Page 7 of Swiped
The panel had mostly proceeded without any big surprises.
Even Nat had to admit it hadn’t been as terrifying as she’d thought to sit at a table with five other people and read off a prepared slide deck, as long as she’d kept her eyes on the moderator instead of the two hundred or so faces in the crowd and the whirring cameras fixed on her.
It was also a nice distraction from the blow-up with Rami, which blared into her mind every time she let her thoughts wander.
Everyone had made it through their portion of the presentation in much the same way — explaining the problem that had given them the idea for the app, the arduous development process, the sudden roadblock that had threatened it all, and then the equally as sudden breakthrough that saved the day and led to the app as it was known and loved today.
Being the creator of the top app, Nat had gone first, so it hadn’t struck her as odd to hear the random bursts of applause and sitcom-style whoops as she described BeTwo.
But then she noticed the audience was a lot quieter for the other apps, and she’d squirmed uncomfortably as Rami introduced his section for Whither, Weather by saying, “Now I realize predicting the weather may not seem as exciting as finding a date, but even BeTwo’s best match can be thwarted by an unexpected rainstorm .
. .” He’d gotten a few polite laughs out of the line.
But mostly, Nat hoped that he’d been too distracted by presenting to see how she’d craned her neck to catch every pixel of his slides, or to notice how fascinating she’d found the details of his process.
He finished his section with the requisite shout-outs to team members and QR codes for socials as a production assistant snuck back on stage to give each of the panelists mics again.
“Thank you so much for that, Rami!” trilled the moderator, a Hollywood-ready BuzzFill star with real journalism cred named Tracy Goodwin-King.
From her wavy black tresses to her flawless brown skin, she radiated the glow of destined success, even while wearing a branded T-shirt under her pink blazer.
“Panelists, before we go to questions from the audience, I just want to give it up for you all one more time for these amazing insights!” Tracy paused, and from her perch a few feet away, Nat could see her eyes narrow and flash in her perfect makeup — a look Nat knew all too well from seeing it on the popular middle school girls right before they’d hit her with a devastating jab. Her stomach clenched.
As a few snickers rose from the audience, poor Christine flashed her grin and nodded along, unaware or unable to fight the joke at her expense.
Sweat prickled on the back of Nat’s neck.
Tracy was a stunning, whip-smart alpha with a microphone and a captive audience.
Nat hated to make any more animal metaphors, but there was definitely blood in the water.
“All right!” Tracy beamed into the crowd with a toss of her dark hair. “Who has a question for our panel?”
Hands shot up as production assistants scurried between the rows with mics. A young guy in a tech-logo T-shirt stood.
“Yeah, this question is for Nat,” he said.
Feedback whined into the mic as Nat winced at the noise and the instant attention. “Hi,” she said, her mouth suddenly dry. The stage lights flared in her eyes as the spotlights found her. She heard the question-asker clear his throat.
“So, Nat, can you get us some hotter girls on BeTwo?”
A roar of male laughter filled the room as the asker smirked at Nat. The producer frantically grasped for the questioner’s mic just as he added, “I’ll take my answer off the air.” He raised his arms above his head in triumph and sat down to some scattered applause.
No thoughts came to Nat as she registered the producer mouthing her the words, I’M SO SORRY ! She sputtered into her mic, only vaguely aware that she was making sounds at all. “Um . . . uh . . . I . . .”
“No way, nope!” Tracy boomed into Nat’s silence. “Nat, do not even dignify that with a response.” She winked at Nat before turning her full, gorgeous fury toward the audience member. “And you, never speak into a microphone again.”
A few hoots and some more applause rose as Nat shrank in her seat.
She shot a glance at her fellow panelists.
Christine gave her a double thumbs-up and a grin.
Rami was shaking his head, staring at the table, and drumming his pen against a notepad.
Nat felt puddles forming in her armpits as she reached for her lukewarm BuzzFill-branded water bottle.
“OK, can we get another question?” asked Tracy. “A real one this time?”
From the back of the auditorium, a tiny figure with a chest full of lanyards and badges rose. “Yeah, this one is also for BeTwo,” he said.
