Kim Kaplan: All About Authenticity

Kim Kaplan Kim Kaplan is the CEO and founder of Snack, a video-driven dating app where “TikTok meets dating." Kim launched her career as one of the earliest employees at the dating platform PlentyOfFish (POF), leading product, marketing and revenue initiatives. Her product initiatives ultimately grew Daily Active Users from 1 million to over 4 million and revenue from $10 million to over $100 million. Kim’s role as an instrumental part of the executive team culminated in the successful Match Group acquisition for US $575 million in 2015.

Season 5 — October 19, 2022

Can you speak a bit about how you decided on the logo for Snack App?

I am not Gen Z but I knew that I was building a dating app for Gen Z. So the first thing I did was talk to as many of them as I could. I would ask them questions as if they were building this app, and what they would call it. There was one word that stood out the most, which was ‘snack’. I had no idea what it meant, so I googled it and realized it was a reference to someone looking good.
With all the food puns that come along with the name, and how you can be so playful with it, I realized how much fun we could have with it. At that point, it was a no-brainer for me to name it Snack.
In addition, my team and I wanted to figure out what Gen Z thinks should be done. We launched a challenge on TikTok, where people would design a logo for TikTok and get a certain amount of views, and had a prize for whoever stood out.
Several people submitted pretzel logos, which shows how popular pretzels are.

What are people looking for today on the internet when it comes to online dating profiles?

Every social platform has some undertone of dating to it. This is something Facebook did initially, and what Instagram does today. Tiktok has started to become like that as well, which is where the whole idea for Snack was born.
For other companies, dating apps just ended up being a slideshow of images. The thing that fundamentally changed in the last couple of years is that Tiktok taught people how to create really compelling 15-30 sec videos of themselves. Until that moment, nobody knew what to do.
No one knew how to present themselves in a video format. Tiktok created that functionality and trend. Whether it was a dance or the boyfriend-girlfriend application, which made people realize that it isn’t difficult to do. We initially launched Snack, but we didn’t have video creation tools in the app, so you couldn’t upload but you could create a video.

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