Rater's Growth Gamble: Can Anti-Catfishing Sell an App?

Rater, the two-year-old dating app positioning itself around anti-catfishing technology, has appointed Lee-Michael Pronko as its Head of Growth and Brand Marketing. Pronko, founder of the HeresMe Agency, will lead the company's push to reach 100,000 users by mid-2025. The move signals that Rater is doubling down on "trust and safety" as its core market differentiator—a bet that verified identity can sell an app in a market already dominated by Match Group and Bumble.

The appointment raises immediate questions about scale and strategy. Rater launched in 2023, but the company hasn't disclosed current user numbers, making it impossible to assess whether the 100,000 target represents modest traction or a moonshot. For context, established apps count active users in the millions: Tinder reports over 10 million paying subscribers alone, whilst Hinge disclosed 1 million paid subscribers in Q3 2024.

Against that backdrop, 100,000 total users in 18 months is less "ambitious growth target" and more "proof of concept."

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Trust as product positioning, not just compliance

What makes this appointment noteworthy isn't the individual hire—it's what it represents about how smaller apps are attempting to carve out market share. Trust and safety has historically been treated as a cost centre, a regulatory obligation, or a PR firefighting exercise. Rater is attempting to flip that: making verification and anti-fraud technology the actual product story rather than a feature buried in settings.

Every major platform now offers some form of verification. Tinder introduced photo verification in 2020, asking users to mimic poses in selfies that are then matched against profile photos. Bumble launched a similar system and has since integrated what it calls "AI-powered deception detection."

Hinge added video prompts partly to combat fake profiles. According to Bumble's Q3 2024 earnings call, the company now processes millions of verification attempts monthly across its apps.

The challenge for Rater—and this is where specifics matter—is articulating what its "AI and user verification" actually does differently. The company's public messaging describes a system that prevents catfishing but doesn't detail the technical architecture. Does it require real-time video verification? Biometric matching? Government ID checks?

Without that clarity, "anti-catfishing app" risks sounding like "high-quality matches" or "authentic connections"—the kind of undifferentiated claim that every dating app makes and no user believes.

Industry operators will recognise the tension here. Verification processes create friction. They slow down onboarding, which directly impacts activation rates. The more robust the check, the higher the drop-off.

Dating apps live and die by how quickly they can get someone from download to first swipe, and anything that adds steps in between is a conversion killer. Bumble has previously acknowledged this trade-off in investor presentations, noting that whilst verification improves trust metrics, it requires careful UX design to avoid dampening growth.

Budget signals and the agency model

Pronko's appointment from HeresMe Agency—rather than a VP of Growth from a competitor platform—tells its own story about Rater's operating model and likely funding situation. Traditional dating app growth roles go to people who've scaled acquisition at Tinder, managed lifecycle marketing at Hinge, or built retention loops at Bumble. They command six-figure salaries and expect equity packages that reflect IPO or acquisition potential.

Bringing in an agency founder suggests a different approach: outsourced execution, campaign-based thinking, and potentially more flexible cost structures. Agencies scale up and down with spend; they don't carry the fixed costs of a full in-house growth team. For a pre-product-market-fit app, that's a pragmatic choice.

Whether it's the right choice depends entirely on whether Rater's challenge is marketing distribution or product-market fit—and no amount of performance marketing fixes the latter. The dating app graveyard is full of products that had clever positioning but couldn't overcome the cold-start problem.

Users join dating apps because other users are already there. That network effect is why Match Group still controls roughly 50% of the market despite years of new entrants promising better experiences. Rater's user target of 100,000 might establish proof of concept, but it won't create sufficient liquidity in most metros to make the app feel meaningfully better than opening Hinge.

What "top trusted dating app" actually requires

Rater's stated goal of becoming the "top trusted dating app" is marketing language without a defined metric, but it points to a genuine market opportunity. Trust in dating platforms has eroded significantly. According to Pew Research data from 2023, 71% of US online daters believe it's very common for people to lie about themselves on dating profiles.

A 2024 survey from the UK's Online Safety Act implementation unit found that 44% of dating app users reported encountering fake profiles or suspected scams in the previous year. That trust deficit creates space for new entrants, but only if they can deliver measurably different outcomes.

"Top trusted" would need to mean something quantifiable: lowest reported scam rate, highest percentage of verified profiles, fastest response time on reported incidents. Without those metrics, it's just positioning.

The broader industry has already started moving in this direction, not by choice but by regulatory pressure. The UK's Online Safety Act requires dating apps to implement age verification and content moderation systems by mid-2025. The EU's Digital Services Act imposes similar obligations on larger platforms.

Compliance teams at Match Group and Bumble have spent the past 18 months building out verification infrastructure that they initially resisted implementing. Smaller apps like Rater could theoretically turn that regulatory burden into a competitive advantage if they're architected around verification from day one rather than bolting it on.

But that only works if the target user actually cares enough about verified profiles to switch apps—and the evidence on that remains mixed. Users say they want verification when surveyed, but behaviour data suggests they'll tolerate a surprising amount of fake profiles if the app otherwise delivers matches.

The success of Rater's growth strategy will ultimately depend on conversion economics: what does it cost to acquire a user, how long do they stay, and do they convert to paid subscribers at rates that justify the spend? Those numbers will determine whether "verified dating" is a viable market position or just another feature that users expect but won't pay for.

Mid-2025 will provide the first real test. As Morgan Stanley analysts have noted regarding the online dating industry's trajectory, the next phase of growth will be driven by features that meaningfully differentiate products in an increasingly commoditised market.