.

“This voice has made her mistakes, she’s learned with you, and she’s also having the time of her life doing it.” — Natalee Ranii-Dropcho, strategy & copy director, Porto Rocha

Copy moved with it: “happily ever after” became “happily TBD.” Taglines point off-app (“It starts with a swipe”), not at the swiping itself.

The pressure behind the redesign:

• Paying subscribers down from 11.1M in 2022 to 8.77M in 2025.

• Tinder’s own year-end report: 48% of Gen Z singles deleted every dating app in 2024.

• Dating app burnout measured at 78% in 2024 survey data, worst among Gen Z.

Not everyone is sold — Creative Bloq ran a branding-expert critique on July 22: https://www.creativebloq.com/design/branding/is-the-tinder-rebrand-a-total-success-not-everyone-is-so-sure

And then the same month undercut the message. On July 29 Tinder confirmed it had paused its AI “Photo Enhance” tool in the US It had auto-edited profile photos with no opt-in. Users reported changed teeth, altered features, one reported lightened skin.

“It was extremely violating. Those are not my teeth.” — Jeni Rubin, who deleted the app and posted about it on TikTok

Tinder says the tool was meant to sharpen and brighten only, affected a small number of users, and is paused while they add safeguards. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tinder-pauses-ai-photo-enhance-tool-after-user-complaints-rcna589732

A brand built on being a knowing, human friend, shipping AI that quietly redraws your face. That is the whole month in one company.

2. Hinge’s founder raised $18M to delete profiles and swipes

First mentioned in my January blog post, we have some more news on raising $18M and those who invest (basically, competitors).

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/14/the-founder-of-hinge-raised-18m-to-build-a-new-ai-dating-service-overtone/

• Voice- and audio-forward matchmaking, AI-enabled, “grounded in relationship science,” selling curated introductions.

• Launch later in 2026 in select cities. Waitlist open. No product yet.

“Overtone is not a dating app… There are no opaque, algorithmic feeds trained on split-second impulses.”

The paradox wit the Overtone’s funding

A company that makes billions off Tinder’s swipe-based mechanics is now funding a startup (Overtone) whose idea is that swiping is broken and needs to be replaced.

The second layer of paradox is the conflict of interests between people. Justin MacLeod (Founder & CEO Overtone, left position of CEO in Dec’25) previously ran Hinge, which Match still owns.

Spencer Rascoff (CEO Match Group) is both the CEO of Match (the investor) and a board member of Overtone. This means the same person is responsible for Tinder/Hinge/OkCupid, while also sitting on the board of a company that should theoretically devalue them.

A possible explanation: Match is hedging its risk. If the “swipe-dead” thesis turns out to be true, they already have a stake in whatever replaces it, rather than a competitor.

Three things that complicate the bet:

• a Bloomberg Intelligence survey of 1,000 daters found nearly half have no problem writing their own profile;

• Bumble’s Bee is running the same thesis and is still only a pilot;

• and curated introductions need density before they get good, which is where every previous anti-swipe wave did not (yet) show similar to Tinder size success.

My May take on this thesis going mainstream: https://relationshiptech.substack.com/i/200269591/swipe-is-dead-officially-becomes-too-mainstream-to-say

3. Link digest

• Yope raised $12.3M for a private social network with no algorithms, no ads, no public content. ~15M registered users, 10–20M pieces of content shared weekly. “[Young people] don’t have any place to self-express if they are not ready to be an influencer” https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/yope-raises-12-3m-to-build-a-private-social-network-without-algorithms-or-ads/

• Hinge launched “Friend’s Take” — friends and family leave testimonials on your profile via text, photo or video. I personally find this a very strong move. Human vouching, arriving exactly as AI-written profiles lose trust. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/dating-app-hinge-adds-wingman-feature-to-help-singles-weed-out-potential-creeps/ar-AA27Y9Ya

• 265 marriages from TOKYO Enmusubi, the Tokyo government’s app, as of June 30, plus 760 serious relationships. 16,000 members filtered from ~36,000 applicants, each proving they are legally single. The one place in this category where success is counted in weddings. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/07/28/japan/ai-marriage-app-tokyo/

• Tinder Events went from LA to nine more cities, targeting 26 by end of September. LA pilot: 66% of eligible active users engaged, 53% came back. Company data, one market, measures tab engagement rather than dates. https://www.tinderpressroom.com/2026-07-23-Tinder-Expands-Events-Globally,-Bringing-More-Ways-for-Singles-to-Spark-Connections-IRL

