What It’s Like to Have Your Dating App Flooded by the Step-Chicken Cult During Launch Week
The one thing no founder expects during launch week.
There is a special exhilaration that comes with launching a new app. You’ve spent countless hours tweaking and perfecting, and finally, you get to see how a wide audience reacts. Deciding to launch XO in the middle of a pandemic was not a decision my team came to lightly, but XO is a dating app with icebreaker games with the objective of helping people have fun and make meaningful connections, and we knew we could bring some levity to a difficult time.
One thing no founder expects during launch week is for their app to take off amongst members of a cult. But, let me explain.
You’ve heard of the Step-chickens by now (If you haven’t, you’re officially behind. The New York Times already covered it). They are the followers of Melissa Ong, known as @chunkysdead on TikTok, and express their allegiance by changing their profile pictures to the same blueish picture.
I did not know this on May 20, the second day XO was live worldwide on iPhone, when I was doing user moderation. In order to build a safe community we require users to own the copyright to their profile photos, and use at least one photo that clearly shows their appearance without obstructions or heavy filters.
The first time I saw the blueish photo I automatically hid it, but you can imagine my alarm when I started to see it again and again. Even more mysteriously, accounts were being made with a cohesive set of dating profile pictures *plus* the blueish one. My first thought was that someone was pranking us, but the accounts were being made too fast and too varied to be from one person.
A few minutes later I saw this video by @chunkysdead from our agency partner, Jetfuel, and I understood completely.
It was a relief to know the accounts were simply from a cult, and not spam. But this brought up another question for me around the intersection of a cult and a dating app. How does a shared identity fuel connection?
Our early users are TikTokers, who self-identify as creative. The games on XO are creative word and drawing games, because we believe that creating something together tells you a lot about a person. Our personality quizzes are also designed to help start conversations.
I hadn’t considered an influx of followers of a specific influencer, though. From perusing the @chunkysdead account, I can see the humor of Step-chickens is offbeat in a way that aligns well with the style we’ve developed for XO quizzes, for example, “Which cartoon animal will you have a sex dream about?”
I’m confident Step-chickens will have a good time on XO, but would they also want to date each other?
Still freshly launched, I’m sure XO has a higher density of Step-chickens than any other dating app. And when I think about what makes a good romantic connection, shared humor ranks pretty high.
Being on the same wavelength as your partner is the point of our game, Synchronicity, where you and your partner try to guess the same word. In my own non-scientific observation based on years of being single and talking to single friends about dating, that magical thing we’re all looking for is someone who “gets me.”
That’s what these users were trying to achieve with the blueish photo in their dating profiles — a hat tip, a wink to one another, that they get it.
What’s next, collaborative fan art made on Exquisite Corpse, our game where each partner draws half the picture? If the online self-proclaimed social media cult is up for it, now we know what to look for.
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