Brendan Alper’s mom isn’t very happy with him right now.
The 29-year-old founder of Hater, a dating app that connects people based on mutual dislikes, recently took something of a risk: His company created an image of Russian President Vladimir Putin caressing a pregnant Donald Trump and projected it on buildings throughout New York City.
The advertisement got some laughs, but it also inspired internet backlash. Alper has a handful of death threats sitting in his Facebook inbox, and has decided against heading to an upcoming tech conference in Moscow, Russia.
"We got invited a little while ago, right when this started to blow up," Alper told Business Insider. "We were really excited about it - this was before we got any press - and it was a big deal. But I don't think we're going to go now, because we're just a little nervous, which is crazy that I have to make decisions like that. My mom wasn't happy about this whole thing, I'll tell you that."
But Alper mostly laughs off the internet backlash and the concerns that Russia might be displeased with his company's handiwork.
After all, stirring the pot and sparking conversation is the whole point of Hater.
There's science behind it
Hater is Alper's first foray into the startup world. The former banker spent five years at Goldman Sachs and one and a half more at Nomura, but he never really loved what he was doing.
"To be honest, I just wanted a steady job out of college," Alper said. "That's all I wanted, to be able to make some money and survive."
It was at Goldman that Alper began writing comedy sketches. Two days a week, Alper would work on sketches with his roommate, filming them and putting them online. He continued working at Goldman, and later Nomura, in able to save up enough money to quit and write comedy full-time.
The idea for Hater started as one of those sketches. Wouldn't it be funny, he thought, if there was a dating app for bonding over things you don't like?
"I did the research on it and found a study saying that actually, there's some science behind this: People bond over the things they hate more strongly than over the things they love," Alper said. "I just thought, 'Man, this idea is really going to resonate with people.'"
Getting creative with monetization
Hater works by supplying users with close to 3,000 topics to rate by swiping one of four ways: up to love, right to like, left to dislike, and down to hate.
By letting the app know how you feel about those topics, you're creating a profile that gets compared to the profiles of other users. You're then matched with other users based on the things you both hate or love.
Alper says Hater does not allow hate speech of any kind on the platform. The topics do not include any racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups and all the topics are chosen by the Hater team, not by the users.
The app is only about a month old, but it's amassed more than 30,000 daily active users, about 310,000 total users in the US and abroad - it's the top lifestyle app in Germany right now, the company says -and has produced close to 200,000 matches so far.
The app is iPhone only right now, but an Android version is coming out this spring. Hater is also working on a login that doesn't require users to have a Facebook account, a common gripe in the app's reviews.
Hater is now based out of Alper'sNew York Cityapartment with five full-time employees and a handful of part-timers. While he says he's "definitely broke," Hater is starting to gain ground and the company is in the process of raising a round of seed funding.
The next step is figuring out how to make money.
Alper has no plans to make the app a subscription-only service, have a paid tier, or show ads. Instead, he hopes to monetize in different ways, like letting brands pay to show themselves as a topic in the app (like giving users the chance to weigh in on how they feel about Starbucks, for instance) and giving anonymized demographic data back to the brand. Hater is in talks with Cosmopolitan magazine to publish some of the stats the company gathers from the app.
Alper is also excited about selling Hater-inspired merchandise (which he says some enterprising fans have already started doing on their own using the pregnant Trump image), though he admits it's an unconventional way of trying to make money as a startup.
"We're willing to try anything and we'll keep toying around with things," Alper says.
'It's about empathy'
After a few weeks of being live, the company is starting to hear back from couples that have found each other on the app. One couple Alper heard from bonded over a shared love of queso and a shared hatred of the Super Bowl. So, on Super Bowl Sunday, the pair watched a movie while sharing homemade queso.
It's those types of stories that make Alper realize he's onto something, he says. While he knew that naming the app Hater and zeroing in on pessimism might earn him some animosity, it would at least get people talking. Besides, he says, the app isn't even really about hate.
"A lot of people initially have that gut reaction because the word 'hate' is so charged," Alper said. "But it's not really about hating at the end of the day - it's about empathy and finding someone who feels the same way and has been through the same things."