Howdy
Interview by Alice Armitage Photography by Alice Armitage
It’s not very often that you come across a young woman living in regional Australia who is giving the tech giants a run for their money, but that’s exactly what Mia Ryan is doing. At just twenty-two years old, Mia knew there must be a better way for country people to find a partner. After extensive research and armed with a very healthy dose of naivety, Mia decided to build her own dating app designed specifically for country people. Eliminating the prohibitive distance range that comes with the mainstream apps, Mia has expanded the horizons for those of us living in the country looking for love [corny, but true]
What set of circumstances sets someone up to be able to start a tech company at the ripe old age of twenty-two? I left school when I was sixteen. I hated school, it was not for me. Maybe I just like to do things my own way, to walk my own path. I did well at school, and my teachers were very much against me leaving but I just didn’t see the point in being there. I was very lucky to have a mum who was really understanding and let me go onto something else. By the time everyone else was doing their HSC I was a qualified vet nurse and I was building a business, training and breeding horses. I never liked the idea of having a traditional job.
Tell me how Howdy came about? It’s a pretty common scenario that led to Howdy. I was single and I had been for a while. I tried the online dating thing and found it really challenging so I gave up pretty quickly – I think I lasted on Tinder for two days. I don’t live far from some big regional bases so there were plenty of people on the app, it was just super challenging to find someone that I had anything in common with.
Maybe I’m being hyperbolic but there really is a culture to the way that country people are, the way that they live, I think is hard to understand if you’ve not spent much time experiencing it. Personally, I’ve never really found that I see a long term future with someone I’m seeing if they aren’t from the country or have that understanding of the country culture. Absolutely! Country people are just different. You can decide for yourself if that’s good or bad! But you can spot a country person from a mile away. The idea for Howdy was never very complicated, I just wanted to be able to go on a dating app and be presented with other farmers. After some research I found out that there was no such thing, not even in the US. I looked into it a bit more and thought that surely it’s just like building a website and I’d done that before. I thought I’ll just do it, make an app, throw it out there and hope for the best. Turns out that’s not really how it works. Ultimately I decided I wanted to make it work anyway, I engaged a team of developers and we got to work building Howdy.
I’m obviously the biggest advocate for living regionally and the opportunities that exist for us all out here but, especially for young people, the difficult dating dynamics definitely play a huge role in the quality of life for someone choosing to live outside the city. The mental health element of being able to build relationships with people has been such a driving force with Howdy. People are really struggling all across Australia, but particularly those in isolated areas. Obviously Howdy has been designed to help people find a long term partner which is great, but sometimes all you need is that occasional message from someone, just once a day can be enough of a positive experience to keep people feeling connected. It’s the potential of something that keeps us all going.
Can I tell you a funny story, when Howdy first launched I couldn’t help myself and I downloaded the app to check it out and the first person I saw was someone I knew. They had a photo I’d taken on their profile but it was super low resolution, so the photo looked terrible. I sent him a better version of the photo and told him he had to fix it. We ended up seeing each other for a while. It all ended disastrously but there is a point to me sharing this story. And that is that Howdy also gives people that already know each other a new opportunity to connect in a different way. That is hilarious! But yes, in so many country towns it can be hard when everyone already knows everyone and there is never really an opportunity for a fresh start. Having something like Howdy where the people you find on there are genuinely looking to meet someone [hopefully that’s the culture we are building on the app] it can give you a chance to start a new conversation with someone you already know, someone you might be interested in but didn’t know they were looking for someone. It feels like a much smaller risk to connect with someone on an app then walking up to them at the pub and asking if they want to live happily ever after with you!
I worked in tech in a previous life so I’m uniquely qualified to understand how much of an undertaking it is to decide to build an app, let alone one as complex as a dating app, when you don’t have a background in coding. I can imagine it was quite the learning curve. Oh it was hard, I naturally wanted to do everything myself but I had to give up so much control. I did as much as I possibly could. Designing the interface and doing as much research as possible to make the app as good as it could be, but I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I got a loan to pay for the development of the app and had to pay fifty percent upfront, which was terrifying. I was told it would take six months to build and that timeline just kept getting pushed out. There was a lot of pressure to get the app launched so I could start generating some income to pay this big loan. When the app first launched there were so many glitches. I didn’t realise that when you launch an app it’s not actually ready. That must sound so silly!
