Rob's Viral Tinder Bot
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A story about how John Coogan's Soylent co-founder Rob created viral content by writing about automating Tinder through programming.
"Rob had been writing on his blog and posting on Hacker News. He wrote a bunch of viral clickbait targeted at programmers. Speaking of dating, he wrote a blog post about how he hacked Tinder. This was before bots and stuff were common.
He claimed (though he didn't really do this, it was more for satire and fun) that he wrote a script that would automatically swipe right on everything, then use generative AI to talk to the person, use the Uber API to call them a car, and then order DoorDash to deliver food. The punch line at the end of the story was basically that he wasn't involved at all.
Through posts like this, he built a following on Hacker News, which helped when we later launched Soylent."
John Coogan
John is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Founders Fund. He regularly publishes YouTube videos about technology companies and Silicon Valley. He previously co-founded two startups; a nicotine company named Lucy and a food company named Soylent.