Project summary

Cuties! (cuties.app) is a curated social app and vouch network that helps community-members find friends, opportunities, and people to date. Current communities include LessWrong, tpot, Art of Accomplishment, Escaping Flatland, Edge City, Roots of Progress and more.

Cuties! has over 2K users and has led to over 120 self-reported meet ups, including many friendships, collaborations, relationships, engagements and even 1 baby. Cuties! is also lightly monetized through its Classifieds feature, where aligned organizations place listings and advertise opportunities to our user base.

We are looking for a grant of $1M to sustain us after Surplus. We seek runway to keep us afloat without pressure to hyper-optimize for profit.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

We are helping build a more serendipitous, high trust, and pro-social world, one community at a time.

Our goal is to help people find friends, indicate trust, discover opportunities, enter romantic relationships, and start families.

We achieve these goals by setting up a high-trust directory of community members, where members can vouch for and indicate interest in each other.

How will this funding be used?

Funding will be used to build:

• a more sophisticated data ingestion layer for matchmaking and recommendations

• llm features for communities, so members & guests can more easily connect and get involved

• social agent experiments

• continued marketing, product, and growth initiatives

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

Christine Shiba is the founder of Cuties! She is also a designer, community builder, and weaver of social infrastructure. Previously she built social platforms 3rdspace and Twitter Job Board, and was Design lead at Bubble.io and ML senior designer at Lightning AI. She has 13K twitter followers and is embedded in many communities around the world. Find her on X at https://x.com/christineist

Francisco Carvalho (xiq), co-founder of Cuties! and founder of Community Archive. ML researcher, ex-METR, Emergent Ventures fellow. He will lead our data and engineering efforts, including infrastructure for recommendations, opportunity discovery and matchmaking. A twitter power user (5K followers) and lover of the post-rat community and its intellectual lineage. Francisco is also a strong community builder and organizer, and previously established the Portal community in Porto, Portugal. Find him on X at https://x.com/exgenesis.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

If we don't get grant money or investments, we may need to return to our full time jobs, and Cuties! will return to maintenance status.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

$200K from Austin Chen for Surplus fellowship