An Interview with Yeet's Penny Chen

Dating apps have spent years optimizing the match. Yeet is betting that Gen Z cares more about what happens after the match - and that better conversations, community feedback, and campus-level cultural insight matter more than simply generating more swipes.

Before launching the dating app, Yeet opened Founder Club, a Discord community where young singles could talk candidly about what wasn’t working for them. Those conversations helped shape everything from Yeet’s real-time Vibin’ Chats to its AI agent, Yeeta, and gave the company the language it used to bring the product to market.

I sat down with Penny Chen, co-founder and head of marketing at Yeet, to learn how Yeet used a Discord community to understand how Gen Z talks about dating, what frustrates them about existing apps, and how local social dynamics - especially on campuses and in young digital communities - shape what better connection looks like.

Interview

Walk me through the decision to build Yeet alongside a Discord community before launch. Why was that approach more valuable than traditional customer research?

Answer: Our team had spent over a decade building dating products. Still, we knew going in that Gen Z’s relationship with dating apps was fundamentally different from the generations we’d built for before. We couldn’t assume our existing playbook would transfer.

We wanted to truly understand their perspectives and needs before we started building the product. That’s why we opened Founder Club, our Discord community, and invited young singles in as founding members. The first conversations weren’t about features at all. People talked about swipe fatigue, ghosting, matches that never became conversations and the exhaustion of the “talking stage.”

This community helped us get a sense not just of what this generation’s craving from dating apps, but also how they interact with each other, including their rhythm and humor, and what excites them or bores them. We knew then that Yeet’s goal would be to foster those fun, energizing conversations to drive stronger connections.

Can you share a specific feature, workflow, or product decision that came directly from community feedback?

Answer: Several of Yeet’s core features came directly from the same community insight: users didn’t want more matches; they wanted better ways to start, sustain and deepen conversations.

Our core feature “Vibin’ Chats” is a key example. A 25-year-old U.S. tester told us that what she really wanted was to know the other person was online at that moment and actually able to respond. Rather than optimizing the swipe flow, we reversed the experience: when two compatible users are both online and willing, they can go straight into a real-time conversation and talk first, then decide if they want to match. That behavior showed up more broadly in our research, where 84% of respondents chose real-time interaction over swiping.

The community also fundamentally shaped the design and development of Yeeta, our AI agent. Users told us AI could be genuinely useful for breaking the ice, but only if it didn’t feel awkward, overly forward or templated. They were very clear that they didn't want AI taking over the conversation or pretending to be them. That gave us important boundaries for Yeeta: she helps people connect through personalized, interest-based icebreakers, light games and well-timed nudges, while keeping the actual conversation between the two people. What made this technically hard is that Yeeta doesn't work one-on-one the way most AI does. She operates inside a live conversation between two real people, reading both sides at once. We also built in features like interest-based icebreakers, recall and conversation recap, which are designed to help conversations build on shared context rather than constantly starting from zero.

Together, these features reflect the product philosophy we learned from the community, which is to use technology to create better human conversations, not replace them. The model is resonating, as users spend 85% of their active time in conversation, and completed Vibin’ Chats result in a 62% mutual match rate.

How did your community shape Yeet's go-to-market strategy? Beyond influencing the product itself, how did it affect the way you launched?

Answer: The Founder Club existed before the product, so by launch, we already had a group of early users and beta testers who had helped shape what Yeet would become. Their feedback helped us define not only features like Vibin’ Chats and Yeeta, but also the bigger idea we brought to market: that people didn’t need more matches; they needed better conversations.

Yeet has reached more than 90,000 downloads. What role did your community play in generating that early growth?

Answer: Their role was foundational. It helped us understand what frustrated Gen Z and translate those frustrations into a differentiated product experience. Rather than copying and pasting strategies that used to work for dating apps ten years ago, we took a more curious, open-minded approach and were able to bring in new, eager users from day one.

What the community gave us that we couldn't have gotten anywhere else was the language. The frustrations they described, conversations dying at "hey," the exhaustion of the talking stage, collecting matches that go nowhere, became the hooks we took to market. We weren't guessing at what would resonate or writing copy that sounded like what a marketing team thinks Gen Z sounds like. We were reflecting back what real users had already told us, in their words and from their perspective.

Did your earliest community members naturally become advocates for Yeet, or did you intentionally cultivate that? What motivated them to spread the word?

Answer: We didn’t design the Founder Club as an ambassador program. The earliest members were people who were openly frustrated with existing dating apps and curious enough to help us think about an alternative.

Around ten of those early members have since become verified “Yeet Legends” with a dedicated channel. They’ve been with us since before launch and remain among our most engaged contributors.

