The Philosophy of SOULS

Dating apps promise to help you meet someone, but their real design serves a different purpose: to keep you swiping, keep you paying, and make sure you never stop needing them. If they truly fulfilled that promise, you'd cancel your subscription—and that's not a sustainable business model for them.

I believe every system eventually becomes a reflection of what it incentivizes. If the business depends on keeping you engaged, the system will learn to retain you, not to accomplish what it claims to exist for. Results are never accidental; they are the natural consequence of the rules we choose to build.

That's what I saw in dating apps.

I noticed that people with completely different experiences were ultimately trapped in the same system. Some were never given the chance to be discovered. Others received constant attention, but not for who they truly were. Their experiences looked different, yet both were products of the same design.

That's when I realized the problem wasn't the people. It was the system.

SOULS began as an experiment to answer a simple question: What would happen if a system stopped optimizing for engagement, popularity, or appearance, and started optimizing for genuine human connection?

Of course, a product needs to be sustainable. But I don't believe sustainability should become the reason it exists. When financial incentives stop driving design decisions, we create space to build systems that genuinely serve people. To me, financial success should be the result of fulfilling that purpose well—not the purpose itself.

That's the philosophy I try to bring to everything I build whenever I encounter a broken system: understand the incentive that's distorting it, then redesign it so it serves people better.

I don't believe dating apps fail by accident. I believe they're working exactly as they were designed to work. And if they were designed that way, they can be designed differently.

That question became SOULS: a system that doesn't need to keep you hooked to justify its existence.