Following a clamor of demand from disabled singles looking for love from across the pond, the groundbreaking U.S. disabled dating platform Dateability has this week finally landed on app stores in the U.K.
Dateability is the brainchild of Colorado-based sisters Jacqueline and Alexa Child and had its U.S. launch almost exactly two years ago. It is not the first ever dating platform for disabled singles but certainly one of the few, if not the only one, to have a co-CEO in Jacqueline who identifies as disabled. The app, though a web version is available too, also offers a modern smartphone-based dating experience with specific customizations tailored towards the disability community. These include Dateability’s “Deets” feature that allows users to reference their disability in their profile using a broad descriptor such as “wheelchair user” or “immune-compromised” but without needing to go into the weeds of a specific medical diagnosis.
Currently, Dateability has around 25,000 users across North America. Though this may be a tiny fraction compared to mainstream digital dating behemoths like Tinder, Bumble and Eharmony, it represents impressive organic growth given the budgetary constraints the sisters have found themselves up against.
Funding challenges
Jacqueline (30) has lived with several chronic health conditions since the age of 14 including lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, gastroparesis and trigeminal neuralgia. During an interview, she admits that accessing adequate levels of investment to grow the company has been an uphill task.
“Getting funding has been extremely difficult. We have not been able to secure any venture capital,” she explains.
“All of our funding has been through angel investors, sweat equity, winning grants or accelerator perks. We’ve had to be extremely scrappy and have been working hard to make every dollar count.”
When pressed on why she feels outside investment has been slow to arrive, she responds, “The feedback we’ve had is that the dating app market is oversaturated. However, I don’t think investors necessarily appreciate the problem that disabled people have with online dating. Yes, the mainstream dating app market is oversaturated but we don’t feel this applies to specific community dating apps at all.”
Of course, investment decisions are necessarily subjective but it would not be unreasonable to suggest that a great deal of misunderstanding is likely to pervade this funding space particularly if investors have few personal touchpoints with the disability community.
Straight out of the blocks however, it must be stated that being a disabled single in no way automatically equates with disabled dating and needing to look for love from within the disability community. Many disabled singles may not consider this practical and may not self-identify that way – instead preferring to access a wider gamut of prospective dates.
At 20% of the global population, however, the disability community is vast and incredibly diverse. Yet, until Dateability’s U.S. market entry in 2022 and now in the U.K., there have been few credible options for safely exploring a dating niche that intuitively should always have been there but has too often failed to materialize.
The reality is that disabled daters are not well served by modern-day swipe-away digital dating culture which is itself both superficial and saturated leading to a brutality that can weigh on even the broadest of shoulders. Even if they can get past stage one and start a meaningful conversation, disabled daters still need to tackle the emotionally draining issue of how and when to disclose their disability to their digital match in full anticipation of the ghosting this might then provoke.
By helping daters be more transparent about themselves from the outset in what should also be a more welcoming community space Dateability aims to empower its users to be their authentic selves.
Keeping it real
“We’ve heard from people with visible disabilities who have said if they went on Bumble, they would only post pictures from their chest up so that people wouldn’t see their wheelchair” explains Jacqueline.
Now they can show their full body and the full person that they are on their dating profile without that fear of being rejected. Before starting Dateability, I experimented once on Hinge where I put that I was chronically ill in my bio and I did not get a single like. The moment I took it out, people started liking me. It’s so very easy to just move on to the next person on a dating app that people think ‘I don’t need to deal with that. I can just find somebody else.’
Sophie Brisker from Overland Park Kansas who lives with chronic fatigue syndrome amongst a range of other impairments was a Dateability early adopter back in 2022. There she met her partner Zach who she now cohabits with. Sophie agrees that there is an inescapable pragmatism when using mainstream dating apps when you are disabled.
“I’ve heard the whole ‘You shouldn’t define yourself by your disability’ thing many times before,” Sophie says.
“I never really saw it that way. I am just realistic about what I’m able to do within my life. Perhaps someone who has an easier time functioning than me might be able to go straight into dating anyone because they can do most of the things that other people can do. I just found that because I have these limitations which can change at times I wanted to start from a point of mutual understanding.”
The sisters hope that this latest U.K. expansion will be just the start of a brand-new chapter in the startup’s existence and provide enough exposure to propel Dateability into Europe and other English-speaking countries. Should the necessary investment arrive, Alexa acknowledges that targeted marketing campaigns will be the next big challenge.
“Back when they launched, Bumble did all this guerilla marketing on sidewalks in New York City and that’s something we’d love to do if we had the budget,” Alexa says.
“But it’s tough because disability is so diverse. We can’t just target one place, one organization and then expect to reach all disabled people. There are just so many because there’s one for every diagnosis. We’re going to keep hustling to get the word out there but the reality is that the disability community is exceptionally marginalized and disparate.”
On the flip side, it’s also huge and woefully underserved in this important niche which is why Dateability hopes that it’s in pole position to navigate those challenges and finally put disabled dating on the world map.