Exes & References

The Pitch

Hiring a barista requires two references. Dating requires a phone and an optimistic bio. Exes & References closes the gap: to activate a profile, two former partners answer a short structured questionnaire — communication, reliability, how they behave when a restaurant loses the booking. Answers are summarised into a calm, neutral reference card. No free text, no revenge essays. Verified humans, verified history.

The tagline tested extremely well: “Date someone with a paper trail.”

The Delusion

Trust is a familiar problem in online dating, and every incumbent solves it with a blue tick that confirms only that your face exists. Exes & References verifies the thing people actually want verified: what you are like after month three. The exes are a free, infinitely renewable content source. The screenshots market themselves. Somebody said “LinkedIn for love” and, worryingly, nobody laughed.

The Reality Check

Walk through the onboarding as a real person. Step one: contact two exes. Step two: ask them for a favour. There is no step three, because the funnel has selected for exactly two groups: people on miraculously good terms with everyone they’ve ever dated, and people whose references are their cousin with a new area code. We never measured the drop-off; dignity prevented the test. The structured questionnaire reduces revenge essays and also prevents information; every card converges on “communicative, mostly punctual,” which is a horoscope.

Meanwhile the failure modes write themselves: reference-swapping rings, defamation letters, and the breakup conversation acquiring a new closing item — “so, will you still fill out my card?”

Why It Stays Unbuilt

Because the product’s core loop depends on a favour from the single person on Earth least motivated to grant it. Marketplaces die when one side won’t show up, and we designed a marketplace whose supply side is, by definition, over us.

Unwanted Bonus

The v2 backlog contained “endorsements” — one-tap skills for exes to confirm, LinkedIn-style. Top requested example in the concept test: “good at assembling furniture.” The furniture people may have been onto something. That app we would use.

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I thought about building this and chose not to.