What’s interesting is that their connection to Yeet comes from having participated in the process from the beginning. They weren't handed a finished product and asked to promote it. They had an opportunity to help shape what got built and see their feedback reflected in the experience – and one of them even met their now partner on the app!

Beyond product feedback, how else did Discord become a growth engine for Yeet? Did it influence customer acquisition, retention, referrals, hiring, or other parts of the business?

Answer: I actually wouldn’t characterize Discord primarily as a growth engine. Its most important role has been as an ongoing source of product insight.

We’ve intentionally kept Founder Club at around 2,000 members rather than pushing for scale because the value has always been in the depth of feedback, not the size of the server. We regularly invite active users who demonstrate genuine interest in giving feedback and shaping the product, while prioritizing signal over scale.

Of course, building a product that reflects what users actually want can have downstream effects on things like engagement and retention. We’re seeing that with Vibin’ Chats. But that’s different from saying we created a Discord server to drive acquisition. We created a place where we could learn alongside the people we were building for.

Many brands think of community as a marketing channel. Yeet treated it as part of the product team. What's the mindset shift companies need to make if they want their communities to become a competitive advantage instead of just an audience?

Answer: The biggest shift is treating community feedback as something that can actually shape the product, not just slightly tweak or even validate what you've already decided to build.

With the Founder Club, we weren’t looking for people to confirm our ideas or help promote Yeet. We were listening for patterns in what wasn’t working for them so that we could build something that would.

For us, the competitive advantage wasn’t having a community. It was being willing to build differently because of what that community told us.

What's one thing brands consistently misunderstand about building community that your experience with Discord proved wrong?

Answer: That bigger automatically means better. We’ve deliberately stayed at around 2,000 Founder Club members because we're optimizing for the depth of the feedback rather than the headcount. A relatively small group of people who feel comfortable being candid can be incredibly valuable if you're genuinely willing to listen.

The other misconception is that the community has to prove its value through acquisition. Sometimes, the most valuable thing a community can do is challenge your assumptions and show you that you should be building the product differently.

Do you think community-led product development is replacing traditional consumer research, or do you see the two working together?

Answer: I see them working together because they give you different kinds of information.

Traditional research can help validate something at scale. For example, our research found that 84% of respondents preferred real-time interaction over swiping.

The community helped us understand the why behind that number. People talked about dead-end chats, low-effort “hey” openers, the pressure of figuring out what to say and wanting to know whether someone was actually available to have a conversation.

Those qualitative insights are what allow you to turn a statistic into a product decision. Traditional research can tell you what people prefer, but community can help reveal the behavior and emotion underneath it.

If you were launching a new startup today, what would you absolutely repeat (and what would you do differently) when it comes to using community as a growth engine?

Answer: I would absolutely repeat the decision to involve users before the product is finished. But I wouldn't start by thinking of community as a growth engine.

I’d start by creating an environment where people feel comfortable telling you what isn't working and then paying close attention to the patterns that emerge.

With Yeet, that process changed what we thought we were solving. Dating apps traditionally optimize heavily around matching and recommendations. Our community kept telling us, in different ways, that they wanted conversations that were easier to start, sustain, and deepen.

If I were doing it again, I’d continue prioritizing signal over scale and make the feedback loop even more visible, so community members can clearly see how an insight travels from conversation to product decision.

You've built growth around the community. As you scale, where do creators fit into that strategy? Do you see them complementing your community or serving a different purpose?

Answer: I see creators and community as complementary, but serving different purposes. The Founder Club gives us depth and an environment where we can listen over time, observe behavior, and understand how people are actually experiencing dating and connection.

Creators can bring a different kind of cultural insight and reach. Dating is something people constantly talk about and make content about, so creators are often very close to how the language, frustrations, and expectations around dating are evolving.

But I think the same principle applies, which is that the most interesting opportunity isn't simply asking creators to distribute a message for us. It's listening to what they're seeing in their communities and giving them room to contribute to the conversation.

That's where we're focused as we grow, connecting with young voices who are already close to this, especially on campuses, where dating culture shifts fastest and people are the most vocal about what's working and what isn't. The goal is to keep expanding the circle of people we're building with, not just the audience we're broadcasting to. Built with Gen Z, not just for Gen Z, is a principle we want to maintain as Yeet grows.

Key Takeaway

Community-led product development helps brands understand not just what Gen Z wants, but how dating behavior, language, and expectations can vary across campuses, cities, and digital communities. 

Yeet’s growth story shows that community works best when it is treated as a source of product insight, not just a marketing channel. By listening to Gen Z through Discord, the company shaped its features, sharpened its messaging, and stayed closer to how dating behavior shifts across campuses, creator ecosystems, and digital communities.