This App Knows What Lesbians Want

A dating platform reinvents itself to help lesbians do more than date each other
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Robyn Exton, the woman behind Dattch, a dating app for lesbians, realized she had a problem last month: No one understood the name. In response to a survey of 20,000 users, women offered bemused interpretations of its meaning. Was it a reference to “butch”? A play on crude slang for female genitalia? (For the curious, it was a portmanteau of "date" and "catch.")

Negative feedback about Dattch's name and requests for new features prompted Exton to overhaul the app, which has been available in the iTunes App Store since 2013. It is set to relaunch Friday with a radically different interface, $1 million in seed funding from investors led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and a new moniker: Her.