u/Various-Net6025

I genuinely didn’t expect making friends in college to be this hard

Everyone talks about college like you’re constantly surrounded by people but honestly it’s weirdly easy to just end up doing everything alone without even realizing it

A few weeks ago me and a few friends started messing around with this random blind voice call thing for college students where you just get connected with someone and talk for a bit without really knowing anything about them beforehand

At first it was literally just supposed to be a funny late night experiment but somehow people kept inviting more people into it and now random people on campus actually know what it is which feels insane

Honestly meeting people at ucla has been way harder than I thought it’d be lol

A few weeks ago I started making this small app just for ucla students where you randomly get put into blind voice calls with other students. You basically just hop in and see who you end up talking to.

Started with a really small group at first but more people kept asking to get in so I’ve been slowly opening it up to more ucla students.

If anyone at ucla wants to try it lmk

I’ve been using Tinder/Bumble/Hinge for years and honestly I think I finally hit the point where all of them started feeling exactly the same.

Same conversations. Same “hey how’s your week going.” Same disappearing after 3 messages for no reason.

A few nights ago I randomly downloaded one of those voice dating apps because I was bored and couldn’t sleep lol

The idea was basically you get matched and end up on a short voice call pretty quickly instead of texting forever first.

I thought it was gonna be awkward as hell honestly but it was actually kinda refreshing?

The call only lasted like 7 minutes so nobody had time to do the whole fake polished dating app version of themselves.

And idk maybe this sounds dramatic but it weirdly felt more real than some people I’ve talked to for like 2 weeks on Hinge.

You can tell way faster if someone is funny or awkward or actually interested when you hear their voice.

Also made me realize how exhausting endless swiping has gotten without me really noticing it.

Not saying it suddenly fixed dating or anything lol. Some calls were still awkward. But it did feel way more human than staring at profiles for an hour.

I’m working on a dating app called 24Crush and I’m trying to figure out how to get the first real users.

The main feature is basically a 7 minute blind voice date.

You match with someone local, but you don’t see their profile during the call. You just talk for 7 minutes. After the call, both profiles reveal and you can like or pass.

I built it this way because dating apps feel super photo-first now. People swipe, match, barely reply, ghost, or text for days just to find out there’s no vibe.

I posted the idea in a local subreddit and got some useful reactions. A few people said they’d rather do this than endless texting. Some liked that 7 minutes feels low pressure. Other people brought up the obvious concerns like safety, awkwardness, or not wanting to call a stranger.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to actually do next.

Would you focus on TikTok/Reels first?
Reddit?
UGC creators?
College ambassadors?
Local launch nights?
Paid ads later?

My gut says short videos around “would you talk to someone for 7 minutes before seeing their profile?” could work, but I’m not sure if that’s the best angle.

For a dating app like this, how would you try to get the first few hundred users without wasting a bunch of money?

I'm 23.

Like a lot of people, I used dating apps for a while — Tinder, Bumble, Hinge. But I'd barely get one match a day, and even when I did, conversations almost never went anywhere.

Then one day it hit me. I was judging people based on their photos before anything else. If they looked average, I assumed their personality probably wasn't great. If they looked attractive, I assumed they were probably interesting. I was doing the exact thing I hated when other people did it to me.

I figured this system would never get me to actually meet a good person. So I thought — what if you got to know someone's personality first, and saw their face afterward? That's why I started building a blind dating app.

The first version was simple. You'd get matched with one person and have a 24-hour blind chat. After 24 hours, profiles would unlock. It didn't work. Ghosting was a huge issue — if someone went silent, you just sat there for a day with nothing happening. And even when chats were going well, text didn't really tell you who someone was.

So I rebuilt it. Instead of long, drawn-out chats, I went the opposite direction — short and intense. The new version is a 7-minute blind voice call.

When you match, you go straight into a 7-minute voice call. No photo, no name, no age. Just voice. The timer runs out, profiles automatically reveal, and if you like them, you can send a match request. If they accept, you're matched and can keep chatting.

The thing about 7 minutes is that it's short, but it's enough. You hear someone's tone, the way they laugh, how they handle silence, what kind of jokes they make. Things text chats can't show you in 24 hours, you pick up in a single voice call.

P.S. The profiles in the demo video are mock data — obviously can't show real users for privacy reasons. 

The app is live on the App Store now in the US, Canada, Japan, and Korea.

App Store Link:  24Crush

 

https://reddit.com/link/1t99vfj/video/607rp9osub0h1/player