Until March, Zhamilya Mussaibekova, a junior majoring in cognitive science, had been “very against dating apps” and had never downloaded one before.

Mussaibekova said she didn’t “like putting [herself] out there like that,” and didn’t want to meet “completely random people.” But she was persuaded to download a dating app by Carter Rocket-Munk, a senior majoring in business administration who co-founded the app Cerca alongside two Georgetown University students. 

Cerca is a “mutual-based dating app,” said Myles Slayton, chief executive officer of Cerca and a senior at Georgetown. It uses mutual phone contacts with other users to provide potential matches who are already in the user’s social circle. The app has amassed around 500 USC student users since its launch in February, Rocket-Munk said, and more than 14,000 in total from across the country.

Rocket-Munk, Cerca’s chief operating officer, organized a Cerca party April 4 in Los Angeles to increase the app’s user base in the city. Around 250 people attended, Rocket-Munk said. In order to get access to the party’s open bar, attendees had to prove they had an active profile. 

“Everyone was there for this … mutual consent of going out and meeting new people that your friends already know,” Mussaibekova said. 

She said the people she met were “down to make these fun new connections that are not entirely new.” 

Rocket-Munk’s recruitment tactics at USC have relied on the “network effect,” he said. In late March, he started visiting sorority and fraternity houses and approaching students around campus to figure out who is and who is not on dating apps, and their reasons for either choice. 

He said one of the app’s goals is to recruit students from schools with a “massive trickle-down effect to New York City,” where he and Slayton are from. 

“We want New York to be our main hub, but we also want to create hubs at different universities,” Rocket-Munk said. “Focusing on that junior going to New York for that summer internship or that senior graduating and taking a full-time job in New York.” 

By being able to see who else knows your potential match, users can feel more confident they aren’t potentially going on a date with a “random weirdo,” Rocket-Munk said. 

“As someone who uses dating apps, and I’ve tried it out, I think that there’s nothing really out there that’s great,” Rocket-Munk said. “I’m not really interested in going on a date with a random person. … There’s no accountability.”

William Conzelman, chief marketing officer of Cerca and a senior at Georgetown, said on another app, his family friend went on several dates with a guy and eventually discovered the man was a serial killer. 

This was a “huge motivating factor” for Conzelman to get involved with founding a dating app that aims to increase safety, he said. 

According to a Pew Research study 57% of U.S. women say dating apps are a “not too safe” or “not at all safe” way of meeting people. Forty one percent  of U.S. men agreed. 

The app’s algorithm also uses an anonymous liking system. Unlike dating apps such as Hinge or Tinder, which show matches automatically when a user likes another user back, all matches on Cerca launch daily at 5 p.m. Pacific time. That way, users cannot tell when another user “likes” their profile first, Slayton said.

Cerca’s largest college campus presence so far is at Georgetown where it was first promoted, according to Slayton. 

Like USC, he said, there’s a “unique bar” near Georgetown that many students regularly go to. There, Slayton said, some students have confirmed to him that using Cerca has made it easier to approach people in real life.

“If you match with someone, let’s say you don’t feel fully comfortable talking over the app with them, right? You do know that even if you don’t respond to them, you’re gonna see them at the bar,” Slayton said. “So for enough [Georgetown students] now, they know going into that bar … if they run into someone they match with, this person is equally interested.” 

The app also launched a feature for people in relationships last month, Rocket-Munk said, where users can play Cupid by anonymously setting up their contacts for matches. 

The Cupid feature helped Rocket-Munk convince around 40 to 50 USC students in relationships to join in the feature’s first week. 

“You have the ability to play Cupid for your friends,” Rocket-Munk said. “That’s been a huge plus.”

Slayton said he was originally concerned people would be uncomfortable with joining a mutuals-based dating app because it shows users which of their other contacts are on the app, and vice versa. So far, reactions from users have been the opposite. 

“You can’t just depend on meeting in-person because people are too busy,” Slayton said. “You can’t hope and pray that your friend brings along their old high school friends to a bar on a Friday night. That’s not a sufficient model to find someone. So you do need a way to match on your phone.”