If Hinge is the “dating app designed to be deleted,” then why is it so fun?
For many college students, downloading Hinge or Tinder at the beginning of freshman year is the start of an addiction. Parents warn of peer pressure and offer out the “don’t do drugs” talk, but nobody ever seems to warn of the suffocating grip of dating apps.
College students can doom scroll on these apps for hours at a time, dopamine rushing through them after each Tinder match and Hinge like. The yearning for love and connection becomes a game of “hot or not.”
On apps like Tinder or Hinge, the possibility of falling in love seems endless, but the cyclical struggle toward this love is just as endless: Like, match, chat, first date, get ghosted. Like, match, chat, ghost. Like, match, ghost. Maybe Hinge is designed to be deleted out of sheer frustration.
Sure, some people escape this vicious cycle, but that small fraction of happy relationships that come from dating apps don’t negate the unending pangs of rejection of those who remain stuck. The dopamine rush of likes and matches doesn’t cut it when you are reduced to your looks and can’t land a date. What started as a silly game can become a detrimental blow to self-confidence and self-worth.
Bo Brainerd, MCAS ’25, has witnessed the heartbreaking results of today’s dating culture one too many times, and she has made it her mission to foster meaningful relationships and promote wellness. With the creation of Ophelia, a dating platform that focuses on in-person experiences, Brainerd wants to revolutionize this messy online dating world, bringing the URL to IRL.
“With AI and everything right now—it’s just been out of control—I think we’ve lost our humanity, and we’ve become so disconnected,” Brainerd said. “With Ophelia, we are just essentially trying to help that and create a better version of not only ourselves, but for other people.”
Once a user makes an account with Ophelia, they will receive 10–13 potential matches, and, upon receiving these matches, the user must go on a date within 10 days. Ophelia is partnered with various date spots in Boston—including Fenway Park, Kured, and concert venues —to set up your perfect date at a discounted price.
This dating site does not have a chat feature as typical dating platforms do. Instead, Ophelia provides a selection of pre-written messages that strictly relate to their date.
Brainerd hypothesized that the problem with Tinder and Hinge is the seemingly unlimited number of potential matches. With the reduction of choices and chatting, Brainerd hopes to eliminate as much superficiality as possible.
Christina Quinn, BC ’13 and general partner at SSC Venture Partners, explained this phenomenon of limitlessness.
“I think Gen Z and millennials are similar in this way,” Quinn, one of Brainerd’s mentors, said. “It’s like we all want to optimize, right? We all want the best of something. We want to know that we’re going to the best restaurant or we’re going to the best concert, whatever. I think it’s really easy when there is a limitless supply to think, well, maybe if I just swipe to this next person, they’ll be the right one.”
When creating an Ophelia profile, users are prompted to fill out a questionnaire. Here, you identify your ideal first-date spot—a factor that will later determine compatibility with potential matches—and are also assigned a “dating archetype”—a term coined by Brainerd.
There are five of these archetypes: cautious dater, hopeless romantic, commitment seeker, friends with benefits, and serial dater.
By creating these archetypes Brainerd has greatly reduced the chances of users falling for someone who is not looking for the same thing in a relationship. Brainerd wanted to ensure that a hopeless romantic would not match with a serial dater who would ultimately break their heart, something she once experienced and would never wish upon anyone else.
“There’s users and givers in this world, and I will never let a taker take from a giver ever again,” Brainerd said. “That’s my main mission in this. I don’t care what I have to do; I will do it. I just want the world to become more humane again.”
Although Brainerd’s personal dating experience has influenced her mission, Ophelia originated not from her heartbreak, but from witnessing her close friend drowning in the dating pool.
“Going through it yourself is one thing, you deal with it, but watching your best friend destroy herself because she thinks that she’s not beautiful enough or smart enough… I was like, I can’t do this,” Brainerd said. “That’s when I finally was like, we need to do something about it. That’s when Ophelia was born.”
Even before the inception of Ophelia, Brainerd has been a matchmaker. Ophelia’s roots sprouted as Brainerd acted as a matchmaker for her friends, creating couples that still are going strong today.
When Ophelia first launched, Brainerd manually matched couples, but the quickly growing platform has since implemented an algorithm to accommodate Ophelia’s 3,000-plus user base. Using an algorithm does not prevent Ophelia from remaining Brainerd’s personal, matchmaker’s touch, as Ophelia has sent 300 couples on dates, with 600 users with an 80% return rate, as of early October.
Brainerd described herself as a very sensitive person. She acknowledged that this is typically identified as a feminine trait that is frequently dismissed in the male-dominated world of entrepreneurship, but this heightened capacity for connection is exactly what makes her so successful.
“I’m not afraid to be in touch with my humanity and my femininity,” Brainerd said. “And because I’m not afraid to face that, I can help lead the way for others so that they can do the same. I think especially with my interns too—I can tell immediately who is not in touch. I can tell immediately who is here because they believe and are also followers of that mission.”
