Dating app fatigue has become all-pervasive, with many people growing tired of swiping, ghosting, being ghosted, and generally treading water while searching for the right fish in the sea. Two UC Berkeley dropouts, Allen Wang and Eric Liu, think they can help. Their startup, Ditto, leverages AI to match people based on the data users input into the service and plans their date for them.
“There’s a mismatch with the dating apps that are currently so dominant,” says Wang, “Their business model is based on keeping you on the app for as long as possible, but what people really want is to set up a good date in real life.”
Users simply message Ditto with as much detail as possible about their dating preferences. Each Wednesday evening, the app sends them a possible match. If they approve the match, Ditto will also arrange the date by suggesting a time, place, and activity. After the date, users provide feedback to the app with the aim of ensuring next week’s suggested match is an even better fit.
“We wanted to build something that actually helps people go on dates, not stay stuck in an app,” explains Wang. “When you remove swiping and chatting, you remove a lot of the toxicity and anxiety that people associate with online dating. We plan the date, people show up and real connections have a chance to form.”
The platform initially launched at UC San Diego and went viral across sorority group chats before quickly expanding to UC Berkeley, USC, UCLA, and UC Davis. Since launching, Ditto has grown to more than 42,000 users across these college campuses, with over 25 per cent of users coming through referrals. The startup figures show 69% were able to get a match, compared to about 25% for apps like Tinder, according to Wang.
“We’re trying to maximize, you know, that everybody can get as much matches as they can,” he said, adding, “More than half of the users were able to actually go on a date through our platform, which is a very, very crazy number.”
Ditto announced that it has raised $9.2 million in seed funding, led by venture capital firm Peak XV, with participation from firms like Alumni Ventures, Gradient, and Scribble Ventures. The seed funding will primarily be spent on hiring talent for AI, growth, and marketing. The company has 10 staffers and has raised a total of $9.5 million to date.
Check out the 12-slide pitch deck Ditto used to secure the $9.2 million Seed funding.
What were the slides in the Ditto pitch deck?
Browse the exact example slides from the pitch deck that Ditto used to raise $9.2M from Peak XV.
1. Paradigm Shift Slide
A paradigm shift refers to a fundamental change in approach, perspective, or underlying assumptions. Startups that come up with paradigm-shifting products create solutions that disrupt existing markets. Investors love these startups because if they succeed in creating the new market reality, they will own the space and be a market leader for a long enough period of time to provide a substantial return to investors.
Ditto pitch deck understands the importance of first-mover advantage and places the paradigm shift slide in the beginning of the deck. The slide tells a very clear and structured story of how dating tech has evolved over the decades. By labeling the eras as PC, Mobile, and AI Native, the slide builds a narrative instead of just timeline, and eventually the focus lands exactly where it should: on DittoAI.
One clever detail about the slide’s design is the use of S-curves. These lines communicate in the background that while the PC and Mobile eras have peaked or saturated, the “AI Native” era is at the beginning of its growth trajectory.
2. Competitor Analysis Slide
Oftentimes in pitch decks, we find competitor analysis slides that essentially say ‘our product is better and more feature-rich than competitors’. However, investors understand that these competitor analysis slides will always show their product as a superior, thus rendering them meaningless. This is true especially for seed-stage startups like Ditto AI because these companies are often pre-revenue.
This is why we recommend that founders not include competitor matrices if they are only going to attempt to win a feature-by-feature contest. Instead, the correct way to build a competitor slide is by connecting competitor’s shortcomings to an expressed and validated customer problem and value proposition. Ditto AI’s deck nails this. Their competitor slide (which doubles as their problem slide) ignores the usual feature checklist. Instead, it attacks Tinder’s underlying mechanism, making a strong case for why the traditional dating app format is broken and highlighting the actual friction users feel when trying to find a date.
From a design perspective, this slide is a winner. As the platform is initially directed towards college students, using a retro Super Mario Bros-esque theme is a perfect cultural fit. This layout also works well for investors; instead of forcing them to read dense paragraphs, the slide allows them to scan the pillars and instantly understand the friction users face in reaching “The Date.”
However, despite the fun and clever way this Mario theme represents the problem, the design appears only in the problem and solution slides and then is completely abandoned. When a visual metaphor can be strong and eye-catching, using it for only two slides creates a bit of a cognitive disconnect. It would have been better to subtly weave elements of that video game style world into the overall design language of the deck to keep the design consistent.
3. Social Proof Slide
Many early-stage entrepreneurs are so focused on raising funding and pitching their ideas to investors that they forget to seek feedback from their users. Paul Judge, founder and CTO of Purewire, points out that he often encounters pitches from early-stage startups where the founders have no idea what their customers think about the product. These founders lack the one of the most important desires of investors: social proof. While having confidence in the idea is important as a founder, it’s still not enough to convince investors. They need to exhibit social validation.
Social proof can come in many forms such as customer logos, media mentions, industry awards, advisor names, and team credentials. For a consumer social app like Ditto AI, especially one with inexperienced founders and no revenue, the most powerful validation is raw customer feedback. Only the user feedback can do all the heavy lifting to prove that, even without cash flow, the product has substance.
On the design side, the slide is simple and puts the user voice front and center. The headline “People Love Ditto” captures the investor’s attention immediately. Plus, there is a subtle visual trick at play: the testimonials about the AI working and users finding relationships are in large, bold text, while the more neutral feedback is kept smaller.
That said, the slide missed a huge opportunity to highlight traction. Since Ditto is seeing strong organic growth across college campuses, layering those hard numbers on top of the emotional quotes would have made the social proof undeniable.
How to create your own pitch deck like Ditto:
We hope you learned something from the Ditto pitch deck, and that you are able to use these insights for your own business. If you’d like to, you can bookmark it at bestpitchdeck.com/Ditto.
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