• Korea’s Apting only accepts people who live in apartments, verified against resident registration records. Villas and officetels excluded. It went viral and started a national argument about class. https://globalnation.inquirer.net/329998/no-apartment-in-korea-you-cant-join-this-dating-app

• Korean apps are moving into Japan (Wippy, Glam, Gold Spoon) as the home market saturates. Around 70% of Koreans in their 20s–30s say they will not use dating apps. https://en.sedaily.com/finance/2026/07/05/korea-is-a-red-ocean-k-dating-apps-set-sights-on-japan

• Turkey’s block on LGBTQ+ dating apps continued through July, extending from Hornet to Jack’d, Taimi, SCRUFF, ROMEO, Surge and others. https://bianet.org/haber/turkey-blocks-access-to-lgbti-dating-apps-320810

• Arya acquired couples app Flamme (~200K users) in a multi-million, performance-based deal that started with a cold LinkedIn DM and closed in ~30 days. The bet: couples retain, daters churn. First move in a planned roll-up. https://www.businessinsider.com/read-linkedin-dm-pitch-acquisition-arya-flamme-ai-relationship-couples-2026-7

“We can’t create chemistry.
But we can try to maximize the chances that something good might happen.”

Quote from a video by Luba, Head of Product at Timeleft.

There’s more great ideas there.

“Majority of our audience actually single people — and I think there’s some kind of dating intention always underneath.”

Or the list of metrics worth watching for IRL product:

• Experience score – rating of the impression after the event

• Rebooking rate – repeat booking

• Post-event cross-chatting – communication between participants on the platform after the meeting

• Word of mouth – organic referral traffic

• Funnel drop-off points – conversion at each step: ad → install → subscription → first event → repeat

• Cancellation rate – percentage of cancellations

• No-show rate – percentage of no-shows

Check the full video:

This podcast got me thinking about the limits of what Relationship Tech apps can actually influence. By 2026, surely you (we) have already built a service that will reliably introduce me to the right person?

The truth is, any social product is a complex system, or call it an “assemblage”: people, tables, food, light, music, price, social networks, weather, mood, phase of the moon, I don’t know what else! You control part of these elements. But control is distributed across the assemblage.

You can design the perfect dinner, but someone had a hard day and showed up “closed off.” This reflects how a complex system / assemblage works. That still hasn’t changed in 2026.

In terms of metaphor: building an algorithm that “finds the perfect match” is an attempt to push the river. Putting five strangers at one table with good wine is an attempt to build a great service, one where it’s good and comfortable to step into the river.

You control the rules, not the outcomes. You don’t see:

• why these two specific people don’t “click” (even though the data says they’re a perfect match)

• which look across the table said more than a hundred words

• why someone left feeling “empty” even though every metric was green

Order emerges at the edge of chaos: not in full stability (where everything is predictable and “dead”), and not in full chaos (where nothing works).

The fact that chemistry is chaos isn’t a reason to leave everything chaotic. Founders in the Relationship Tech space shouldn’t shrug off responsibility for shaping the environment where magic is more likely to happen:

• choosing who sits at the same table (composition)

• setting a format that reduces friction (structure), the rules of the game (who speaks, when, for how long)

• information flows (who sees whom before the meeting, what they know about each other)

• setting a price that filters intent (commitment), or keeping it at $0, depending on the system’s goals

• the system’s goals (do you monetize through commitment or through volume? in other words, “take time selecting motivated people” versus gathering a large crowd to raise the odds of “molecules colliding”)

• highlighting and enforcing behavioral norms (culture)

Different Relationship Tech products choose different ways to “keep the system at the edge of chaos.” Different users of Relationship Tech products have different ideas of what counts as “good.” The more formats there are, the higher the chance that more people experience that “chemistry” we’re talking about.

Huberman’s new video mentions an interesting experiment. You are a lecturer, you tape a number on each student’s forehead, one to ten. Nobody can see their own, everyone else can. The task is to find a partner with the highest number in the room. Count to five, then everyone walks around making “marriage proposals.” Watch the low numbers — people start avoiding them fast, nobody wants to talk to a two or a three. This is what researcher Paul Eastwick calls “consensual desirability”: the whole room agrees who’s an eight and who’s a three. It’s basically every dating app, minus the paper.

In real life those numbers stop holding up. A room full of strangers might call you a six. One person who actually gets to know you might see a nine. Someone else might see a three. Huberman says this growing disagreement between people is actually good luck. It’s the reason so many couples end up together without being the most “objectively” desirable option in the room. Offline speed dating backs this up. Men were drawn to ambitious women exactly as much as women were drawn to ambitious men, same strength both ways. Online, people still play out the old stereotype. Offline, the stereotype falls apart (!)