A true baptism by fire! When you first launched, what was your plan for onboarding users?
I was booked to go on the Today Show on a Friday morning last March, on the Thursday night beforehand we still didn’t have the app live. The whole week leading into that the app store kept rejecting the app, something I didn’t know was part of the process and super common. I was losing my mind! We got it live but with so many issues that hadn’t been sorted out and a lot of errors because we had so many people trying to get onto the app. It was a disaster, people were finding my phone number and calling to abuse me, telling me the app was shit. All while the developers had taken the weekend off – it was hell.
Ten months have passed since then, how are you feeling about it all today? Touch wood, things are running pretty smoothly these days. Things always happen and we’re always working on updates to improve the user experience. In my naivety I really thought that it was a ‘set and forget’ situation once it was built but it takes a lot of maintenance! Aside from our development team, it’s just me here at Howdy HQ. So I’m just doing what I can to take it all in my stride, and to come to terms with us growing more slowly and sustainably than what people might expect an app to.
How are you managing your own expectations for your growth? The more I learn and the more I understand how the technology works the more I know that the app couldn’t have exploded overnight, the tech wouldn’t have coped. I needed to go slowly, to iron everything out. I wouldn’t have been ready for 10,000 people signing up overnight – which I had hoped for. Obviously with any dating app the more people on the app the better, we all want 500 people to choose from when we open it.
But you’re also trying to tackle the mentality of mindless swiping? I don’t want Howdy to be as superficial as other dating apps. It’s part of our algorithm that we restrict how many people you can see at any given time, and that is tough for people. I’m trying to disrupt the mentality of sitting on your lunch break flicking through people. Everyone on the app is a real person take your time.
Tell me the kinds of people that you hope will be using Howdy? I want people that are genuinely looking for their person. I created it for country people, I created it as a nice place to go where you can meet someone.
I bet the success stories from people using the app over the last year have been incredibly rewarding Absolutely! I got a message from a girl the other day, she’s a lawyer in Sydney and she has just flown to Perth for a first date with a farmer. Their first date went for a week at his farm three hours from Perth. Another woman from Sydney I’ve been talking to has been dating some from rural Victoria. She flew down to Melbourne for their first date. Obviously it’s not easy but you realise very quickly whether the two of you are actually interested in each other or not. When the distance that comes with dating regionally comes into play, there is no mucking around because you just have to make the effort. If someone has gotten on a plane or driven however many hours to see you, it’s a pretty clear sign that they’re committed.
Are you going to let us talk about how Howdy’s worked out for you? Ok, I’ll give you the inside scoop. I met Josh on Howdy a month after it launched. He didn’t know I was the founder and quickly asked for my phone number but I made him keep talking to me through Howdy so I could keep testing the chat functionality. I caught two flights to go on our first date!
You need to pay for a subscription to use Howdy. Talk me through that decision. I did a lot of research into the psychology around this. Having to pay for something shows commitment, so it’s one thing we can put in place to ensure that everyone on the app is genuinely interested in finding someone. $4.60 a week is not a lot of money, you can’t even buy a latte for that these days. I don’t know what price people are willing to put on a relationship but having to pay for the app does just show a little commitment from our users. It means that we might have less people on the app than if it was free, but hopefully the quality of people and their intentions are greater. And we obviously need to generate revenue to survive as a business, but if I was able to offer this for free I think I would still keep the payment gateway in place to keep that barrier for the people who aren’t genuine.
People can now book a consultation with you to work on their profiles. Tell me, what makes for a great dating profile? Firstly you need to share as many photos as you can, don’t just share one or two. Make sure you can actually see you in the photos and that they aren’t full of other people. We need to be able to tell which one you are! You need to sell yourself so don’t write one silly sentence as your bio. Really share some stuff about yourself, something that shows a bit of personality. Statistically, women still want men to make the first move but don’t just say ‘hey’. C’mon you can do better than that!
What would you say to someone who tried the app a year ago, didn’t love it, but might be open to trying it again? I completely own that a year ago the app was not where it needed to be but we’ve done a lot of work on the user experience since then so you’ve got to give it another go. We’ve proven that the people on the app are genuine – what have you got to lose?
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