Dating Through Mutual Contacts
Cerca matches people through people they already know, so whoever is on the other end of the chat has been vouched for by a friend. That is a different promise from a grid of strangers, and it needed explaining before it could sell. Four weeks of creator work with SideShift later, Cerca was sitting in the App Store's Top 150 and installs had gone up 4x.
Barriers
- Dozens of swipe apps were already in the category, and in a fifteen second video most of them look identical.
- Cerca launched with under 20,000 downloads, so every piece of content had to teach the mutual contacts model with no existing user base to seed it through.
Approach
- Creators picked for how well they already talk about dating and Gen Z social life.
- Formats people already watch on their own time: first date stories and practical safety tips for meeting someone new.
- Hooks built on the social stakes of dating, who introduced you and who vouched for you, the part of Cerca people repeat to their friends.
Results
- Top 150 in the App Store, held for three weeks
- 4x increase in installs
- A tested set of formats and the creators who made them
Conclusion
A referral based dating app needs density before it works at all: enough people inside one social graph holding the app for a mutual contact to exist. Four weeks of creator content bought that density fast enough to hold a Top 150 position for three of those weeks. Cerca started the run with fewer than 20,000 downloads.
From the campaign