Age works the same way. On paper, people swear off anyone younger. Women in surveys say things like “don’t set me up with someone four years younger than me.” Then the actual date happens, and the same woman says she’d like to see him again. Younger partners are still slightly preferred in real dates, just nowhere near as much as the stereotype suggests. So the pattern keeps repeating across every category: what people write on a form and what they respond to in person come from two different datasets. “Skip the questionnaire, go on the date.”

Some practical advice from that video:

🥇 «Just be around people on repeated occasions»

I’m embarrassed to say my field can’t answer that question. I can’t tell you, you know, use two apps and use these two apps and go to church. Don’t join kickball ‘cause they’re a mess... We can’t answer questions like that. So, in the absence of that kind of specificity, my answer is always just be around people on repeated occasions.

🥈 «Trust your subjective experience. If you feel a spark, trust it.»

Believe your subjective experience when you’re interacting with somebody <…> ‘I know that maybe to some people he looks like he doesn’t have his life together, but I really see a spark there.’ If you trust that experience, I think that’s likely to go better.

🥉 «The life of the thing is the little stories and moments two people are sharing»

True connection is born from shared micro-moments:

A lot of times what we’re doing when we’re trying to figure out if we’re into somebody — yes, we look at how they look visually and it matters a lot. But we’re also talking with them, forming little stories. If you have a little bit of good banter, that means when I see you at the party next week, I’m going to want to sit next to you and see if we can recreate that moment. And that’s often where attraction is coming from. I think that’s why the apps are so hard — because it turns it into an interview where you’re trying to impress other people with your traits. And again, traits are important, but it’s not the life of the thing. The life of the thing is the little stories and moments that two people are sharing.”

But I also as a usual read what is happening in dating, friendship and other layers of human connection. Missed update from May? Here it is.

1. Bumble is exploring a sale

On June 25, Reuters reported that Bumble is working with Morgan Stanley on a potential sale process. Three sources familiar with the matter, all anonymous. Bumble, Morgan Stanley, and Blackstone declined to comment. No deal is certain — the company may stay independent. Status: unconfirmed report, but from the strongest possible byline for M&A in this sector.

The numbers behind the story:

• Market cap has collapsed to roughly $388 million. The company went public in February 2021 at a valuation above $7 billion. Shares are down about 48% over 12 months and hit an all-time low of $2.54 in June.

• Blackstone, the largest shareholder at about 22%, sold $28.2 million of Bumble stock earlier the same month. Read that insider signal however you like.

• Operating picture: paying users fell more than 11% in 2025 to about 3.7 million, revenue dropped nearly 10% to about $966 million. In Q1 2026 paying users dropped about 20% year-over-year after the company trimmed low-engagement accounts. ARPPU rose modestly on price increases — monetisation is holding, the user base is not.

Why this is #1 news in my opinion: the sale exploration lands in the middle of Whitney Wolfe Herd’s boldest product bet. She returned as CEO in March 2025, announced Bumble would kill the swipe and rebuild around AI-driven matchmaking.

The company also launched a paid in-person group-dating feature in New York this month (June 4) — so it is simultaneously betting on AI matchmaking and on IRL meetups. While the board weighs a sale!

I will keep my eye on this situation: will Bumble be “staying independent” or we will know a name of a potential buyer. Also interests of Wallstreet finance guys <> CEO <> app users are often not aligned. So also soon we will see if AI and IRL bet has its potential among end users.

2. 69–74% of young daters say AI makes dating less genuine

Hily’s T.R.U.T.H. Report (survey of 1,559 US daters)

• 69% of Gen Z and 74% of Millennials believe AI involvement makes online dating less genuine.

• 54% of women and 63% of men said they would be less attracted to a match they suspected of using AI to create their profile or content.

• At the same time: about 51% of women and 50% of Gen Z use AI to write bios, and 52% of men use it for conversation suggestions.

Numbers are from 2025, but the reason we bring it is that Hily “reintroduces its time-tested matchmaking technology known as “Human Intelligence” — the main age of this is that “humans are irreplaceable in the dating process”. It is a a counter to the industry AI push.

Survey is Hily’s own, commissioned by a company whose positioning depends on the result. The numbers are consistent with independent coverage of user backlash to AI features I see in other articles.

