What’s He Really Like? Check the Lulu App
Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times
Alexandra Chong, center, who founded Lulu with Alison Schwartz, right, in New York.
By DEBORAH SCHOENEMAN
Published: November 20, 2013
Not long ago, after Alexandra Amin, an assistant at Warner Brothers, broke up with an agent she had been dating for a year, her friend told her about a new, free, female-friendly social networking app that lets women anonymously review men who are their Facebook friends.
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Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times
Ms. Chong, center, hosting a dinner party in New York.
“She was like, ‘He’s so crazy, you should rate him on Lulu,’ ” said Ms. Amin, 29, who lives in Los Angeles. Ms. Amin gave the ex hashtags including #NeverSleepsOver and #FriendZone. He scored a 6.9 out of 10, which, she admitted, was “lower than he actually deserves.”
On Lulu, women can rate men in categories — ex-boyfriend, crush, together, hooked-up, friend or relative — with a multiple-choice quiz. Women, their gender verified by their Facebook logins, add pink hashtags to a man’s profile ranging from the good (#KinkyInTheRightWays) to the bad (#NeverSleepsOver) to the ugly (#PornEducated). The hashtags are used to calculate a score generated by Lulu, ranging from 1 to 10, that appears under the man’s profile picture. (The company’s spokeswoman declined to explain the ratings algorithm.) Men can add hashtags, which appear in blue, but these are not factored into their overall score.
Since it was started last year by Alexandra Chong, who has a law degree from the London School of Economics, the service has provided a sort of “Take Back the Internet” moment for young women who have come of age in an era of revenge porn and anonymous, possibly ominous suitors. “The thing that drew me to Lulu was that dating without a reference is the scariest thing you can do,” said Erin Foster, 31, an actress and writer. “Meeting someone out in the world when you’re not in school or don’t work with each other or have mutual friends — you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
Ms. Chong, 32, a former member of the Jamaica Fed Cup tennis team, is now relocating Lulu from London to New York, where she said the audience for her app had grown 600 percent in the last six months, according to the analytics provider Mixpanel. “The trendsetting capital for women is New York and that’s where we need to be,” she said recently.
Sewell Robinson, 24, who lives in the East Village and works for an advertising agency, estimated that 70 percent of her female friends use Lulu; she has reviewed 10 men on the app, some generously. “I have written a few reviews to promote guy friends,” Ms. Robinson said. “If a random girl meets them in a bar and is somewhat interested, I want them to have a good rep on Lulu.”
But she has also panned men, in a sisterly spirit. “I think sometimes girls feel like they don’t have that much power in the hookup world,” Ms. Robinson said, “but this gives them something to bond over, and you can give advice to a girl you’ve never met before.” Appropriately enough, the app was introduced in sororities, which representatives of the company continue to visit. “Sororities are an established network of girls who are talking about relationships, and word spreads very quickly,” Ms. Chong said. “We changed the product a lot with their help.” (She said that a quarter of all college women now use Lulu, according to Mixpanel.)
Ms. Chong herself never belonged to a sorority; she attended Florida International University on a tennis scholarship and after law school worked forUpstream, a large mobile marketing firm. She credited her entrepreneurialism in part to her Canadian mother, whose family helped start the Calgary Stampede, the summer rodeo, and her Chinese-Jamaican father, who she said was born poor but won a lottery and used the windfall to start a tourism company.
She got the idea for Lulu during a boozy brunch with female friends the day after an awkward Valentine’s Day setup. “We were all sharing stories about guys, relationships and sex,” Ms. Chong said. “There were tears and laughter.” She concluded that women needed a focused search engine for dating — a “Guygle.”
“When you Google a guy, you don’t want to know if he voted Republican or what he wrote a paper about in college,” Ms. Chong said. “You want to know if mothers like him. Does he have good manners? Is he sweet?”
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