Lucy Rout, founder of Haystack Dating.
Lucy Rout
Lucy Rout is not your typical entrepreneur.
The 30-year-old Londoner — known for going viral for skiing off an icy slope in a bikini and for consulting her Instagram followers on whether she should fly 10,000 miles for a fourth date with a man — has used her eclectic experiences to develop a new dating model that’s all about making meaningful connections.
Rout told CNBC her confidence had never been lower when using traditional dating apps.
After years of being ghosted, and what she describes as a “strange dopamine cycle of downloading, trying some dates, experiencing bad behavior, writing them off, and vowing to never do it ever again, and then starting the cycle again,” — Rout determined that people were hungry for in real life (IRL) connections.
She came up with the idea of Haystack Dating in a bid to increase the chances of people building romantic connections.
“What we absolutely can do is increase the chances and put people in the right environments where they feel safe and included. Use a bit of tech, use their similar interests and bring them together, and just make it less of a needle in a haystack and more of a needle in a sewing box,” she told CNBC Make It in an interview.
Rout doesn’t just expect her customers to show up at an event and attempt to strike up conversations at random. Instead, attendees fill in a form that inputs their data through an algorithm that matches them with a small group of people based on similar interests and personality traits.
“I researched the parameters that lead to meaningful connections and tried to understand a lot more about the psychology of how people work — introvert versus extrovert, effort levels, career ambition. I spoke to hundreds of people about it and I came up with this current algorithm, which we’re always optimizing,” Rout said.
Attendees commit to an activity such as cricket or touch rugby for an hour, and then spend the rest of the evening with the full group of guests.
So far, as many as 200 to 500 people have shown up to a single event, and 92% of customers show up alone, Rout said, with events in London costing around £30 ($39.85).
‘Dating burnout’
Rout has been documenting her entrepreneurial journey and her distaste for men’s poor behavior in the dating world on Instagram for years.
A cancer survivor, she created a pill case called Tabuu that secured investments on BBC’s Dragon’s Den in 2023. Before Haystack, she was working on Tabuu remotely in Colombia, while posting snippets of her life, reminding women to never chase a man “unless he is the ice-cream man.”
Three years of using dating apps severely deteriorated her confidence, Rout told CNBC. She’s not alone, with dating app users becoming increasingly disenchanted with online dating.
“There is no way in hell that people in real life would have said to me some of the things they said on dating apps. People behave better. They’re kinder.”
Lucy Rout
Founder of Haystack Dating
Frequent use of dating apps can contribute to a decline in mental health and negatively impact a person’s body image, according to a study published in April. Increasing the number of available partners on dating apps lowered self-esteem, the study found. Across heterosexual and LGBTQ + connections, ghosting and online sexual violence were factors that contributed to psychological distress.
These experiences are leading to a decline in dating app use, according to an OFCOM report from late 2024, which tracked how U.K. adults spent time online. From 2023 to 2024, Tinder lost nearly 600,000 users, Hinge saw 131,000 less visitors to its app, Bumble shed 368,000 users, and Grindr users were down 11,000.
As millennials and Gen Z leave online dating behind, IRL events are making a comeback, and even dating apps are trying to tap into the hype. Hinge announced a $1 million fund in March, for social groups across New York, Los Angeles and London to put on events for young people to connect in person and build relationships.
Bumble IRL was founded in 2022 with a range of exclusive in-person events centered around fitness, food, music and charity.
“Yes, you can meet 5 Hinge dates in a week, or you can come to one pub once and meet a few hundreds. I think people do want to find love, and they’re just no longer willing to put themselves through the crap that comes with dating apps.
“That’s exactly where I got to. I got to dating burnout. And I just thought to myself, you know, I’m not going to do this anymore, I’m actually going to try and fix it for other people,” Rout said.
It was at an entrepreneurial networking event that Rout met her now-boyfriend in December 2023. In a turn of events that she documented on Instagram, she flew 10,000 miles as he was travelling to South-East Asia to meet him again for a fourth date. While she was navigating her new relationship, Rout was developing Haystack to help others find love.
With nearly 50,000 followers, it was Rout’s Instagram community that drove the initial sales for Haystack, with word-of-mouth reviews and recommendations helping spread the word.
“Whilst I’d say initial sales definitely were driven by my Instagram community, you don’t go back if you’ve had a bad experience. I am not going into the numbers, but we have had a very high return user rate,” she said.
Haystack is set to launch in Leeds, and together with her team of six, Lucy is bringing her events to the rest of the U.K.
“In IRL events, there’s a hell of a lot more accountability, and people behave very differently in person than they do virtually. There is no way in hell that people in real life would have said to me some of the things they said on dating apps. People behave better. They’re kinder.”
Want to stand out, grow your network, and get more job opportunities? Sign up for Smarter by CNBC Make It’s new online course, How to Build a Standout Personal Brand: Online, In Person, and At Work. Learn from three expert instructors how to showcase your skills, build a stellar reputation, and create a digital presence that AI can’t replicate.