3. Link digest

Maybe you find something relevant to you and click to read the full article:

• Bumble launches paid in-person group-dating plans — monetized IRL feature https://mashable.com/life/bumble-set-to-launch-plans-paid-date-feature

• Goose launches in the US — anti-algorithm gay dating app by model Derek Chadwick (1.7M IG followers). “Waves” instead of swipes, human-reviewed profiles, Raya-style membership gate, will have a live map that shows where people are, so users can discover who's around them. 56,000+ pre-downloads. https://mashable.com/life/gay-dating-app-goose

• LA Times: “Swipeless online dating? How AI is reshaping the search for love” — AI matchmakers like Known vs. incumbents selling AI subscriptions. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-06-28/swipeless-online-dating-how-ai-is-reshaping-search-for-love

• AP/ABC: AI chatbots as dating coaches — a user describe Known’s voice onboarding going “one or two levels deeper”; the line users draw between AI help and AI replacement. https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/ai-chatbots-hit-dating-scene-becoming-lovelorns-modern-134123381

Thanks for reading!

Hope all goes good for you personally 💙

IRL Tech Summit 2026 fixed that blind spot for me.

The event was organized by Timeleft (yes, that Timeleft — the one that seats strangers together for dinner in 200+ cities every week). Maxime Barbier, Timeleft’s founder, is the person who decided this room should exist. “Closed door. No panels. No pitch theatre. No press. No VCs. Just founders who are building products that bring people together IRL”. 36 people, two days, a château one hour outside Paris, during VivaTech week.

I got in as a founder, not as a newsletter writer. Before Relationship Tech, I spent six years building Random Coffee — a platform for one-on-one meetings inside communities. Hundreds of communities, from professional networks to hobby groups. Tools for organizers + subscription for people who wanted to join. We reached profitability, did several hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue, and then I sold my share. That background was the ticket into the room. Companies there were bigger than Random Coffee and smaller than Random Coffee — but the founder language is the same everywhere. You understand each other fast.

Anyway! Back to the blind spot.

Several companies at the summit were from travel. WeRoad — group tours, recently raised a round from Airbnb. Huakai — similar model, focused on Spanish-speaking markets. Surfweek — niche surf trips. A few others probably, pardon my far-from-excellent memory.

The logic across all of them is the same: shared experience creates connection faster than any app. Fun fact: one of the 36 founders met his wife on a WeRoad trip :) as well as thousands of others make great connections there.

I was listening to this and thinking — why did I never count travel as relationship tech? Probably because I (still!) kept thinking in terms of features. A group tour felt like “just“ tourism. But it’s a managed shared experience that creates conditions for real connection. The focus becomes different in this case. The surprise for me was how big this category actually is, and I just wasn’t looking at it.

Second thing I noticed — and this one is about founders who came. When you spend two days with them and talk to most of them, you start seeing a pattern. The founder’s background shapes where the company goes. Someone who came from community management builds differently than someone who came from finance or law or content creation. You can see it in the product decisions — which bets they make, which things they don’t even consider. Different intuitions → different strategies and also different blind spots.

One founder said he’s taking three months to live in San Francisco, New York, and a city in China — to absorb everything happening in AI — and then coming back to Spain to build at a new level. Said it casually, like it was obvious. Not obvious to me! Strong move.

The format itself is worth saying something about. Chatham House rules. No recordings. So specific numbers and names stay in the château, and it works. At some point at the end of the first day, someone thanked me for “being honest in a conversation”. And I realized I had stopped noticing that I was being open. Usually that takes effort — you think about how much to share, what to hold back. Here it just happened. That’s what good trust in a room feels like. When you stop noticing it.

That’s also, by the way, exactly what every company in that room is trying to create for their users. Each in their own way.

Anyway. Turns out the industry I cover is wider than I thought. Nice kind of surprise.

Application for the 3rd edition: https://form.typeform.com/to/vbxVDkv7

Potos by: Méline Lancrerot

I also released the List of Relationship Tech Tools. It’s available to free subscribers – meaning all subscribers :) Whenever you want to find that list, just open your email and search “List of Relationship Tech Tools,” and the link will be there.

“Swipe is dead” officially becomes too mainstream to say

For a long time, small startups were attacking big corporations with “Swipe is dead!” And now we’ve reached peak escalation. Bumble CEO Wolfe Herd says: “Let’s kill the swipe!” https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/07/bumble-is-getting-rid-of-the-swipe-ceo-says/ Ok, now we all aligned. So what?

First, small startups will need to change their narrative. Attacking the swipe feels strange when the swipe is already blamed by literally everyone. What’s a stronger argument now?

