For the past few weeks, CrossPaths, a mysterious Marriage Pact dupe, has been flooding students’ emails, prompting them to fill out their match-making form in time for Valentine’s Day.
The aim of the program is to “find your perfect match,” according to co-founder and Notre Dame junior Nathan Gafney. It was created to rival Marriage Pact, an online annual match-making program created by Stanford students which now operates at over 100 universities, including Notre Dame.
The idea for CrossPaths started last spring at the Hesburgh Hackathon, a weekend-long coding event where students pitch startup ideas. The original concept was a friendship matching service that failed to intrigue the judges.
“We made this algorithm that matched friends with friends to solve the loneliness epidemic,” Gafney said. “We got dead last.”
When two of the people who matched on their friendship service were revealed to have been dating, Gafney and his project partner, ND junior George Gardey, decided to disregard the judges’ criticism and move forward with the project as an improved Marriage Pact to prove the judges wrong.
Gafney and Gardey pitched CrossPaths to the IDEA Center at Notre Dame and received a total of $1,600 from a combination of direct funding and competitions. They were granted permission from the Office of Information Technology to send emails to the ND student body, and since last spring they have had a total of four rounds of the matchmaking program. The biggest and most official launch was this semester, in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day.
“We’ve matched 3,500 Notre Dame students across grad and undergrad,” Gafney said, “about 40 percent of the undergraduate population and 20 percent of the graduate student population.”
The timing, for Gafney, is key.
“It’s very easy to market Valentine’s Day,” he said. “Go get a match so you’re not lonely on Valentine’s Day. Why not?”
The project comes at a time when being single is on the rise. Gafney said that 60% of 830 respondents they surveyed said they had not been in a relationship at Notre Dame.
Senior Nicholas Peterson was one of the 1,600 students to fill out the form this round. Peterson has been single for “21 and a half years and counting.” He needed a date to his formal.
His friend, senior Ivan Alvarez, who has been single for “about 21 years and three quarters” saw CrossPaths as “a low commitment, fun way to find out if there’s anyone like you.”
The two of them didn’t really know where CrossPaths came from or if there was any benefit to doing it as opposed to the Marriage Pact, but figured “why not?”
CrossPaths aims to be more fun, engaging and successful than the Marriage Pact. Features like free response questions, customized date ideas and the agency to choose between two top picks are unique to the algorithm. Users can also choose whether they are looking for a friend, a serious relationship or something casual.
Free response questions on CrossPaths are generated based on responses that the user has already given.
“All of those written questions are adaptive, so if you fill it out, your questions will be different than anyone else’s … no two people have the same questions,” Gafney said. “It’s all trained to extract information from you.”
The extracted information is used to build a profile that allows the system to match you with other users.
Students who are willing to pay $5 are allowed to see their top two matches and choose between them.
“These are essentially two people who match all the criteria of similar values, similar beliefs, similar interests,” Gafney said. “We give you the choice to pay to pick who you think is more attractive, essentially.”
The system does not include photos of matches, but Gafney said the assumption is that users could look their matches up online.
“Someone paid like ten times I think,” Gafney said.
Neither Peterson nor Alvarez paid to see their matches.
“Hell no, I’m not paying for that,” said Peterson.
The $5 incentives are how CrossPaths generates revenue. Including the money that CrossPaths received from the IDEA Center, Gafney said the project is profitable and will continue to be so in the future.
He and Gardey are planning to expand CrossPaths beyond Notre Dame; the tentative plan is 10 schools in the next month, 50 in the fall, and 250 by year three. The primary strategy will be to avoid schools where Marriage Pact is already operating.
“We’re going to try BYU,” Gardey said. “The Mormons might be into this as much as Catholics are.”
Gardey says that user data generated from CrossPaths is very valuable.
“The Rover or something will always try to do a poll of like, what political leaning their students are,” said Gardey. “Well, we have that information on 40% of the student body already.”
This data could be sold to companies that are interested in changing their business models to adapt to the interests of college students, keeping individual information anonymous.
“It would be illegal to sell the data raw,” said Gardey. “The IDEA Center has told us we should look into anonymized research reports to marketing companies … It’s all laid out in our privacy policy.”
The data is also used to provide date ideas for matched individuals based on their interests.
“Mine gave me an idea for a date night that involved me breaking into the top of Jordan Hall,” Peterson said with a laugh.
Alvarez’s suggestion was “star gazing by the St. Joe River.”
Peterson did not end up breaking into the top of Jordan Hall, but he did meet up with his CrossPaths match.
“We met up today. That was probably successful,” said Peterson. “We got along and talked for about an hour and a half.”
She agreed to go as his date to Keough formal.
Senior Sean Kerr, who one-ups Peterson and Alvarez by being single for 22 years, also met up with his CrossPaths match.
Kerr had done Marriage Pact before, but never actually ended up meeting a new person through it.
“I got a match and I met her. I mean, it was successful,” Kerr said. “It was like the first person who responded to me that I didn’t know in person already.”
The two of them met at Starbucks in LaFortune Student Center this week, and while he does not know if it could go anywhere yet, he is happy to have met a new person.
“I think [CrossPaths] is helpful for a lot of people, actually, because … I don’t know how to initiate a relationship,” said Kerr. “I get really nervous asking a girl out.”
He also thinks that it can be helpful for introverts.
“I feel like to date people and get to know people you have to, like, go to parties and stuff,” Kerr said. “And like, I’m definitely not a party guy.”
Gafney and Gardey are pitching at the McCloskey New Venture Competition with the prospect of winning $50,000 to support CrossPaths.
Reflecting on his and Gardey’s process of creating CrossPaths, “two nerdy guys trying to do dating sites,” Gafney said he is glad to have had the opportunity “creating a business, building something cool and proving the judges at that hackathon wrong.”
And Peterson is happy that he has a date to his formal.
