Mark Brehaut is the co-founder of Icebrkr, a startup based in North Attleboro that’s designing a mobile app to take the guesswork out of online dating, and currently runs a real-time SMS coaching service for online daters called Text Icebrkr.
Brehaut spoke with Providence Business News about his company’s story and goals for the future.
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PBN: How did you and Kevin Murray come together to take Icebrkr from an idea to a company?
BREHAUT: It’s a bit of a circuitous route. Kevin and I met back in 2010 at Rutgers University. He was there studying under one of the top online-dating researchers in the country, Jennifer Gibbs, who was a professor at Rutgers. At the same time, I was studying on a Ph.D. track to be a marriage and family therapist.
We kind of bonded as these two guys in a female-dominated field of study. Then when he left school, he went on to be an online-dating coach at eFlirt for a few years, where he’d do everything from looking for matches for people to ghost-writing their profiles, chats and emails. His clients ran the gamut from 40- and 50-year-old women in Boston to 30-year-old men in San Francisco. So he “lived” several online-dating lives.
But he saw a lot of the problems clients were having, coupled with his academic knowledge of online dating.
Meanwhile, I had decided not to pursue marriage and family therapy, and instead I left school in 2011 and taught myself how to code. I was a professor for a couple years, and then I worked as a web and mobile app developer.
So when Kevin had the idea for Icebrkr in about July 2015, it had been a year or two since we spoke, and when I said, “By the way, I develop apps for a living,” he said, “Well then, you’re the perfect person to do this.”
PBN: How are you providing this “real-time” counseling? What sort of issues do you advise your users about?
BREHAUT: We documented these problems Kevin had seen in the industry, and we saw two areas where people struggled to build rapport in online dating. The first area is self-presentation, how you put yourself out there on your dating profile. A lot of people suck at that, and it’s not their fault. If you don’t have a coach, you don’t know.
The other area is communication.
We wanted to build an app to solve these problems … and our advisers said that it would bode well for us in fundraising to be able to display traction. Basically, does the product you’re building solve an actual problem?
So, we came up with this idea of a “Text Icebrkr” product, which is an SMS service. We have coaches, including myself, Kevin and a couple other people. Users send us texts to ask questions, and we help them right now, in real time.
Some advice might be, for example, Kevin was talking the other day to a man that was looking to improve his dating-profile photo, and one of the photos he sent us was a picture of him with a girl standing next to him. The girl was his sister, but still it’s not the kind of photo you want to use on a dating profile. So, Kevin told him, “I wouldn’t use that photo.”
We also help set up dates. Clients ask where they should go on a date. Sometimes they send screenshots of their dating profiles and we try to coach them. We’ve also had clients text us after dates, saying, “I thought it went well, should I message them back now or should I wait until tomorrow?” That sort of thing.
PBN: What’s the difference between the SMS service and the app you’re developing?
BREHAUT: So, we’re in the process of fundraising to build our app. The app is a dating app, but there’s a bot built into the app. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Hitch,” with Will Smith, it’s a lot like that idea of your “wingman.”
We’re taking all our experience in online dating, and we’re building that in a bot version. As you use the app and input your information, the bot is learning about you, giving you recommendations about what photos to use and how to improve your profile.
In the same way, when you’re communicating with your matches, it helps you communicate in a good way to build rapport. Pickup lines that are ubiquitous on apps like Bumble or Tinder – “Hey,” “Hey there,” “How are you” – if I went to a bar and said that to a woman, she’d think I have no personality.
If you’re in our app and you type something like that, the bot will stop you and say, “Are you sure you want to say this? Stephanie only responds to this kind of line 10 percent of the time.” The bot can tell you that Stephanie likes tennis, so maybe you can try asking her what inspired her to get into tennis.
What we want to try to mimic is your friend sitting on the couch next to you as you’re texting the other person. You’re asking your friend, “Hey, what should I say” and the person sitting next to you is also really good friends with the person you’re texting, and knows she likes tennis. That’s the experience we want to create.
Our goal is to build the bot within our app, but at the same time keep this “Text Icebrkr” service going. So we’d have our own standalone application, but if you don’t want to download that app and just want to use Bumble or Tinder or something, you can still text this number. But ideally, eventually, instead of us texting you back and forth, it would be a bot as well.
PBN: Who are your target users for Icebrkr? Is the app going to be inclusive of LGBTQ users?
BREHAUT: If you imagine a spectrum, on the far left you have casual daters and on the far right you have serious daters who want to find someone they might marry. Dating apps currently fall somewhere within this spectrum. On the far left, you have apps like Bumble and Tinder. On the far right, you might have something like eHarmony or Match.com.
Our goal is to target only serious daters. So, we’re not going after Tinder’s market; our goal is to go after eHarmony’s market, which is really a completely untapped market. Nowhere is there anything like what we’re doing.
Our initial go-to-market strategy is to start with a very limited user base, which is very common in consumer software. With Facebook, for example, it started out with a user base at Harvard and then expanded. So we’re going to start with a limited user base, for example, we might start our pilot product off with a thousand users.
Within that pilot group, we probably wouldn’t have LGBTQ users for two important reasons. First, there’s only a thousand users. I don’t know the percent of the LGBTQ population, but let’s say it’s around 10 percent. You might not get any LGBTQ users in that group.
But more importantly, I don’t know what it’s like – as a straight white man – to be LGBTQ. So, I don’t want to put myself in those shoes. I would want to hire people who are LGBTQ who understand. In building our culture as a company, our No. 1 thing is diversity in every sense of the word. We’re hiring a CTO [chief technology officer] right now and we’d especially love to hire a woman, or anybody who has a different perspective from us, as 30-something straight white men.
So, in the future, absolutely 100 percent we’ll be LGBTQ inclusive.
PBN: How are you doing in terms of funding? Do you have plans for expansion?
BREHAUT: We’ve raised some money, about $75,000, and our goal is $200,000.
Right now, the company is just Kevin and I. We have three others, one who helps us out with the coaching and dating advice … and two people who help us out on the marketing side, developing a marketing plan and all that. But it’s mostly Kevin and I that run this, at least 70 hours a week.
Our No. 1 priority right now is hiring a CTO. We’ve been working with a development company, NorthOut, who’s helping us develop the app and they specialize in AI [artificial intelligence] bot applications, which is perfect. My strength is really in product and design, so we’re looking for someone who’s a very strong tech person. The CTO would ideally be someone who can work in tandem with our development team.
We are looking at bringing on other positions, but right now the CTO is our top priority.
Kaylen Auer is a PBN contributing writer.
