How is this different from eHarmony, Match.com, or OkCupid?

Instead of matchmaking and connecting people, we provide objective romantic and social advice using advanced modeling.

Loosely, we give you a Carfax of your love and social life. We can answer specific questions about your love life. For instance:

• Where and in what groups you have the best chances of finding a compatible partner,
• With whom you’d be happiest,
• Whether or not it’s best to stay with the person you’re with,
• And many more!

When I can use it?

Soon! In January we will open up for personality testing.

In the spring or early summer, we will open up the invite-only beta. General launch will follow later in 2015.

Can I be a Beta user?

If you’re interested in joining the beta program, take the Nanaya personality test and create an account. We’ll offer rolling invites during the beta phase to people who have created accounts.

What will it cost?

Nanaya will be a free service with option to purchase premium reports.

What’s a premium report? How much will it cost?

We will offer some test results for free in the LoveCast. Premium reports will answer specific questions that you may have, such as advice on an existing relationship or different ways to find a good match if you’re single.

We have not figured out pricing, but we expect around $10.

What’s in the LoveCast?

We offer high-level results for free. We discuss some of these on our main page, but we’re still working out what everyone wants to see the most. People in the beta program will help us figure out what the final product will look like.

What happens with my data?

We will develop a privacy agreement by the beginning of personality testing in November.

We’re data nerds at Nanaya and plan on doing sociological studies using the dataset starting during the beta. If you like the OkCupid blog, you’ll like the posts we’ll make in the future.

Who is Nanaya for?

Nanaya is for people who are about to make romantic and social decisions. Whether single or in a relationship, we can help you make decisions by doing the statistical analysis to determine outcomes for decisions you have yet to make.

If you’re single and don’t know how or where to find someone who’d be a good partner, we can help you answer that.

If you’re in a relationship and don’t know your next step or want affirmation before making a decision, we’re here to help.

If you’re simply looking for a way to meet more people and make friends in an adult world, we can help with that, too.

Well, how does Nanaya work?

The heart of Nanaya is an algorithm for options analysis that was designed for long-term relationship decision making; the byproduct of the algorithm is information that applies to people who are single or just dating.

We combine your personality data and aggregate personality data of groups you interact with then perform sociological modeling and statistical forecasting to get probabilities and values that are unique to your situation.

Does Nanaya work?

To some, the idea of a computer “predicting the future” in your love life may seem preposterous. However, the methods Nanaya uses are actually quite common in decision and risk analysis. Nanaya uses the same methods that are used every day to design space missions, manage wealth, and perform industrial optimization. Theoretical work for Nanaya has been reviewed by leading statisticians and physicists and has been well received. Nanaya has been validated through dozens of test cases.

Nanaya is designed to be intrinsically compatible with standardized personality tests, such as those available on major dating sites. Please contact us for more information.

What will the user experience be?

The entire process will take about 15-30 minutes depending on how you answer the questions. It will be a guided process of personality tests and adaptive questions to assess your social interactions and life goals.

Personality testing will be provided by our friends at Traitify.

How do you handle incompatible life goals like disagreements where one partner wants children while the other does not, etc?

Theoretically, Nanaya will be able to handle any questions but we do not plan on handling these types of disagreements for now.

Why?

There’s a difficult balance between level of detail and getting a reasonable answer. While willingness to have children is a major issue and it may be incorporated later, if we were to incorporate every possible disagreement it would take hours to get all the needed information from the user.

We presume a general correlation between life goals and personality, but it’s hard to know the details. We ultimately look forward to having detailed answers from users and personality tests to see what correlations exist. For now, we believe simple and sweet is best.

Will you be able to detect potentially abusive relationships?

Nanaya only asks for goals and preferences. We can guess which relationships will fail but not which ones are abusive.

Will you take into account dating preference statistics like those discussed on the OkCupid blog?

Absolutely, but the detail is limited to personality, life goals, and a few preferences. In the future we may expand this.

We look forward to writing blog posts on the data, too!

How can you predict the number of people I’ll be meeting at work, around town, etc?

We can model rates of interaction based on your personality and context with each group (e.g. how long you’ve been a part of it, how large it is).

What if my job is in service or sales? Isn’t that complicated?

It’s a little more complicated but we know how to handle it. For special groups, like working in service, we’ll be asking for a few more details about your personal experience.

 Bottom line, we are trying to create a personalized assessment.

What if I’m bisexual and could see myself settling down with either a man or a woman?

We account for bisexuality.

What if I’m not cis-gendered?

The Nanaya algorithm will leverage Census data for significant portions of calculations and will only work for men and women. If you are not cis-gendered, please choose whichever gender you identify with the closest.