Progress Report 2024

It's time to take a look at all we've accomplished in 2024! We will be publishing these holistic Progress Reports annually, but you can expect to see other blog posts pop-up as we have exciting updates to Firefly. If you'd like to see our progress on a more regular basis, you can check out the Progress Tracker, and join our communities on Discord, Reddit, and our Newsletter.

Now let's look back at our 2024 progress!

Looking Back

Onboarding - Less Friction → More New Users

User experience is a top priority for our team at Firefly, and it has been from the very beginning. When we hear your feedback, we take it seriously! One example of this is the recent update to our Onboarding experience for new users. Based on your feedback and our own testing, we identified areas where users were facing friction while creating accounts, and made improvements.

This also addresses another common piece of feedback we've received: Firefly needs more users. By enhancing the Onboarding experience to reduce friction, we've seen more new users complete their profiles and stay engaged with Firefly.

Discover - Find Your Perfect Match

Firefly's unique experience isn't just about our quizzes and match percentages—it's also about the Discover page, where you can explore profiles that match your filters and easily return to them. No more swiping right, then regretting it later!

But how can you be sure these profiles meet all your personal criteria without running into deal breakers? That's where Advanced Filtering comes in. Introduced this year, Advanced Filtering lets you refine your Discover page based on your quiz answers, helping you find even better matches. Currently, you can filter by 'Dietary Restrictions' and 'Has Kids,' with more filters coming in 2025.

We've also added the 'Viewed By' sorting option on the Discover page. This highly requested feature can help you find matches with people you may have looked over initially. When in this view, profiles are sorted by the chronological order of users who have viewed your profile. We chose to make 'Viewed By' a sorting option rather than a notification because it allows you to view profiles without having to worry about triggering notifications every time you return to a profile. Instead, you'll just jump to the top of their 'Viewed By' list.

If you haven't already, check out this Discover page feature next time you login to Firefly!

Profile - Introducing Date Me Docs!

Other dating apps have low character limits for text on user profiles, preventing their users from giving detailed profile information. To combat this, people go onto Google Docs and write dating resumes about themselves to link to their dating profiles. Since Firefly let's users write as much as they want about themselves on their profiles, we created a way for users to generate a Date Me Doc from their Firefly profile, creating a shareable link for them to post on other apps!

You can access this feature by going to your profile and tapping the icon on the top right of the page. From there, you'll generate your Date Me Doc you can link to your other dating profiles online. Since launch, we've had over 150 users generate Date Me Docs and consistently see use of these links.

We have to call out that this idea came directly from a Reddit user and we quickly got to work implementing it. If you have ideas that you think would elevate Firefly, let us know on Discord or Reddit!

Web Support - Released in Alpha!

When we first launched Firefly, we focused on building the app for iOS and Android users, but a web version has always been on our roadmap. Currently, Firefly Web is in Alpha and you can access it here. While the UI is still a work in progress, it's fully functional if you prefer using it over the app.

If you check out the Progress Tracker you'll see that the landing page UI for web is undergoing updates! We'll post on Reddit and in Discord when those UI updates are live so you can share your feedback. Keep an eye out for these updates in the new year!

Reporting - Keeping Firefly Safe & Bot-Free

Bots, scammers, and others who make the dating app space a bad experience are impossible to avoid all together. With AI becoming more accessible, bots are more difficult to prevent at account creation. And that's where our users come in!

We have officially implemented Community Moderators to increase report accuracy and the response rate to reports. If you accurately report an account enough times, you may be asked to join our Community Moderator team. This group of moderators are alerted when a new report has been made and are asked to review it. If the report is deemed to be valid, the reported account is banned. However if enough time passes without response from the moderators, our team is alerted to make the final call.

Even with a small Community Moderator team to test this function, accuracy and response time have both increased as we expected. We are elated to be able to keep Firefly a safe environment for all of you as it grows and are grateful to our Community Moderators for their vigilance!

Quizzes - UI Refresh

As we continued adding quiz questions, we realized the Quizzes page could use a UI refresh. These updates were recently released, allowing you to search or use tags to filter through quizzes on your own and other users' Quizzes page. These changes were a long time coming and now that we have over 200 quizzes, the new UI makes navigating this key part of Firefly much easier.

Logo Rebrand

We made a whole blog post about this at the beginning of December - check it out here! We are so proud of our new look and it was the catalyst to allow us to bulk up our social media presence and stand out as a brand to take seriously.

We couldn't be where we are without your support! 2024 was an incredible year and we can't wait for you to see what we're planning for 2025.

A Year of Growth

As of December 31st, 2024, Firefly has over 6300 users! We are growing at an average rate of 10-40 new users by word of mouth online. In 2024, we gained at least three new users every day and our highest number of new users in a day was 210!

We love your support and that you want Firefly to grow. Our team is ready to make concrete steps towards significant user growth. Firefly officially has team members who are focused on our brand, marketing, and social media. Follow our socials on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky for consistent content from our team.