Launch HN: Muzmatch (YC S17) – A place where 400M single Muslims can meet

They could make gender a slider :)

Or maybe a dot on a 2D graph? Or maybe a point inside a hypercube.

This is a good point! Most dating apps have Facebook login and grab a bunch of information from Facebook. Maybe this platform for single people grabs data from Facebook.

I like the idea of having LinkedIn and not just adding all my work contacts on Facebook. I want to be sure that the information I share on the dating platform and Facebook don't mix too easily. Curating my Facebook data once when signing up to a dating app is fine.

My wife is a user of this app (she has used to to help her sisters look for husbands) and so far I think it's a good product. You were wise to include the wali/chaperone option because that is clearly a key feature for many sisters.

She always mentions how she's puzzled over the "Always pray / sometimes pray / never pray" options under religious practice. Can you explain your thought process in coming up with those options?

I want to say that I can see why your app would be a tremendous challenge from a product development standpoint. What you have as a user base in America are basically a mix of many different immigrant cultures that each have their own idea of Islamic traditional marriage customs - Somalian vs. Arab vs. Indopak vs. West African vs. Cham vs. vs. vs..., as well as clashes between youth & elder viewpoints, as well as a large indigenous (I use the term loosely - we're all immigrants to an extent) American Muslim population as well (something that foreigners usually are shocked to hear - Americans becoming Muslim?! What!!). Do your research well & don't give up

I ask Allah to guide you to a product that is beneficial for the Muslims - and also materially successful!

Edit: Also, my email address was used at one point as the "wali" contact but I stopped getting digest emails from the conversations inexplicably. You may need tighter QA around that pipeline

If you made an app just for white Christians, as a non-white non-Christian I'd be fine with it because it saves me from having to a) look at their profile, b) potentially get matched up with them, and c) waste my time. Chances are they want someone who shares a lot of their same beliefs and more importantly want someone faithful to God.

Like it or not, people have preferences.

A few year ago, I joined Match. You know how many of my 'matches' explicitly stated they don't want to date my ethnicity and only want to date their own? A lot.

Then I joined CoffeeMeetsBagel. And while I never explicitly mentioned a preferred ethnicity, they kept matching me up with women of my own ethnicity despite the fact that 50% of the people in my city are not my ethnicity. Again, how much of that is women explicitly stating they don't want to be matched up to men of my ethnicity?

My point is that even though some apps have a generalized population, the idea of intermingling is a minority. In the U.S. I think interracial marriages are like 10% of all total marriages. And religion has way more differences in terms of life style and philosophy than ethnicity.

If you are choosing a life partner it makes sense to filter for religious beliefs because that is something you need to agree on to raise children together

There are lots of dating services for Christians only, that's not new.

Just because people are super religious doesn't mean they are resistant to all types of change. Not sure what you mean by "super religious" but I know a lot of people personally who have found this app useful who are practicing Islam in a traditional way