Hi fellas. I think the world really needs a way for humans to leverage tech to make more babies in the context of long-term pair-bonded relationships supported by community.

I’ve read through your memo and deck. I think there’s a need to innovate beyond just better preference-matching. Indeed, I don’t think you’ll get very far if you don’t build a much better mouse-trap w/r/t connecting men and women to make babies and incentivizing community support of the child-rearing couple.

All of this is informed by my subjective life experience, so feel free to ignore my comments/suggestions if they aren’t relevant to the market you probably know better than me, i.e. younger people setting off on the family-making journey. I’m 53, four sons, two mothers, no marriages, and am currently looking to have more children (hopefully some daughters) in the coming years. I’ve been using Hinge and have met some decent prospects there.

Comments:

1. The problem the project seeks to solve is creating pair-bonded male/female relationships that result in offspring. But the product as described seeks to address the problem through better match-making via declared preferences of men and women using the service. This strikes me as only part of the solution (community support is missing); also suggest building the solution up from the basics of human biodynamics and male/female sexual polarity.
2. The product goal of matching men and women for traditional marriage strikes me as problematic. Marriage without the reinforcing cultural norms and supports of community and religion in which marriage evolved. Modern divorce laws incentivize dissolution rather than union, and the default system is punitive to the spouse with greater assets/earning potential. It’s an archaic failure mode construct for families rooted in a historical context when women were chattel. I’d suggest incorporating a better solution than marriage into your product, while also recognizing that it’s a bigger vision/heavier lift.
3. Match-making based on volunteered preferences is problematic— most people’s preferences with regard to what they think they want in Mr./Mrs. Keeper/LTR/Right are assigned to them by a culture that celebrates women animating their masculine traits and men animating their feminine natures— the opposite of the sexual polarity that results in babies. I see this everywhere with couples who make sense based on earning potential/education/background, rather the spark that tends to make babies.
4. The default reproductive desire trigger for men is female beauty, i.e. reproductive fitness, as expressed by facial symmetry, body proportions, and age (youth). For women it’s provisioning and protection, i.e. wealth, strength, risk-taking, achievement. Ignoring these biodynamics in favor of what men and women think they want strikes me as failure mode if the goal is more pair-bonded families with children.
5. It takes a community to support a couple with children, especially through difficult times, i.e. deaths, scarce resources, illness. Without community, couples (whether married or not) find it easier to co-parent (less compromise and stress), rather than continue in a single household. We (mostly) no longer have the communities that once supported traditional marriage (especially online elites who are likely to be the early adopters of Keeper). But we do have communities of friends, cofounders, collaborators and coworkers. It strikes me as a missed opportunity for Keeper not to leverage these mostly online relationships to both generate prospects and support couples once they form, especially through child-rearing.
6. Building a two-sided marketplace for male/female meetups/hookups/fuckups is a solved problem, as you point out. Keeper’s opportunity (seems to me) is niching down to two-sided marketplace for masculine men and the beautiful women who are intent on making babies in a pair-bonded long-term relationship and their friends and families who want to support them in that goal, i.e. their communities.

This would require innovating on the dating app/matchmaking service model beyond just better preference teasing and alignment. It would incentivize and reward communities for participating in the process, punish participants who don’t end up staying together or making babies with matches, and provide a new sort of updated commitment contract for baby-making, pair-bonding, and families. Without additional structure and participation, as well as incentives and disincentives, I don’t see how Keeper can build a moat, as better-capitalized projects, Tinder, Hinge et al can just copy the improved preference teasing that Keeper hopes to implement.

By including community and adding incentives, every new participant would bring clusters of value-creating users, resulting in Reed’s Law NFX, vs. (hopefully) the P2P Metcalfe NFX of Hinge or the worse Sarnoff NFX of match-making services(assuming here, have never used, but that’s my understanding of the one-to-many broadcast way they work).

Questions:

1. Have you considered using biometrics (AI measured markers of female beauty) + proof of fitness for males to create a more reliable League-style elite community of singles?
2. Have you considered POS system style staking/slashing mechanics to reward/punish activity in Keeper? I’m not suggesting anything decentralized, but rather a centralized ledger that gamifies your product flows?
3. Have you considered expanding the product entry points beyond those looking for Keepers to their community, including expanding gamification to their participation?

Happy to meet up or get on a call to discuss any of this. I live in Mill Valley, CA. Cell is 646-238-6751. email: [email protected]