Zinger Newsroom

Are you thinking of covering Zinger in a story or article?

Well, thank you!

We know you’ve got deadlines to hit and are usually pressed for time, so we’ve tried to think of everything you might need to be able to make writing about Zinger easy.

We’re also happy to jump on a phone for a call as well. Just get in touch with us via the contact form below.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions we get asked about Zinger all in once place.

Zinger is the social chat game where creativity, humor, and charm allows you to meet new people.

How it works is simple:

  • Users sign up to play in just a few seconds. They also have the option to complete a fun questionnaire and receive a “Zinger Score” that measures the like-mindedness between them and everyone else on the platform (this helps users get matched into games with people they’re more likely to hit it off with!).
  • Depending on their luck, they can play a game as the “Star” or one of the “Contestants.” If they want to watch games as an observer, they can do that too!
  • The Star picks three questions to ask. Each contestant gets to show off their creativity and give their answers.
  • The Star selects a winner and only then are the contestants’ pictures revealed. After the game, the Star and winner can chat privately.

One interesting twist is that all games are public so others can congratulate you on your responses.

There are quite a few reasons we reckon this is a much better approach.

1) It’s more fun. Instead of being like a factory worker swiping left or right on profile pictures hoping that someone will match and chat, you can just start chatting straight away and you get positive social interaction immediately.

2) Science would suggest that like-mindedness and whether or not you find someone interesting or funny is a better predictor of enduring relationships than looks.

3) Everyone can enjoy Zinger, even if you aren’t looking for a date. We have made all games anonymously public so you can also watch how other questions are being answered. There are some really funny people on Zinger already.

4) It helps people who are perhaps a bit more socially awkward to tune their game. You can get feedback on your responses by not only whether or not you win the game, but also from whether people (the Star or people watching) “like” your answers.

5) To really drive this philosophy home, we only reveal the profile when a winner is picked after the game.

All the studies say it. The richness of our lives is determined by the quality of the relationships we have. The problem is, every day we’re walking right by amazing people we would completely hit it off with without even knowing it.

It’s so much easier doing pretty much anything when you’re doing it with someone who is like-minded. Whether that’s travelling, studying, running, partying, inventing, working, singing or living with. It’s always better doing it with people on your wavelength.

Zinger helps you find people you hit it off with. For both friendship, or romance.

We created the overall company to try and find a way to improve social connections between people. The science behind why that’s a good idea is overwhelming.

We always described it as we’re helping people find “their people” (at which point I’d throw some air quotes).

Our belief is that our Instagram led culture overemphasises the aesthetic. To counter this, we’ve been exploring alternative ways we can create the thin end of the wedge through other avenues to facilitate positive social interaction.

With Affinity, we did that with like-mindedness combined with people’s love of music, books, movies & TV shows. This was primarily in the context of friendship.

With Zinger, we’re doing this in the context of meeting other people we find funny and interesting. We felt this worked best within the context of dating.

So we get people chatting and interacting first in a game format. The winner of the game gets to continue chatting.

We’re kind of flipping the script on the normal dating app methodology. With these apps, you look at their photos and then decide if you want to chat. That process isn’t that fun. If you ever get hit back, it’s disheartening to then realise that this person is just not on your wavelength.

Over time, machine learning will kick in to improve the game formation algorithms which will mean that you’ll be with other people who are more like-minded and find the same sort of stuff interesting and funny.

After experiencing how hard it was to find other like-minded people when they moved cities, co-founders Jay Stockwell and Cameron Slabosz decided to do something about it.

They took lessons learned from building a real-time credit risk engine (that went on to process over a million loans) and created their Zinger Engine.

In finance, you have a credit score that is designed to predict how likely you are to repay your loan.

In Zinger, you have an Zinger Score that is designed to predict your level of like-mindedness.

We then wanted to make it more fun, so the natural next step was to turn it into a game format.

Hmmm… well kind of, but not really.
 
A lot of the time you’ll be playing games with people from around the world. The point of the game is to meet new people who you might hit it off with. We consider location, but also consider many other things when placing you into a game.
 
The main point of Zinger is to have fun with other people, create new social connections as well as get better at interacting with other people.
 
If you are a contestant, you’re not being picked because of how you look. Photos aren’t shown until the end.
 
You are being picked based on your ability to show off your personality.

The Zinger Score is a likemindedness score. It was birthed out of the core “Affinity” technology we built where we created a method of combining psychometrics and artificial intelligence to predict how likeminded two people are.

So in the case of Zinger we use it in two primary ways:

  1. To match you into games that will be the most fun.
  2. When you win a game or select a winner of a game you get to see someone’s full profile. This includes a Zinger Score and the breakdown of that score. So you get to get a head start on how you are both similar and different.

It’s available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

We created the content in-house. We currently use “Icebreakers” in Affinity, so we had some data on what questions worked well and what didn’t.

We will continue to expand and have plans to introduce others as we continue to get feedback.

The questionnaire data is used in a couple of ways.

1) We use it to create a “Zinger Score” between people. This is a like-mindedness metric. When you win a game and see the Zinger Score. The game results help us calibrate the score with machine learning. So we learn what characteristics predict game success and up-weight those more.

2) We will use this score in the game creation algorithm once we have enough users to make games more fun.

No. The questionnaire data is used only to improve gameplay and to inform users of how like-minded they are to one another.

To be clear, the questionnaire data is private and not used outside of Zinger.

Image Library

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Media Releases

Links to our most recent media releases.

Founders

Zinger is founded by Australian based entrepreneurs Jay Stockwell and Cameron Slabosz with the support of both cornerstone investors as well as Advance Queensland.

Jay Stockwell
Jay Stockwell (Co-Founder)
Jay is a Behavioural Scientist with 15 years of experience growing tech start- ups. He designed and executed the marketing strategy for one of Australia’s largest Fintech companies, Nimble, that went on to issue over 1 million loans.

High-Resolution Photo

Cameron Slabosz
Cameron Slabosz(Co-Founder)
Cameron is an innovation expert who as Head of Product led a team of data scientists who pioneered advanced real-time, automated credit risk assessment for Australia’s leading short term loan provider, Nimble.

High-Resolution Photo

Contact Us

If you would like to chat with someone about Zinger, shoot us your details below and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

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