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Written by JJ Barnes
I interviewed podcaster and dating app developer Taly Matiteyahu about her work, what inspired her to start her podcast, and what she hopes to achieve with her business.
Taly Matiteyahu is a lawyer turned product manager with experience working at startups and tech giants alike, ranging from Datadog to Netflix. Laura Ciccone is an ops person turned product manager with experience working on marketplaces ranging in size from gaining their first users all the way up to $145MM. Between their product and other experiences, Taly & Laura are excited to be using their skills to lead a team to make Blink, a voice-first speed dating app, a reality.
We started Date in a Blink in February 2021 with a few goals. First, we wanted to validate our concept of voice-focused dating and see what people thought of it. We also hoped it would expose people to the concept of voice-only speed dating, as it’s a novel dating method that differs from traditional dating apps. Beyond that, as we weren’t able to engage in paid marketing on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, until the app was downloadable given restrictions on dating platform advertisers, the podcast became a great marketing tool for Blink.
We ultimately hosted 17 dates in our first season and just posted the final episode of season 1 in October.
Our podcast is called Date in a Blink. We wanted to use “Blink” in the name, as it’s the name of our dating app. We liked the play on words, too — it’s a quick, 10 minute date that goes by “in the blink of an eye.”
Date in a Blink can be found on Apple, Spotify, Anchor, or wherever you get your podcasts (additional options below) –
Date in a Blink is a speed dating experience where we bring two total strangers together for a ten minute, voice-only date. We provide our guests with a prompt to get the conversation started and see how it goes. Do sparks fly? Does the conversation fall flat? The podcast offers folks a chance to listen in and hear others’ first dates, successful and otherwise.
Laura and Taly hosted season one. Our only guests were our daters, so we had two guests per episode.
For season two, after each date episode, we plan to have an episode with a relationship expert who’s listened to the date and can share tips and learnings on healthy dating.
Laura selects and snips the raw audio and her partner mixes the audio files for us.
The dates are totally unscripted. Laura and Taly pre-select a question prompt for the daters, who know nothing about each other or the question beforehand.
Laura and Taly prepare very short intro/outros for each episode. Our final episode, where Laura and Taly discussed each date and their thoughts about it, was unscripted, but we had notes prepared with a few bullets about each date, indicating how they went and our thoughts about them.
I foresee the biggest change coming as we transition from season one to two. Season one comprised only of dates. As we hosted the dates, we saw how much there is to learn about relationship building through dating. Given that, we decided to add relationship experts to the mix for season two, which will add incredible insight and help our daters learn more about developing strong and healthy connections (or identifying bad ones!)
It takes a lot of time to produce each episode, though the episodes are only ~12 minutes long! Recruiting, matching, scheduling, and hosting are only the least of the process. Once the episode is recorded, it needs to be mixed and transcript-ized. We also need to create social media assets and schedule posts across platforms. While it doesn’t seem like a ton of work, each episode requires ~30 steps from start to finish. The challenge is remembering to complete each one!
I love listening to podcasts about entrepreneurship and relationships.
On the entrepreneurship front, one podcast in particular has been especially inspirational – How I Built This, a “podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and their stories about the movements they built.” Over the years, I’ve had so many ideas I’ve wanted to work on and so many businesses I’ve wanted to start… but in many cases, fear of investing my time, energy, and money into a venture that might fail stopped me from taking the leap. Listening to How I Built This and hearing the stories of successful entrepreneurs reminds me that, even for the most successful people, success came after failure… and that oftentimes, the failure begets success down the line. Whether it’s an episode about a female founder whose story somehow mirrors my own or the story of a founder who struggled for years before succeeding, each episode reminds me that success means trying, learning, iterating, and trying again.
On the relationship front, I love listening to Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin, a podcast where “real couples anonymously bare the raw, intimate, and profound details of their story.” Hearing Esther unpack people’s stories and help them understand one another better is incredible, helping listeners better understand not only the individuals in the session, but also themselves.
As we’re a bootstrapped company, we’ve invested less than $50 in promoting Date in a Blink, so there isn’t a ton of promotion happening.
We post on social media, including Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, but don’t have the bandwidth to promote broadly given our work on our startup, Blink.
Beyond social media, we connect with other podcasters to share more about our work on Date in a Blink and the Blink app, through which we’ve gotten some shoutouts and shares.
It is currently primarily a hobby, but we hope the podcast can generate revenue through sponsorships over time.
We had no idea that the interest in getting on a 10 minute date for a podcast would resonate with so many people. We had over 100 people sign up and were able to set up 17 dates. We had some people come back for second dates and one dater told us that it was the best online first date she’d ever had.
Beyond our surprise about people’s interest in trying the experience, we were amazed at how quickly two people could connect within 10 minutes!
Podcasting can feel overwhelming – there are so many tools to use (both physical for recording and software-wise for editing) and it can feel like publishing an episode is impossible. But it isn’t. Just take the process step by step and eventually you’ll get into a groove.
What helped us iron out the kinks was using a task management tool (in our case, Asana). We created a template task that contained all of the steps we needed to take to record and publish an episode and used that to help us make sure we didn’t let anything slip through the cracks.
We are so proud of Date in a Blink! We started it as a bit of a social experiment as we weren’t sure how it’d go, but we fell in love with it. It was so much fun to host dates (thank heavens for the mute button, since we spend a fair amount of time laughing behind it) and talk to people about the experience. It was very much worth the effort and we’re super excited to be gearing up for Season 2!
Date in a Blink can be found on Apple, Spotify, Anchor, or wherever folks get their podcasts.
We can be found on social media –
Date in a Blink (https://www.theblinkdate.com/date-in-a-blink)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/dateinablink)
Twitter (https://twitter.com/dateinablink)
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/dateinablink/)
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Podcast by Blink (www.theblinkdate.com)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/theblinkdate/)
Twitter (https://twitter.com/theblinkdate)
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/theblinkdate/)
TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@theblinkdate)
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