TXSL #9: Swiping Left on Vapourware

Image credit: Hot Air Balloon, by Jean Beaufort. Public domain (link: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=285348).

Recently I encountered an advert about a new dating site that promised to deliver an improved dating experience compared to existing services. I won’t be identifying the site or the business that’s behind it, but wanted to talk about spotting the signs that (based on currently available public information) this service could be an instance of vapourware. This term was first used in 1986 to describe the delayed release of Microsoft Windows, and is now often used to describe a product or service that is announced, but that doesn’t yet exist (or has little prospect of reaching the market).

It sounds great but also vague

The ad and the website for this shiny new dating service played on popular discontent with dating apps in general. It offered a bigger focus on connecting with potential partners on a deeper level, rather than casual hook-ups. And it marketed itself as a smarter, more satisfying, fundamentally better service than other dating apps on the market.

Was any evidence presented to support any of these claims? No. The website cited findings from focus groups, but nothing that could be independently or externally verified. (The success rate of dating apps in terms of generating meaningful relationships is a whole topic in itself, with reliable statistics difficult to find.)

All aboard the buzzword bandwagon!

Not long ago, it used to be ‘blockchain’. Now, the buzzword of the day is AI, and this dating site leaned into it, claiming that it had created an AI system to present users with suitable matches. But again, there was no real detail provided – not even any discussion of which large language model might be running it behind the scenes. (Anyone up for using Grok as their wingman?)

No user base or evidence of development

The dating site isn’t actually available yet. All you can do is sign up to a waitlist. (Which is, of course, described in terms of joining a social movement.) On LinkedIn, there’s no evidence that any software developers are employed by the dating site. By contrast, for example, a LinkedIn search for developers at a competing dating service returns at least five current or former software developers in the first 20 results.

Sparse corporate records

Publicly available records indicate the company was formed in the last 12 months, so no accounts are available yet. While this is to be expected for a very new company, it also suggests that the company is marketing its services at a very early stage of development.

No clear expertise in the field

The company’s founder appears to have little or no relevant background in software development. Which is fine, if the plan is to hire developers to build the service, but as mentioned earlier, there’s no evidence that this is happening. A look through the founder’s LinkedIn feed suggests that they’ve only recently become interested in founding a business and are still very much learning how to navigate early-stage financing.

The bottom line

It’s not always considered problematic to market a product or service that doesn’t actually exist. For some years now, game development studios have made it very common for players to pre-order a game and wait for it to be finished and released, sometimes waiting for years! But I think the harms of this kind of business model should be acknowledged: wasted effort/marketing spend, disappointed customers, and loss of trust – which, according to a recent analysis of corporate trust by Boston Consulting Group, tends to correlate with shareholder return, and once lost, is difficult to regain.

There is also a more insidious harm arising from the intentional announcement of vapourware – that a competing company may be dissuaded from entering a market by the signal that vapourware gives, as discussed by Barry Bayus and colleagues in a paper from 2000. This could potentially deprive the world of a superior product. Vapourware became a topic of discussion in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. antitrust case of 2001, although in the end the US Department of Justice settled the case and Microsoft didn’t appear to suffer any penalty for its use of vapourware announcements.

Ultimately, if your product offering isn’t available for potential customers to at least preview or demo, then you should probably be focusing on building that minimum viable product before worrying about marketing.

AI usage disclosure

I used ChatGPT to assess the final drafts of this article to determine the risk of the dating service being identifiable, and made some minor textual edits that the LLM output suggested, to reduce this risk. The research and writing process was otherwise my own work.