Quinn noted the importance of uplifting women’s voices in the male-dominated world of investing, as women-led entrepreneurship ventures receive less than 2 percent of the venture capital dollars that are allocated, which is the highest it has ever been, according to TechCrunch.
“There are just differences in how women are treated as entrepreneurs, and like the challenges that they face as a founder relative to male counterparts,” Quinn said. “And that’s not just like women-specific, I think, across a range of identities. People who aren’t a white, straight, cis man building in tech have different experiences than those that are.”
Despite these challenges, it is apparent that Brainerd is not one to back down from a challenge, not only in her entrepreneurship ventures but in her community work.
As a high school student, Brainerd climbed her way from working with her state senators to working with Joe Biden where she was in charge of campaign strategy in her district. Along the way, she led the plastic bag ban in Connecticut, which went into effect in 2021.
Here, working in the world of politics, is where Brainerd learned how to talk to people, hear their problems, bring problems to her state senator, and enact laws quickly. She quickly applied this process to the issues she saw in her generation’s dating landscape.
“I listened to the people, I listened to myself, what was going, what was going wrong, and then immediately found a solution,” Brainerd said. “It’s all about learning to hear people and not just listen to them.”
In the summer of 2024, Brainerd was selected for SSC Venture Partners’ Summer Accelerator program, a 12-week program that provides selected student entrepreneurs with a $10,000 investment and mentorship in exchange for 2 percent equity. She additionally won second place in the Strakosch Venture Competition, where she won $5,000 to put toward her company.
These are exceedingly impressive feats for a solo startup founder, Kudzai Taziva, BC ’13 and one of Brainerd’s mentors at the SSC Summer Accelerator said.
“Bo brings great energy, and she has a charismatic ethos that makes you want to listen to her idea,” Taziva said. “And she’s also a solo founder, which we typically don’t love at SSC, or any investor, per se. And so we, I think, first and foremost, invested in Bo before we considered Ophelia.”
Brainerd doesn’t have a co-founding team around her, which is frequently an obstacle in the startup world because a solo founder doesn’t have sounding blocks. A solo founder has to be willing to keep going and not burn out despite how many hats they have to wear.
“What always stood out to me about her is just how self-motivated she is, and how she has a really strong drive to make things happen, and has that bias for action, which is important, Quinn said. “I think, that she definitely has initiative and she is a really reflective person. That’s the philosophy side, I think coming into play.”
As a philosophy major, Brainerd’s entrepreneurship plans are filtered through a philosophic lens of unconditional compassion.
“When you get to know her, she does really have this bigger framework of thinking for how she approaches entrepreneurship and business building,” Quinn said. “She really cares deeply about the problem she’s trying to solve and about the people she’s trying to solve it for. I’d say she has sort of a relentless focus.”
Taziva said that Brainerd embodies the values that BC represents, with helping people at the core of her business.
“Bo is someone who I found to be very open-minded, very ingrained in terms of the ethos of what I think BC represents, and also ambitious in what she wants to create, which is a new platform and a new paradigm for dating in light of the digital forces that have entered our social fabric,” Taziva said.
When Brainerd says that she cares about people, she truly means it. Her company is driven by her passion for helping others, and nothing else.
“I feel like a lot of guys here are like, ‘I’m gonna exit in five years, and I’m gonna cash out,’ and I’m like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” Brainerd said. “You should be doing business because you want to fix a problem, and you want to help people, not because you want the money. Like, it’s disgusting to me.”
Brainerd has gone to intense lengths to prove her compassionate integrity, so far as to go out on 40 dates in one day.
This past summer, Ophelia experienced a major hiccup. On a day that the platform had planned 40 dates, Brainerd was notified that many people were planning on missing their dates, without informing their match they would not be showing up.
No way was Brainerd going to let these people get stood up.
“I was like, I’m not gonna leave these people hanging,” Brainerd said. “So I literally went on like 40 dates within like one day. Just continuously met new people. Like, fully, not thinking that that’s what I was gonna do. But, again, I’ll do anything for our users. I’ll literally go on dates with like, random people.”
Ophelia is still in its beta version and will release Ophelia 1.0, its fully functioning platform, this November. As a result of this experience, Ophelia will have consequences for those who continuously drop dates or do not initiate a date. In Ophelia 1.0, users will be granted three strikes—if a user continuously “flakes” on people, their account will be deactivated for 30 days.
In preparation for this launch, Brainerd is not only busy making final tweaks to the website itself, but she is also busy with getting the word out. With her contagious energy, it is not surprising to hear that she landed broadcast interviews with CBS Boston and Newton News.
Brainerd shared that the process of preparing for these interviews was quite nerve-wracking—she does not have any media training, and she wasn’t quite sure if she was ready to let Ophelia, her “baby,” be released into the wild.
But she ultimately decided that it was her and Ophelia’s time to fly.
“I’ve built this,” Brainerd said. “I don’t have a co-founder—I don’t have someone. I’m fully bootstrapping this. I need to have Ophelia’s name be heard. How are we ever going to help people if we don’t put ourselves out there? How are we ever going to find a person to connect with if we don’t put ourselves out there?”
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