Overview

Noticing incredibly high churn, the team at Phobia came to the conclusion that, instead of having a fundamentally flawed business idea, they needed to improve their onboarding process.

Previously users selected their phobias manually but this led to some users selecting things they weren’t actually afraid of to increase their matches.

To combat this, we developed a system that displays a slideshow of common phobias during onboarding. We then use malware to surreptitiously access their microphone and detect when they have audible reactions. We measure the pitch, volume and duration of their screams and feed that information to the matching algorithm.

The next phase is a VR version of the onboarding flow where users are subjected to a series of scenarios that will determine their fears. We are currently developing the first scenario, working title: “Jumping out of a plane full of spiders”.

What we did