Better Late Than Never

The queer dating app landscape for women in early 2014 was bleak—a trail of collapsed attempts with names like Wing Ma’am and Qrushr Girls, apps that launched promising to connect gay and bisexual women with each other and then quietly folded. Meanwhile Tinder was perfecting the swipe for straight people and Grindr had already sorted out gay men years earlier. The gap was obvious to anyone paying attention. Two demographics getting functional tools, one being handed broken toys.

Robyn Exton, a British entrepreneur, built Dattch as the actual answer: a clean iPhone app for queer women, designed by someone who understood the users instead of theorizing about them from the outside. No straight-male gaze encoded in the interface architecture. Profile-based, interest-driven, honest about what it was for. The Guardian gave it a warm write-up. Berlin probably had a thin user base at launch, but the logic was sound and the need was real.

An audience that large and underserved should have had a working app years earlier. Exton got there, and she built it right. That’s more than most.