Think Your Dating Life is Crazy Now? OkCupid Dares You To Step it Up

NEW YORK, Jan. 15, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- OkCupid today announced the launch of Crazy Blind Date, a new mobile app whose name speaks for itself. For millennia, humans have relied on friends and family members to set them up on blind dates, most of which turn out to be disasters. Finally, 20 years into the online dating revolution, there is no excuse for spending a night alone at home: Crazy Blind Date uses math to set singles up on blind dates with only a few hours notice.

"I've been a happy online dater for years," said Kerry, a single woman living in San Francisco, "and it's great; the only downside is the amount of time it takes to set up a date. The whole point of online dating is to meet people face-to-face. Is that so crazy?"

"People will say that Crazy Blind Date is too crazy," said Sam Yagan, Co-Founder of OkCupid, "But for a whole generation of young singles, it's going to be a great adventure, and a great complement to traditional online dating."

Going on a Crazy Blind Date takes less than a minute of work:

1. Download the Crazy Blind Date app for iPhone or Android.
2. Choose which nights this week you want to go on dates.
3. Pick your favorite bar or coffee shop.
4. Go on with your day; Crazy Blind Date does the rest.

Once Crazy Blind Date has found a compatible date, it will send a confirmation to both parties and then it's game on. One hour before the scheduled date, Crazy Blind Date will open up an anonymous IM window so the daters can easily find each other. 

After the date ends, Crazy Blind Date prompts users to give feedback on the date. If the daters had a good time, they are offered the opportunity to vouch for their date's awesomeness by purchasing Crazy Blind Date credits, called "Kudos," on their date's behalf, thus incentivizing everyone to be on his or her best behavior. The more Kudos daters collect from the people they've gone on dates with in the past, the higher priority they have in being assigned to future dates. 

"Never before has a dating app allowed singles to pay on a per-date basis, and to vary that payment based on the quality of the date itself," continued Yagan. "One of the best parts of Crazy Blind Date will be following along with our users' experiences; after all, even a bad date can be a great story."

Kerry continued, "As a smart, sexy, single woman, what I want out of a dating service is the knowledge that I'm going to meet real people and the comfort of knowing that I'll be meeting them in one of my favorite local bars or coffee shops. I just hope those math majors got the algorithms right and Crazy Blind Date sets me up with that hot guy from the gym, and not my boss." 

To celebrate the launch of Crazy Blind Date, OkCupid, has named today, "LOVE IS BLIND" day. Every one of the ten million photos on OkCupid has been removed from the site; members logging into OkCupid today will have to make their dating decisions based on words and wits rather than abs and, well, other body parts.

Users should share their Crazy Blind Date stories via Twitter using the hashtag, #CrazyBlindDate. 

Crazy Blind Date was designed in collaboration with Huge, a design firm headquartered in Brooklyn New York.

About OkCupid
OkCupid is one of the fastest growing and largest dating products in the US. Known for its highly analytical matching algorithms and insightful blog, OkTrends, OkCupid uses math to get people dates. On a given day at OkCupid: a million singles login to the site, do ten million searches, and send two million messages. Follow us on Twitter at @okcupid.

Media Contact:
Justine Sacco
212-314-7326 / [email protected]

SOURCE OkCupid