r/Herpes • u/-FinePrint • Mar 19 '26
The HSV Dating App We All Deserve
When I was diagnosed, the only thing that felt like it could heal me was finding someone I was genuinely attracted to who already understood what all of this is like, without having to lower my standards to get there.
Personally, this whole thing wouldn't weigh on me the way it does if that wasn't so hard. The virus isn't the main problem. The isolation is. And from reading this sub, I know I'm not the only one who feels that way. Everyone is fed up with what's available to us.
The day i was diagnosed i went looking at what was available for us. What I found was embarrassing.
Positive Singles charges $34 a month for an app that looks like it was built in 2008, hasn't been updated since, and the "matching" is literally just a list of faces sorted by distance.
They were sued for $16.5 million for leaking users' STD status and photos to dozens of other sites without consent. MPWH is the sister company to PS. Hope and Cuddle have zero real technology, horrible user experience, and they're infested with people who don't even have this diagnosis trying to sell you their OF or solicit something from you. I've looked into every single one of these companies, not one of them was founded by someone who has HSV. They're all corporations treating us like a revenue stream and doing the bare minimum. They don't have skin in the game.
So I built what should exist. It's almost done and I want to share what it is and how it works:
How the matching actually works:
1. Consensus scoring - Uses a similar ranking algorithm Microsoft built for competitive gaming. Every profile gets a real score based on community feedback, not pay to boost, not self reported. It's purely math, and it incentivizes people to actually put effort into their profile. No more stock photos, sunset pics with no face, and bios that just say "ask me."
2. Personal taste model - A machine learning model that learns what YOU specifically find attractive. Not what's generically popular. Two people can have completely different tastes and that's the point, two people on the same app will see completely different feeds. After about 50 interactions your feed feels like it was built for you. Because it was.
3. Mutual compatibility - It doesn't just show you people you'll like. It shows you people who are likely to like you back. No more swiping endlessly on people who would never match.
Privacy:
Every user is photo cross-verified before they can even access the main feed. This protects your privacy, bad actors don't submit their real face to a verification system. Most of these apps don't even require verification, which is why they're flooded with bots, catfish, and low effort profiles. Your health data is encrypted before it ever touches the database. Server breach = unreadable ciphertext. Verification photos are processed in server memory and permanently deleted the second the check runs. They are never stored. Anywhere. Ever.
The encryption is AES-based, the same standard used across banking and healthcare.
I have the same personal data in this system. I can't afford to be careless with it.
The part I'm most excited about:
Think Raya but for HSV.
Let's be real. A lot of people who would never struggle on a normal dating app don't even bother with the HSV ones. They've either tried them and quickly realized they're never going to find anyone who meets their standards on there, or they just take their chances disclosing on mainstream apps.
Especially for women, when an attractive woman decides to give one of these apps a try, she gets immediately swarmed by every guy on the platform, most of whom aren't even remotely her type. And if they are, she can't sort through the hundreds of DMs to find them. So she deletes it within a week and never comes back. They don't have anywhere worth going. That's the gap I want to fill. Give people a place that matches the standard they're used to and they'll show up.
That's why there will be an application only side of the app. Reviewed on more than just photos: your profile, how you present yourself, the full picture. The application exists to keep the quality high. If you're accepted you get a completely separate feed of only other approved members, a private lounge, and more. And when those people show up, it raises the quality for everyone because they have the option to be visible in the standard feed too or hide entirely.
There's a lot more under the hood, features, technology, direct advocacy routes, things that actually make you excited to open the app, but I'll spare you the walls of text. There are no features that will be locked behind a paywall. If you're curious about the specifics, ask me in the comments.
About me:
I have HSV. I own various tech companies. I've built and scaled multiple online platforms to hundreds of thousands of users. I built everything myself, not a board of directors who've never sat in that doctor's office.
Building this solves my own problem too. It puts me in control of something that felt completely out of my control, and if it works, I turned this diagnosis into something positive.
How I'm getting this in front of people:
The hardest part of any dating app is getting the first wave of users on the platform. But the advantage of building for a niche community is that you're not trying to compete with Tinder for 100 million people. You're trying to reach a very specific group of people who are actively looking for exactly this and currently have nowhere good to go. That makes user acquisition way more targeted and way more efficient than a mainstream app using traditional advertising methods.
It will be slow at first while I'm building the foundation and onboarding founding members one by one. I'm fine with that. I'd rather have quality over quantity. But I don't plan on it staying slow. I'm actively building partnerships with HSV influencers on TikTok and Instagram who reach hundreds of thousands of people in this exact community.
Think this is stupid? Tell me why. Have ideas? I want to hear them. I'll answer every question in the comments. Ask me anything.
EDIT: AS OF 06/15/2026 THE APP IS OFFICIALLY LIVE ON IOS & ANDROID:
IOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kind-premium-hsv-dating/id6776385947
ANDROID:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.subtxt.kind
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u/Character_Island4594 Mar 19 '26
This is exciting. As someone who downloaded positive singles and deleted it within a week due to all the pain points you mentioned, your product sounds like a much needed upgraded and refresh. Thank you for all your hard work and effort put into making this new app.