Find love without the endless swipe
If you are looking for a relationship, the hardest part of a dating app is not rejection. It is spending three weeks discovering that the person you liked was never looking for the same thing.
That is a solvable problem, and the solution is unglamorous: say what you want before you match, not after.
Why swiping is bad at finding relationships
Meeting online is now the single most common way couples in the United States meet, having overtaken introductions through friends around 2013 (Rosenfeld et al., PNAS 2019) — which makes how these apps work a question worth taking seriously. And a swipe carries almost no information. You see a photo, a few words, and you make a judgement that the app then treats as a statement of intent — when it was really a statement of attraction.
The result is a match pool where "wants a relationship", "wants something casual" and "is bored on the sofa" are indistinguishable until you have invested days of conversation. Most people quietly resolve this mismatch by going silent, which is why ghosting and relationship-seeking are so tightly linked.
Add paid visibility and you get a second problem: some of the people you see are there because they paid to be, not because they fit. That is a business-model decision rather than a technical one, and it is the thing a fair dating app has to get right first.
Matching on intention instead
On Tekero you write an announcement — plainly, in your own words — describing what you are looking for. Something serious. Someone to see where it goes with. A person to share a specific part of your life with.
Mutual filters then connect you only with people whose intentions align with yours. It sounds almost too simple, but it removes the single biggest source of wasted time in online dating: the conversation that was never compatible in the first place.
Music Compatibility adds a dimension a bio cannot. What someone actually listens to says more about how they spend an evening than a list of adjectives about themselves.
Conversations that go somewhere
Empathy Openers exist because the first message is where most potential dies. Instead of another "hey", you begin with something the other person can genuinely answer — which is how a conversation acquires momentum rather than politeness.
Friendship Levels give that momentum a visible shape, so a connection that is deepening looks like it is deepening. Consent Contracts make boundaries and intentions explicit and mutual before things get ambiguous — which, for anyone who has had to have that conversation awkwardly and late, is a relief rather than a formality.
And the Trust Score runs underneath all of it, quietly making people who behave well more visible and people who do not less so.
The point is to leave the app
Tekero is built for what happens outside it. There is no streak to maintain, no reason to keep the feed open, and nothing to buy to be seen more often.
It launches in Barcelona on iOS, free during beta. If you are looking for something real in this city, the fastest route is to say so on the first screen.
Sources
Figures on this page come from the following research.