The Scoop: Casual dating just got easier. We talked to Andrew Ronald, the founder of the dating app Smash, about how the platform makes hookups more simple, safe, and fun. All you have to do is snap a selfie, find a match, and set up a date– tonight.
If you’re going online to look for a casual hookup, where you look is going to have a huge impact on what you get.
Dating apps are the obvious place to make fast connections and start meeting people right away. But while casual sex is your prerogative, you have to choose an app that aligns with your objective.
Most mainstream apps welcome daters with diverse goals, whether that’s a casual dating experience or the search for a special someone. But if you want a safe, stellar, and effective casual dating experience, you should choose an app that’s designed for it.
Hookup sites should have features that make connecting simple and protect your identity and personal information. Great casual dating sites have to find the perfect balance between convenience, safety, and fun.
Inconsistency is one of the most frustrating aspects of online dating, and this downside can become an even bigger problem in the casual dating scene. If you’re looking for a quick hookup or casual date, you probably don’t have time to waste in the chat or– even worse– getting ghosted.
If you want a straightforward and effective way to find a casual date ASAP, Smash is the place for you. We learned about the inspiration behind the platform founded by Andrew Ronald, and how anti-ghosting features are changing the online dating scene.
On Smash, your selfie is posted for 12 hours to potential matches nearby. During this time, you can swipe, match, and arrange a date. After that time is up, everything– your profile, pics, and chat– disappears. Smash attracts people who are ready to meet face-to-face, today.
“There’s a lot of time between meeting someone online– matching with them– and then actually meeting them in person or exchanging numbers,” Andrew said. “Messaging day after day just isn’t that exciting. There’s a lot more fun to be had in person.”
Smash Makes Hookups Happen
When Smash was founded in 2018, Andrew said the aim was to create a platform that actually got people to meet IRL. Instead of designing an app that keeps users hooked through endless swiping, matching, and messaging, he wanted to create an app that led to real-life encounters.
“In terms of connection, meeting people face to face brings so much,” Andrew said. “People give physical cues that just can’t be replicated through a text message.”
The challenge came in bridging the gap between app and offline interactions. Online dating was designed to be a tool to make real-life connections easier to find. But, if you’re not careful, you can end up stuck online.
“The first principle we adopted was to accelerate people off the platform,” Andrew explained. “You’ve got a time limit in chats. That’s the core of the platform.”
Andrew said that by making chats expire after a certain period of time, users are encouraged to make a date happen. Smash brings online dating to its realest form. The app doesn’t have any distracting or time-consuming features. Every feature is geared toward getting you off the app.
“Another thing I noticed about so many apps is all the complexity and the profile requirements in setting up a profile,” Andrew told us. “We wanted to strip away all of that extra effort and complexity and make it just fun and simple.”
Let’s face it. If you’re looking for a hookup, it probably doesn’t really matter if your link is an Aries or a pizza-lover or an avid cyclist in their free time. You have more pressing factors to consider when you’re dating casually.
“Smash takes out the complexities and leaves just a simple photo of you,” Andrew said. It’s simple, straightforward, and attracts a new audience of daters. Andrew said the model may look shallow at face value. But if you boil down any kind of online dating, the model remains the same.
You can’t really tell someone’s personality through a profile on a screen. Even if it’s packed with personal info, pics, and links to their socials, a dating profile is just that– a profile, not a person.
“Maybe people don’t want to go through all of the effort of having to fine-tune filters and bios,” Andrew said. “I think it appeals to a wider audience because it’s so easy to use and get a hang of. It puts things on looks, but I think that’s part of the fun.”
Casual Dating Simplified
Getting started on Smash is easy. Download the app, snap a selfie, and get ready to meet. Smash welcomes heterosexual and LGBTQ+ daters, and you can select what kind of profiles you want to mingle with.
Once you choose who to show your profile to, Smash will post your selfie to other people in your area. Smash gives you one of the most anonymous dating experiences out there. You don’t include a name with your profile and your picture doesn’t hang around on the app for long.
“We don’t attach personal, confidential information to you or personally identifiable information to your profile,” Andrew said.
While Smash is definitely geared toward hookups, that doesn’t mean there isn’t potential for deeper connections. Smash leaves it up to you to decide the course of your relationships by empowering you to navigate it in person.
Andrew said Smash was designed to get rid of ghosting altogether. “From a personal point of view, it was the ghosting,” he explained. “It was the fatigue of having to message people over and over again, and not even being able to find people nearby.”
Smash’s first criterion when it is suggesting potential links for you is proximity. “With the app, we really look at proximity, and we don’t think it’s worth matching you with someone who’s far away,” Andrew said.
Online dating burnout is real. Smash’s simple approach keeps burnout at bay. “We’ve had users using this for four years daily,” Andrew said. “They love it because they’re meeting new people and having genuine connections with people.”
To keep users safe, Smash implements AI spam detection. Unfortunately, many hookup apps are no stranger to fake accounts, which makes online dating super frustrating. Smash’s AI will ban spam accounts, and if a real user is behaving poorly, they’ll get banned, too.
“We’ve put a lot of effort into trying to ban bad actors and just really focus on quality over quantity,” Andrew said. “It’s not important for us to have massive daily user numbers. It’s about people having fun and interacting.”
An Interface Designed for Safe Hookups
Smash is stripping down casual online dating to its essence. Since anonymity is a core feature of Smash, the platform has a special suite of tools that help keep users safe in the absence of rigid identity verification.
Smash doesn’t use the same identity verification methods as do other platforms, since some verification measures may require more personal information than Smash wants to collect. The platform tracks verified phone numbers and creates profiles to keep the platform legit, but that’s the extent of verification.
Instead, Smash uses a unique set of AI tools. “These AI tools effectively enable us to detect strange activity all across the platform, from profiles to chats,” Andrew said. “All of these things help safeguard the platform while ensuring high levels of anonymity.”
Smash is always growing its safety features to make the app more effective. Andrew said the team is dedicated to improving user experience and they aren’t afraid to stray from mainstream online dating practices.
“We’re completely free,” Andrew said. “It was so frustrating to find an app that had all these features, but you had to pay more to get them or show your profile to more people.”
You get every Smash feature with a free download. In another big break from the status quo, Smash doesn’t use any algorithms to present potential matches.
“We’ve deliberately steered clear of ranking users using algorithms,” Andrew said. “That just doesn’t exist in the app. You’re on equal footing with anyone else. One of the pitfalls of online dating is that it’s designed to keep you single, but that’s just not what we do.”
Andrew said he’s excited to see Smash’s growth in the future. The platform is ushering in a new and uncomplicated kind of online dating that the scene isn’t used to.
“We don’t want to keep adding more and more features for no reason,” Andrew said. “We want to keep it simple. Our ethos is simple: you upload a photo, it’s there for a few hours, and then it expires. It resonates with people, and we’re sticking with it.”
