Stello

Stello: Project Story

What Stello Is

Stello is for people who are tired of boring, high-effort conversations on dating apps. We make early relationship-building fun and meaningful through two-player games, quests, and conversation prompts designed with behavioral science. Instead of dropping new matches into an empty chat box, we give them a shared “connection hub” where they can play, talk, and earn ⚡ connection points together.

Inspiration

Stello grew out of Amy Nguyen’s experience of social isolation and chronic loneliness as a child, and her later work as a behavioral data science intern at Spotify, where she saw how technology can orchestrate emotion and shared experiences at scale. While navigating a new long-distance relationship, Amy realized how few products support two-player bonding; most dating apps stop at the match. She brought the idea of gamified, science-backed dating to Sneha and Monica, and the team began interviewing active dating-app users to see whether this pain was broader than their own lives.

Those interviews sit in a wider context. Recent surveys suggest roughly 1 in 5 U.S. adults report feeling lonely, with loneliness now recognized by the U.S. Surgeon General as a public health risk comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and associated with higher risks of heart disease, stroke, and dementia. At the same time, 47% of Americans say dating is harder today than it was ten years ago, and newer studies find that around 79% of Gen Z report some form of dating-app burnout. Academic work on “mobile-online-dating fatigue” echoes what we heard qualitatively: people feel emotionally exhausted and depersonalized by endless swiping and shallow interactions.

What We Learned

We interviewed students (Booth MBAs and undergrads) who actively use dating apps. Across those conversations, five themes kept surfacing: post-match awkwardness, shallow and repetitive conversations, anxiety about planning dates, a lack of any sense of “progress,” and a cumulative feeling of emotional fatigue. People didn’t complain primarily about matching; they complained about what happened after — the tenth coffee or drink with a stranger where they recited the same script about work, hometown, and hobbies.

This aligned strongly with the research: dating platforms are optimized for discovery and engagement metrics, not for emotional safety or skillful relationship-building. Our takeaway was that swiping is not connection. The unsolved problem is the early, fragile period after a match, when two people are deciding whether this might be something real.

How We Built Stello

We started from that post-match gap and designed Stello as a shared space for two people rather than a solo self-improvement app. Every connection gets a “connection journey” with levels like First Meeting, Shared Interests, Deep Conversation, and Reflection Point. Conversation cards and quests award ⚡ points toward these levels, turning time spent together into visible progress instead of isolated dates.

On the product side, we built a web app centered on /connections and /connections/:connectionId, with a shared state for each pair’s level and lightning points so cards, quests, and the journey map always stay in sync. We integrated AI to generate conversation prompts and quests under clear constraints: cards focus on emotional depth and values; quests are concrete two-player activities categorized as Home, Online, or Public. The behavioral-science layer shaped how vulnerable prompts can be at each level, how much novelty we inject, and how we encourage mutual (rather than one-sided) participation.

Challenges We Faced

The biggest tension was ambition versus time. We wanted to ground everything in relationship science, but we were building on hackathon timelines while juggling classes and recruiting. Our compromise was to encode a small set of robust findings — for example, that structured self-disclosure and shared novelty increase closeness — and leave hooks for deeper experimentation later.

Designing for two users at once was also non-trivial. We had to think carefully about how to avoid turning Stello into a scoreboard that makes one partner feel judged. That’s why points and levels are always framed as something the pair earns together, and why actions like “Completed” and “Skip” are lightweight, reversible, and focused on comfort rather than performance. Finally, we were careful not to become another source of screen fatigue; Stello is intentionally built around short, finite sessions so that the real goal remains time spent together, not time spent in the app.

Closing

Stello is our answer to a simple question: if technology helped create a loneliness and dating-fatigue problem, can it also help repair it? By centralizing relationship-building tools and wrapping them in playful gamification and behavioral science, we aim to turn the most fragile part of dating — the first few weeks after a match — from a source of dread into a sequence of small, meaningful adventures.