Second, other articles report that Match Group is pretty lost on what to do with Gen Z (Gen Z registering less on traditional platforms – whether because of AI fatigue or swipe exhaustion) – and is trying to rebuild, putting a serious amount of effort into it last months. The argument about slow, unwieldy corporations is only partially true. In fact, there’s already a reaction.

We’ve acknowledged the need for authentic connection.
We’re just not there yet.

Let’s not forget the scale as of May 2026: as long as the Tinder and Bumble homepages don’t have buttons saying “I want to go offline” and “I don’t want to talk to an AI assistant,” the overwhelming majority of interactions in Relationship Tech will still be “transactional.”

Talk, don't type (But there are nuances)

Despite Gen Z disliking AI interactions (or cringing when they use them) new startups keep launching that exploit voice technology. I already wrote a full deep-dive on Real Roots, where the onboarding is handled by an AI assistant.

There’s the well-known-in-business-circles Boardy (https://www.boardy.ai/), which people genuinely love. And now from the newcomers: Gnome and Amata (1 and 2 for articles)

Honestly though, voice onboarding makes sense. My small (2 conversations!) research outside of Gen Z showed that people feel awkward speaking out loud and think they’re not ready for it – “better to write everything out carefully, later” Which of course they won’t do.

But when they overcome awkwardness and talk, and their rambling self-description gets turned into something edited and coherent, they see the result and say: “well, that’s actually not bad.”

Don’t ask me how to reconcile these two trends:

• the rejection of AI assistants and the push for authenticity

• the fact that speaking out loud is actually more convenient and lets you share a lot more information about yourself

I don’t know yet.

Friendship apps: exist.
Loneliness: doesn’t go down. Hm.

"The friendship app category as a whole has attracted more than $84 million in venture capital. Yet none of these platforms has achieved the scale or cultural penetration of dating apps.”

https://thenextweb.com/news/friending-app-loneliness-real-world-friendships

That’s a fact. However you measure it (revenue, investment), friendship apps are smaller than dating apps. What I also read between the lines:

If loneliness is the disease and IRL/Relationship Tech apps are the cure, why don’t we see obsession with taking this pill and the loneliness index not going down?

A reasonable counterargument exists: “We spent 2020-2021 at home accumulating social isolation, some people missed out on university socializing entirely and never learned how to make friends – all these post-COVID shifts will still show up in demand for friendship apps.” Fair.

This article is hard to frame as a clear trend toward “loss of faith in our ability to fight loneliness” – honestly, reading many articles, I don’t see that trend. But for the sake of variety I’m including it in this newsletter. Maybe it’s an early signal we’ll come back to later?

p.s. I hope all goes well for you personally. See you next time.

As always, what interests me is the relationship side. Does BeReal actually help people be better friends and more authentic?

BeReal is a social app where you get one random notification a day. When it goes off, you have 2 minutes to take a photo – front and back camera at the same time. No filters. Whatever you’re doing right now. The idea is that everyone posts at the same moment, so you see real life instead of highlight reels.

Yes, BeReal helps with friendship

When someone joins BeReal, the expectation is: smaller circle, less performance, less Instagram-ness. When you’re real with that small group, the theory goes, your connections deepen. And you worry less about being judged for missing something.

So researchers tried to measure three things: friendship satisfaction, FOMO, and what the authors call “connection overload” – feeling overwhelmed by too many social interactions. The top-level outcome they were tracking: overall life satisfaction.

In short: people who used BeReal consistently reported stronger closeness with friends and higher life satisfaction. FOMO didn’t go down – but in a world of infinite scrolling, if your friendships are getting stronger, that’s already pretty remarkable I think!

No, it probably doesn’t help with authenticity

Over time, users’ behaviour shifts – away from authenticity-as-truth toward self-expression. People initially come to the app to feel authentic in a small circle of people who get them. But gradually it becomes a tool for showing what their life looks like. Which turns it into a self-expression platform, not an unfiltered recorder of real moments.

And the “self-knowledge” angle. One study had a hypothesis that Bereal users would have stronger self-concept clarity – meaning they could consistently and confidently describe who they are, their values, how they’d act in a given situation. The hypothesis didn’t hold. Daily photo posting doesn’t help you understand yourself better. To be fair, it was a small sample study, so not definitive.

