Slow dating, inside a Circle you draw yourself — a block, a scene, an obsession. No infinite scroll. No invisible algorithm.
Tinder, Hinge, Bumble all start from the same primitive: an infinite feed of strangers, sorted by who's nearest. The grammar trains you to swipe fast, second-guess often, and never feel like you're done. The longer you stay, the more they earn. Their incentives and yours stop aligning the day you'd be ready to delete the app.
Endless feeds train doom-swiping, not deciding. Every "maybe" stays open. The next one is always one swipe away.
Six photos and a two-line bio aren't enough to say who you are. The context you'd meet someone in says more than any prompt — and current apps strip it out.
Every feed sorts by distance from your phone. There's no first-class way to say "show me people in the scene I'm actually part of" — only "show me people within X miles."
Every match that works means a user the app loses. The business model is structurally misaligned with the thing it claims to help you do.
Perch is built on one primitive: the Circle. A Circle is a place, a scene, or an interest you plug yourself into. Inside it, you're discoverable to other members. Outside, you're private. You choose where and how you're seen.
A neighborhood, a city, a zip code. Meet people in the scene you live in — or the one you're planning to move to.
A cultural or professional community. Verified by members, protected from aspirational catfishing.
A shared obsession, wherever you live. For the hobbies that can't find each other locally.
Browse Circles already active in your area, or draw your own polygon on the map — your weekend zone, the venues your scene actually meets at, the trail you run. Free members join one Circle. Paid members join up to five, plus unlock Visit Mode for any city.
At 6 PM your Circle delivers three candidates — verified, photo-confirmed, in your context. Read prompts, look at three photos, decide. When you've seen your three, the app sends you back into the day. Tomorrow there'll be three new ones.
Mutual likes open a chat. We don't optimize for time-on-app. We hope you meet, message a few times, and migrate to text. When you find someone, pause your membership — Perch will be here next time, with your photos and prompts intact.
Schwartz's Paradox of Choice, Iyengar's jam-jar study, and the slow-dating revival inside Hinge all point at the same finding: more options past a small threshold makes us swipe more, decide less, and feel worse about whoever we picked. Three is enough to compare, few enough to remember the next morning, and small enough that you stop reaching for the app every twenty minutes.
LA has more distinct, self-aware cultural and professional scenes than almost any other US city. It's where the original problem we built Perch to solve — "I want to be in the circle of LA creatives, but I can't if I don't live in that scene" — is sharpest. If Perch works here, it works anywhere.
Tinder and Hinge sort by who's nearby. Raya decides who's elite. Perch lets you define the context you want to be seen in. Instead of swiping through strangers ranked by distance, you plug into a Circle — a scene you're already part of, a city you're moving to, a hobby that shapes your life. The context does the pre-qualifying work that a 300-character bio can't.
Every Circle has its own verification standard, defined by the Creator. A running Circle might require a Strava profile. A founders Circle might require LinkedIn plus a vouch from an existing member. A neighborhood Circle might require proof of residency. Membership is earned, not bought. Catfishers don't get past the verification gates, which is the point.
Perch is private by default. You're only visible inside Circles you've joined. Location data is stored at city or neighborhood granularity — never raw coordinates. Notifications are discovery-first: you see activity in an in-app feed, not as an endless stream of push alerts. Real-time push is opt-in only, capped at two per week, with quiet hours enforced by default.
Yes — with a Creator subscription. You define the Circle, set its verification standard, and moderate it. Perch's auto-suggestion engine surfaces verified candidates from the surrounding area to help seed membership. Once your Circle crosses a member threshold, you earn a revenue share on subscription revenue from members you brought in.
Private beta opens in Q2 2026 for waitlist members. Public launch in LA is Q3 2026. Second city follows in Q4 2026.
Twenty founding members. Charter status for life. Waitlist members get first access when Circles open.