“Careful,” Tracy warned.
“No, no, it’s serious!” the asker insisted. “So, my question is, what’s the data on how to get the most girls to respond? Like you must know the most successful opening lines, or the stuff that gets the most right swipes in profiles?”
Tracy turned her glittering eyes to Nat.
It seemed like this question was going to be allowed.
Nat swallowed and raised her mic. “Well, running correlations on our backend data wouldn’t necessarily give us any insight into causation for something so personal,” she said, feeling her words echo into silence.
“So, I don’t have a magic formula. But I like to think—”
“OK specific scenario!” the asker interrupted.
Nat could see his small figure in the back row, waving his hands to cut her off as he continued his thought.
“What’s better: having a little kid in your pics or having an unusual animal, like a hedgehog or a pot-bellied pig?
Because I have access to all of those options, but I just want to maximize my impression, you know? ”
Nat felt Christine perk up as the question, impossibly, continued.
“And if I go hedgehog or pig,” he said, “would girls just think I’m some weirdo whose apartment smells like wet Cheerios? Because it doesn’t. Thanks.”
He sat as Christine raised her mic. “Some women enjoy the smell of wood chips.”
“Yes, well, this is actually an interesting question phrased in an unusual way,” chirped Tracy, righting the ship once again. She flashed a dental brochure smile at Nat. “Nat, do you have data on what makes the most quote-unquote successful profile?”
Nat forced her eyes not to roll, and picked up her last thought, a line she’d actually rehearsed with the twins days before.
“Well, I like to think that all a profile needs to be successful on our app is to exist.” She paused for a warm reaction, but none came.
In fact, she thought she heard a scoff from Rami’s end of the stage.
She sat up straighter and turned to meet his gaze.
She couldn’t ignore the amused glow dancing in his eyes or the heat it sparked in her chest. “The BeTwo algorithm is so unique because it takes into account more personality factors than any other dating app, meaning that the more information you provide, the more accurate your matches will be. We like to let the users set how much they share.”
Rami shook his head and drummed his pen.
“Sure,” said Tracy with her Queen Bee poise. “But back to my question about the data. Do you take any steps to ensure that your app doesn’t just replicate toxic, patriarchal standards from IRL dating?”
This time, Nat felt her nerves ease up a bit.
Now this was her wheelhouse — talking about data, her data, and all the times she had painstakingly combed through it to ensure that her code sorted it in a way that was organic and true to the user pool.
Unlike a lot of app creators, she thought of the vast set of data in the user pool as a kind of personal challenge-slash-conversation between herself and every person on her app.
She let users input as many disparate variables as they wanted, and it was her job, and her joy, to figure out how to stretch her algorithm to respond to each one of them.
She smiled in Rami’s direction as she said, “Actually, I — we have one of the most diverse user pools exactly because we let people set a huge number of details about themselves from scratch, from preferred pronouns to polyamory and even asexual search filters.” She sat up straighter still, visually flashing back to the hundreds of hours she and the twins had spent making sure the app could handle so much variety.
“So, the hope is that each BeTwo user can look for what aligns with them so specifically that the search reflects them as an individual more than any kind of social norm.”
Tracy gave an approving “Hmm!” but it barely covered another scoff from Rami’s direction. He was now frowning and glaring at Nat like she had personally kicked him in the shins. She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Wow,” said Tracy. She pursed her glossy lips. “So it sounds like you’re saying that BeTwo actually endeavors to break bad social cycles in the dating world?”
This time, the whole auditorium heard Rami’s scoff. And what he said next.
“ Break bad cycles?” he spat into the mic. “More like spawn them like locusts!”
Tracy grinned. There was blood in the water, all right. “One of our other panelists would like to weigh in?”
Rami looked a little startled at his own outburst as he ran a hand through his curls and nodded.
“Yeah, yeah, I would.” His brow furrowed in the way Nat had found so charming before they’d learned each other’s names and personalities.
“I mean, being ghosted used to just mean some glowing dude in a Civil War uniform was watching you sleep. And that’s still preferable to what it means now, right? ”