Worth noticing that Meta launched “Instants” a week ago or so (some inspiration from BeReal for sure)

“We want to make it easier to share in the moment with friends” – they say.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-27/match-invests-100-million-in-grindr-rival-sniffies-with-option-to-buy

So, there’s Grindr, the leading app for queer-male audiences. Launched in 2009, IPO’d in 2022. In 2023, Match.com went chasing that success and launched its own app, Archer. By the company’s own admission, it “didn’t take off”. So this year this largest dating corporation is buying the second-biggest app in the space (Sniffies) and shutting down Archer to compete with Grindr.

Wow moment: Sniffies isn’t available on the App Store or Google Play because it breaks their rules. With only a web version, and it has 3 million MAUs (!)

Grindr’s stock dropped ~2.5%. When the largest corporation puts its capital on the line, it weakens and destabilizes competitors’ positions.

For Sniffies to come back to the App Store, they’d need to remove explicit imagery, rename features, add filters, and so on. I wonder whether Match Group will push Sniffies in that direction or leave things as they are.

Match Group once invested in Hinge the same way they’re now investing in Sniffies: a minority stake. And right now Hinge is a very significant player in their portfolio. But Hinge is more canonical and can be distributed through the App Store, while the Sniffies guys look like pirates who don’t negotiate with the App Store 🏴‍☠️

8-minute live video dates from 8–9 p.m. each evening

https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/04/portugals-eight-is-raising-a-e3-million-seed-round-to-scale-its-video-first-dating-app-with-over-e256-6k-already-raised/

Portugal’s EIGHT is raising a €3M seed round to scale its video-first dating app.

Self-reported metrics aren’t something you see often, but they have something to brag about: D1 retention 81% (vs. 25–35% benchmark), D7 retention 43% (vs. 12–15%).

Really cool to see that some new formats are getting a response from audiences.

Video speed-dating (2022) → in-person events (2025) →…

https://www.startupticker.ch/en/news/noii-schweizer-real-life-dating-app-expandiert-nach-deutschland

noii was founded in 2022 as a video speed-dating app and fully pivoted to in-person events in 2025 (hello, IRL trend). “Morning Coffee Parties” in cities across Switzerland and now Germany. Up to 15 events per month with ~2000 monthly participants. New features by April 2026:

• Ticketing

• Post-event matching: the app helps you reconnect with the people you found interesting.

Again, a beautiful example of new formats. The idea that you first feel someone’s vibe offline and then use technology to strengthen that connection. Sounds pretty cool.

Beyond goes further than most. It’s a dating app built around relationship style – monogamy, open relationships, polyamory, “exploring,” people already in couples who want to date together or separately. You can filter by all of this. Plus sexual orientation, with free-text input, not a dropdown.

They review every application manually. Men without a referral go on a FaceTime call with the team first. Three swipes per day only – to keep it intentional. Events in New York and LA for members.

The story behind it is very authentic: Öykü Saran, the co-founder, moved from Turkey to the US, couldn’t find Ethical Non‑Monogamy community, and built one. She runs Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/datebeyond/ ~7K followers) actively – you can feel that this project comes from the founder’s passion (her personal instagram confirms that with even higher number of ~17k followers https://www.instagram.com/cheerswithoyku/)

At public launch: 5,000 approved members across two cities, 10,000 applications pending. No confirmed institutional funding yet, though they’ve talked publicly about raising a seed round. Monthly Membership: $19.99 + micro transactions as monetisation.

Dating apps only work when there are enough people inside. 5,000 members in two cities seems… small, compare to Fleed for example (this sex‑positive, open‑minded dating app reports “community of 1.5M+”). The pool is intentionally exclusive – which is exactly why it’s good for the people it’s built for. And exactly why it’s hard to grow.

🔗 https://www.datebeyond.co/

Match Group: turbulence

Match Group was removed from the S&P 500 in March. Market cap shrank to around $7B → down nearly 80% over five years. Replaced in the index by AI infrastructure companies.

This turbulence can be interpreted two ways.

One: haha, the giant elephant can’t keep up with a changing world and is about to collapse.

Two: the giant elephant is shaking, but started moving because of a changing world, and it started moving early enough that smaller players won’t have time to grow or disrupt it – the elephant shakes a bit and stays the biggest anyway.

Against the backdrop of falling everything at Match Group (COO departure, declining indicators, etc), there’s Hinge, doing well, growing. And there are “old alternative players” – Pure grew fast in recent quarters.

Pure hit $100M annual gross revenue. 46% revenue growth year-over-year, 95% registration growth. While Tinder was down 14% and Bumble down 11% (Q1–Q3 2025 vs. 2024), Pure was up 41%. Ukrainian founders, around since 2012, largely self-funded. Feed-based “Personal Ads format”, no swiping, self-destructing photos, etc.

