Show HN: TwoTickets – meet through events, not swipes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TwoTickets – meet through events, not swipes

8 pointsaammundi4 comments

The idea for TwoTickets started when my wife and I had two tickets to Hamilton, and she couldn’t make it at the last minute. I realized how awkward it is to want to go to a concert, game, or show but not have someone to share it with — and how current apps either constrain you to your circle or to endless swiping.

On TwoTickets, you Twoot an event in order to connect with others around that shared plan. The flow is simple: Twoot → Match → Chat → Decide → Go. You don’t see profiles or matches until you Twoot events, so plans come first and profiles second.

The aim is to make meeting new people more natural: the event itself is the ice-breaker, not a random line in a bio. We’re in soft launch now and would love feedback from HN — does this “event-first” approach resonate with you, and where do you see the pitfalls?

Paul Graham once said that all dating apps are really just matching apps. I wonder: how close is this to a solution to that assertion — although TwoTickets is broader than dating.

*Links:* - Website: https://www.twotickets.us - iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/twotickets-match-eventfully/id...

A bit more context for anyone curious:

TwoTickets isn’t meant to be “just another dating app.” I see it more as a matching engine for shared experiences. Most platforms match people on profiles — I wanted to see what happens if you flip it and match on plans.

I think of it as Uber...when you open the app, you're thinking about where you want to go and the rest happens automatically. On TwoTickets, it is - "What you want to do"

That shift changes a lot:

The ice-breaker is the event, not a bio.

Plans are time-bound, so conversations don’t drift into dead-ends.

Safety and trust feel higher when there’s clarity on why you’re connecting.

On the tech side: it’s a Django + Celery + Postgres stack with a fair bit of scheduling and clustering and feed generation logic to ingest events and suggest matches. Happy to dive deeper into that if folks are interested.

> Plans are time-bound

This is exactly what I don't want. I mean, I'm no longer in the market for meeting new people (read: dating), but I can't imagine anything worse than not having a good way to politely exit an awkward encounter.

My experience with dating apps (good and bad) tells me that I don't want to get locked in with a stranger without an out, whether for dating purposes or otherwise.

Edit: I commend the originality of the idea, however.

What I meant by plans are time-bound is: The event is next week. But I get what you're saying about being "locked in". It's different for different people. I solo golf all the time and meet people in the process. Does the equation change the moment there is judgement involved ? conversely, if the focus is on the (self-chosen) activity, does that lighten the mood ?

Yeah you really need some mechanism whereby you get an excuse to leave where the other person can't know if it's real or not. The japanese do this really well in all kinds of situations. I have no idea how to do it here..

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