:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63698300/the-league1.0.1462686820.0.jpg)
There’s a new dating app in town that will have you cleaning up your LinkedIn profile — and that’s just to get an invite to the service.
The League, a dating app intended to attract “high quality” singles, is launching in San Francisco Wednesday, according to founder Amanda Bradford. Bradford created The League, which operates like Tinder by pairing up individuals who have “liked” one another, in hopes of matching singles who are more “ambitious” and “engaged” than users of other dating apps like Tinder.
Bradford, who graduated from Stanford’s MBA program, helped select the app’s first 1,000 members by leaning heavily on her grad school connections and recommendations from friends in the area, she says. In doing so, she wanted to create a community of people serious about both their careers and finding a date, a “nightclub” of sorts for the online dating world.
“There’s an issues with low-quality members on dating apps in general,” she explains.
Bradford was frustrated after trying other dating apps. She found that men often “swiped right” (that is, they expressed interest) on basically every woman on services like Tinder. This leads to a high quantity of matches, but makes it harder to create meaningful ones, she explains.
With The League, users can be booted off the service if they’re matched up and routinely fail to send a message, she says. The League even keeps a “flakiness score” for users to determine whether or not they are engaging with others in the community.
She also ran into people she was connected with on Facebook and LinkedIn on other apps, mixing her personal and professional lives. On The League, you can eliminate those connections as possible matches.
While it sounds elitist, Bradford says her exclusive strategy has paid off — at least in terms of generating early interest in the app. The waiting list for The League is more than 10,000 people across the country, 3,000 in San Francisco alone. She says her ultimate goal is not to operate a super-exclusive app, but that she wants to start the community out on the right foot.
The approach has even attracted some interest from investors. Bradford said she took $75,000 in seed funding from IDG Ventures, xSeed Capital, and Cowboy Ventures, and is in the process of raising another small “angel round.”
“I think we have to own it,” she says of the exclusivity.
So how do you get an invite to The League? There’s no cut-and-dried requirement, she says, adding that she tried to start with a diverse user base. All 1,000 members will have one invite code to pass along to a friend, meaning the community will grow via recommendations for the time being. (The League will also add a few wait-listed users each day.) As the waiting list grows in other cities, like New York, The League will launch once demand is high enough, says Bradford.
Better start dusting off your resume.
Correction: The League took $75,000 in funding, not $750,000.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