Why is the elephant shaking?

Swipe fatigue (everyone admits this now) and the growing friendship category.

TechCrunch ran a piece on friendship apps this month – over a dozen local-focused apps, around $16M in US consumer spending, $84M+ in total VC investment.

Stigma around friendship apps is fading. Same trajectory as dating apps ten years ago. Remote work and moving to new cities are driving demand.

I wrote about Tinder’s big product event separately:

But Bumble also had AI news this month – they introduced “Bee”, an AI concierge that learns your values and deal-breakers, pairs compatible people and notifies both – skipping the swipe entirely. Testing removing the swipe in select markets.

I have no idea if Bee will work (nobody does yet). But “AI as infrastructure, not a chatbot duct-taped to a swipe grid” is the right framing.

Two European apps in New York

I personally like Breeze – they approached the “everyone is tired of swipes” question well, and early. Great design, also actively developing. Their US milestone: launched in NYC in March after success in Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, UK, France.

Their idea in short: no chat, just dates. When you match, you’re automatically booked for a date at a partner venue. $15 upfront. 909K+ users, 300,000+ dates organized so far.

Same US expansion news for Meet5 earlier in 2025 – European group activity app targeting 40+, 3M+ registered users globally, founded in Frankfurt in 2017. Users average 4+ activities per month after their first one.

Quick hits

Timeleft has a new distribution channel – when you’re in Paris and open Airbnb Experiences, Timeleft dinners show up there. Fresh & smart.

Breakfast, the community-funded app (I wrote about it earlier) – closed its crowdfunding round: $382,659 from 131 investors. Congrats!

p.s. I hope all goes well for you personally. See you next time.

Finding a partner through classic swiping is really hard — but the big players know this too, and at the highest level are saying that by the end of 2026 it will be a “completely different experience”.

What a smart observation!

Ok, jokes aside, Tinder’s CEO (Spencer Rascoff) opened Product Keynote Tinder Sparks 2026 with one stat worth keeping: 18% of women under 30 who left dating apps didn’t leave because of no matches [for female users it’s not actually a problem as we know], but because it never turned into conversations.

So Tinder built a new internal metric. They call it a “spark” — at least 6 messages back and forth. That’s what the whole product is now built around.

What launched

1. Music mode and Astrology mode — live globally. Music lets you browse while hearing profile songs. Astrology shows compatibility breakdowns including something called “sizzle.” 1 in 6 users 18-22 adopted astrology mode within weeks of quiet launch.

2. Double Date — live worldwide. Bring a friend, match with another pair, group chat, low-pressure meetup. 48% of Gen Z women on Tinder US cite it as a reason they use the app.

3. IRL events — live in LA. Events tab in the app, curated local meetups, everyone photo-verified. Built in 10 weeks.

4. Video speed dating — 3-minute video calls with matched users. Testing in LA in June.

5. Profile redesign — photo brightness fix, camera roll scan, interest collages, deeper prompts. Plus integrations with Spotify, Duolingo, and a food app so your profile shows what you eat and what you’re learning.

6. Face check — mandatory facial verification on signup, now live in the US and dozens of countries. Bad actor views down 60% since launch.

That’s the dry overview — just the facts, hot off the presentation. If you want to watch the full thing yourself in the meantime:

For now, I’ll pick a few news stories that caught my attention.

$60 million to win back the trend

Match.com group, despite seeing a decline in active users and paying subscribers across some, if not many, of its apps, is regrouping. Cutting headcount by up to 30% in places — Bumble, for example, easier in 2025. Changing top management (Tinder). In short, regrouping pretty fast. One of the group’s executives said $60 million will be invested in AI.

These changes are, honestly, a decent response to all those AI startups pitching that Tinder is completely unbearable for finding a partner, so we’re launching AI dating.

True. Finding a partner through classic swiping is really hard — but the big players know this too, and at the highest level are saying that by the end of 2026 it will be a “completely different experience”.

Grindr – gAI™

Grindr is also keeping up in this AI race — not only launching a subscription costing up to $500/month, but also giving their AI an absolutely genius name. Brilliant.

Trend: community atomization

Maybe not the loudest news, but a friendship app for neurodivergent people. They say it’s the first of its kind. I’ve heard about a few similar initiatives, but maybe a real scaled launch is happening for the first time.

I think this will be part of a trend toward community atomization. Since AI coding and social media promotion tools are now accessible to many more people, the most initiative-driven folks will start building communities for groups that previously didn’t have the resources to build an app for themselves.

