Is Tinder too unselective for you? Is OKCupid turning up dates that don’t meet your standards? If so, you might want to look into The League, a new dating app recently launched by an Stanford business school graduate.
“You’re smart, good-looking & successful. You don’t need a dating app to get a date—you’re too popular as it is. But you should join The League,” reads the app’s website. The site invites users to download the app and join the waiting list for its “private alpha.” Once live, it promises to exclude all of the chaff you’d find in those other dating apps, and allow only the very best people to meet each other.
The service is described as as a dating app for the elite—and elitists in a post that someone unaffiliated with the app put on the Facebook page for students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School Friday. The app’s founder, Amanda Bradford, earned an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business this year. Bradford declined to comment, but a spokeswoman for the app said it would become operational for people in San Francisco in a few weeks, and that there were over 300 people on the waiting list in that city. In the New York area, nearly 150 people had signed up by Friday evening.
“If you took the top 20% of Tinder….. you’d get The League,” reads the post. The current version of the app asks you to sign in with your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, and “reserve your spot” in line for the alpha version. (“Don’t despair—we’ll be slowly letting in people off the waitlist,” the app reassures eager subscribers.)
So, how do you know if you belong in The League? The Facebook post offers some clues:
“Was it your philanthropic contributions or your impressive college sports career? Your killer smile or you east coast private education? That big-shot CEO that you’re friends with on Facebook or the fact that you’re one of the few singer-songwriters in San Francisco and the odds were just in your favor?” The post continues:
“While you don’t know exactly what got you in, you do know that the best things in life are the most selective.”
An upside to The League, according to The League, is that it “screens for quality,” and promises “No Randoms” and “No Fakes”: “You’ll never have to wonder if that Harvard hottie is too good to be true on The League,” the website reads.
The app also has Twitter and Instagram accounts. “Weeding just got a whole lot easier,” reads text from a photo posted to the @theleagueapp Instagram account. The Twitter account is so far devoted mainly to tweets with the hashtag “#getmeofftinder” but also includes a post linking to a video tutorial created by a portly man on how to “Find a Girlfriend Or Pick the Perfect Wife.”
One hot tip from that video: “We do not hang around and date and marry women who are not at least, in our mind, a five.” For The League, a five seems a little low.
