Behind Twindr: The Genius Dating App

The story behind the once extremely popular dating app for twins.

Genius Stanford dropout Jack Dorfman was unemployed and living in his mom’s basement. When Jack and his MIT dropout friend Leo La Kolahi met to play Genshin Impact, they realized a gap in the market. Twins have no dating app experience. 

Dorfman used his Stanford engineering skills and Kolahi’s MIT computer science skills to begin creating their patent. Thousands of twins were interviewed to create a perfect and personalized dating app just for them. Dorfman and Kolahi successfully pitched their patent to investors, securing them a place within the Silicon Valley hierarchy. Not only did Dorfman and Kolahi have an excellent work ethic, but the company they built was extraordinary. Meditation rooms, paper-airplane question boxes, and a rotating poke bar kept company morale high. 

Former coder Ash Trevino says, “Those were the early Twindr days. We were all just out of Silicon Valley, workshopping ideas. I don’t even think I was earning minimum wage! Even the work felt fun -- we were all just a big family. That was before…. before Jack went crazy.” 

The Twindr app was simple. Twins join, twins date twins. No fear of incest, no need for non-twins. But when the app blew up, non-twins tried to join. Kolahi and his team decided to implement facial recognition technology to confirm twins. But Dorfman didn’t think that was enough, and implemented data tracking and bots to stalk users' phones. A rift was created within the company. 

Identical twins dating identical twins (KTVL)

Over the span of two years, Kolahi and Dorfman had become multimillionaires. In a shocking turn, Dorfman kicked Kolahi out of the company to continue his Twindr empire. Kolahi, in his best-selling memoir, Twins, said, “When I left Twindr, the morality of that company left as well. Twindr would become something different, so far from the Silicon startup we started as.” 

Under new leadership, Twindr evolved into a dating app for twins and non-twins. Public outrage spread, especially on X. People could not believe that a once wholesome twin dating app could open its doors to people who were not even twins. Billions of twins began leaving the app, Twindr stock plummeted by 40%, #CancelTwindr trended on X for a record-breaking five months. 

 Leo La Kolahi’s new app, Tripletr, had millions of downloads while Jack Dorfman was fired from Twindr and started being investigated by the CIA. Harvard dropout Elon Fragrance stepped in as Twindr’s CEO and successfully sold Twindr to Tripletr for a low two million dollars. Dorfman was sent to a maximum security prison for crypto fraud (Twincoin), and Twindr was officially over.