A photo. An age. A short bio. Swipe. The interface optimizes for speed — and gets less and less of who someone actually is in return.
"People connect more meaningfully when they can see the structure of each other's inner world."
So we built a map. Every person on Make a Match has a personal Planet — a visual identity space built from the interests, values, tastes, and relationship priorities that actually matter to them. The Planet is the profile, the discovery layer, and the compatibility source, all at once.
A visual world built from the user's interests, values, tastes, hobbies, personality, and relationship priorities. The filled Planet carries the profile photo in the center and suggested photo signals around it.
In the app these are not separate planets. They are five orbiting nodes around the user's Planet, each with a photo cover, label, and colour system.
A concept is a hobby, a value, a taste, a relationship priority, a personal trait. Each one is small enough to be honest, structured enough to be useful for matching.
Users add text concepts, choose photos, customize category covers, and make the Planet feel like theirs. The more they add, the more the rest of the product wakes up.
Discovery uses the same cosmic visual language as My Planet: large planet cards, blurred context behind the active profile, and direct movement into exploration.
We don't claim a scientific formula. We claim a richer starting point — built from signals a user actually chose to share. Every match has a reason a person can read.
"The purpose is to give users a richer, more meaningful starting point for deciding who's worth exploring."
As a Planet grows, Inner Compass surfaces reflective views: connections between concepts, weekly reflections, recurring themes. The app stays useful even when you're not actively looking.
The Atlas in the real app is a category-filtered workspace: users add concepts, review completion quality, and move back to My Planet when they want the visual world view.
The Vault is the one place where account tier, self-knowledge level, and feature access are visible together. It earns trust by being transparent — users always see what they have, and what comes next.
As your Planet grows in depth, your self-knowledge level rises. These are the same five levels used in the app: numeric ring badges, exact ranges, and the real colour family.
Five gem tiers expand or accelerate access. The visuals now use the same gemstone assets as the real Crystal Vault implementation.
Same model, same metaphor, same Planet. Native where it counts, parity everywhere else — so a user can switch surfaces mid-thought without losing the thread.
The category is exhausted. People are tired of empty bios, ghosted chats, and discovery that treats them as faces. Make a Match opens a lane the incumbents can't pivot into without rebuilding their core.
Five categories × dozens of concepts give a partner real material to react to — and the matching engine real signals to learn from.
"You also love Wong Kar-wai?" is a better first message than "hey :)" — and the product hands you the opener.
Inner Compass, progression, and Pulses turn the app into a place users tend even between dates — not a faucet they only open when lonely.
A dating product asks for an unusual amount of trust. We treat that trust as a feature — with public policy pages as the source of truth, granular controls inside Settings, and account self-service that doesn't hide behind support tickets.