New Dating App Wants to Make Denver Romance More...Raw

Denver singles plagued by catfishers and ghosters might find solace at last.

The RAW dating app launched in the Mile High City in February, promising users a more genuine, "unfiltered" experience than predecessors like Tinder and Hinge.

It basically works like BeReal. Once a day, users are prompted to take a photo of themselves and their surroundings using their phone's front and back cameras. Those daily photos are what singles swipe yes-or-no on when selecting dates on the app. Users have to take new photos every 24 hours and they can't swipe on other people until they update their daily pictures.

"We designed it this way so everyone can get a real-time snapshot of someone's life, not vacation pics from five years ago," says Marina Anderson, co-founder of RAW. "If they want to learn more about someone, they can swipe up on their profile and can see their daily photos from the last few days, too."

The model is supposed to prevent catfishing, forcing users to show themselves in real time without any photo editing or identity theft. It is also designed to deter ghosting; if a user has too many unanswered chats from their matches (capping at around twenty), the app pauses new chats until they answer some of the old ones.

RAW started in New York in July 2023. Since expanding to Denver at the beginning of last month, it has seen around 300 to 400 new singles join every day, Anderson says, adding that the goal is to maintain 5,000 active daily users in the Denver area in March.

"Most dating apps rush to places like L.A. and New York, but we wanted to focus on cities with more unique character," Anderson says. "We absolutely love what's happening in Denver right now. It's buzzing with a young, trendy crowd and there's this incredible energy everywhere you go. This shows in our app stats. We see lots of activity in Denver."

Denver daters could certainly use the help.

The Mile High City's notoriously disappointing dating scene has been a well-documented phenomenon in Westword. Some local experts partially blame dating apps themselves, calling the platforms too time-consuming or saying they create a perception that romantic partners are unlimited and disposable.

Apps have quickly become a leading tool in the modern search for romance. Three in ten U.S. adults have used a dating app, and that jumps up to 53 percent for adults under the age of thirty, according to the Pew Research Center. However, 46 percent of users report an overall negative experience, increasing to 51 percent negative for women users.

RAW wants to be different, centering authenticity and claiming to have an average match-time of just seven minutes.

Anderson says RAW is advertising the app with free coffee trucks driving throughout the city, parties hosted on nearby college campuses and posters at bus stops. It's working on partnering with coffee shops to give free drinks to app users.

"We're focused on building strong communities in distinctive cities like Denver that have their own special atmosphere," Anderson says. "Local folks seem to really get what we're about: keeping things real and authentic. So we're here to help those locals connect with each other and to do it without scammers, catfishers, and all the fakeness that online dating usually brings."

At the very least, Denver singles now have one more option to avoid the terrifying ordeal of meeting people IRL.

RAW is available to download for IOS and Android in the App Store.