An example of a niche app that pulled this off — and has been doing it for years — is friendship and networking among researchers. I see their ads on Instagram. Great that they’re actively promoting this niche story. It could have been a professional friendship network for everyone, but the focus is researchers only.

Timeleft streak

Participate eight weeks in a row and enter a contest.

This rhythm might be too intense or make you less intentional, or you actually form a friendship, whatever! I’m looking at this from one angle only — I love streaks! <3 I love when the counter doesn’t reset. And I am glad seeing this in social apps.

<…> network size tends to peak in our twenties and diminish in old age; personality – unsurprisingly extroverts have bigger networks than introverts; and sex – women tend to have bigger networks than men. <…> For both men and women, the size of the social network peaked at the age of twenty-five, although at this point males had more connections than females. From this point onwards, size diminishes until at the age of around thirty-nine women start to have larger networks than men, and there is in fact a second peak in size for women at the age of fifty.

from 📘 Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships | Book by Anna Machin

So we have some research that shows how many friends will you have over years (less and less). It is different for male & female, depends on extravercy level, do you proactively make new friends or not, live in a big city or village, etc.

So if a person will answer these questions, it is possible to

• make a fair prediction of how many friends will you have

• give theoretical advice (“btw people in big cities have more friends”)

• give practical advice (“here is the link to relationship tech tools”)

Spiral Dynamics maps how people’s values evolve through eight levels (Beige → Purple → Red → Blue → Orange → Green → Yellow → Turquoise). Each level has its own way of seeing the world — and its own type of community.

Main idea: at different stages of life, people naturally want to be part of different communities — it just matches where they are on their personal journey or “Spiral.”

• When you understand that, it becomes easier to find communities that actually fit you.

• And as a community manager, it helps you choose the right format and vibe for the group you’re trying to bring together.

Beige — Survival

Pure physical survival. No identity, just “am I alive?”

Communities: Refugee camps, homeless shelters, crisis centers. Groups held together by necessity, not ideology.

Purple — Tribe & Magic

Belonging to “our people.” Traditions (often unquestioned), ancestors, rituals, emotional safety within the circle.

Communities:

• Extended families, clans, village structures based on blood ties

• Religious circles with shared rituals

• Immigrant diasporas helping “their people” with housing, jobs, adaptation

Red — Power & Status

“I take what I want.” Dominance, impulse, hierarchy through strength. Respect through fear.

Communities:

• Street gangs, radical fan groups where loyalty to the leader is everything

• Companies with cult-like charismatic bosses

• “Alpha” clubs built on conquest and status displays

Blue — Order & Rules

Stability, moral codes, “the one true way.” Sacrifice now for future reward (religious, national, or organizational).

Communities:

• Traditional churches and religious organizations

• Military, scouts, patriotic movements with clear discipline

• Classic corporations where “doing it right” matters more than results

Orange — Achievement & Success

Personal achievement, growth, measurable results. KPI, money, status, competition. Morality = fair play.

Communities:

• Expensive business clubs, CEO circles where capital and connections are currency

• Startup accelerators, elite coworking, MBA alumni networks

• Professional associations and mastermind groups focused on deals

Green — Connection & Equality

Relationships, empathy, inclusion, meaning beyond success. Dialogue, consensus, care for minorities and nature.

Communities:

• Support groups, therapy circles for vulnerable topics (burnout, trauma, relationships)

• NGOs, climate movements, social justice initiatives

• Eco-villages, co-living spaces, holistic retreat communities

Yellow — Systems & Integration

Seeing the world as complex systems. Integrating different values without fanaticism. What actually works > what’s “correct.”

Communities:

• Interdisciplinary think tanks connecting business, science, psychology, tech

• Self-organization communities with deep reflection

Turquoise — Planet & Wholeness

Global consciousness. Interconnection of all life. Long-term thinking, ecosystem restoration, “I’m part of Earth’s living system.”

Communities:

• Global networks focused on planetary healing and regenerative economics

• Spiritual-scientific networks combining meditation, psychedelics, climate action

How to use this

Real people carry multiple levels: Orange at work, Green with friends, Blue in religious tradition.

For community design: think about your dominant value — safety, order, success, acceptance, integration, or planetary impact. You can even layer different “zones” within one community or split them into separate: support groups for Green, career clubs for Orange, meta-communities for Yellow/Turquoise leaders.

This explains why some seek “family”, others want “status clubs”, and others need space for complex conversations and systemic projects.