The sisters behind ‘personality first’ dating app So Syncd

Edit Her meets founders and sisters Jessica, a former investment banker, and Louella, who worked in real estate, over Zoom to learn more.

“Making dating less superficial” is how Jessica sums up So Syncd’s mission, within two minutes of our conversation. The chemistry graduate previously worked with CEOs of billion-pound companies while working at Morgan Stanley and is now one herself. “I think that [being CEO] suits you more,” Louella tells her sister. “You weren’t tempted, were you?” Jessica asks rhetorically, before Louella quickly replies, “No, and you’re very good at it.”

The dating app is founded on MBTI personality type testing, which was first dreamt up by mother-daughter duo Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers in the 1940s. It’s now used by worldwide organisations to uncover employees’ personalities and create a compatible work culture.

I immediately strike up a bond with the sisters and they tell me my background is similar to their mum’s. “She’s a journalist; she’s done freelance stuff, she was an editor for a bit and she did a fashion degree at Central Saint Martins, quite a long time ago now.” (Jessica and Louella’s mum, if you’re reading this, let’s have coffee some time.)

Talking about their relationship as business partners, Louella says, ‘Luckily, we’ve always gotten along. Jessica [the introvert – or INFP – of the two] and I are nearly the opposite personality types, so I think that really helps in terms of having complimentary skill sets and having a balance. We each have our own strengths and weaknesses where the other one makes up for it.” And the extrovert (aka ESFJ) continues: “We can just be honest with each other about everything, we don’t need to hold anything back; I trust Jessica, massively,” she affirms. They are an example of how business and pleasure work effectively. “You hear stories of some business partners going behind each other’s backs, but we 100% know that would never ever happen,” she insists.

Jessica admits, “It’s not like we agree on everything all the time, but we don’t really argue. I leave Lou’s strengths to her and she leaves my strengths to me.” The feeling is clearly mutual: “I talk to you more than I talk to my boyfriend, for sure, and I sit opposite him on a working day,” Louella says, speaking of her ISTP partner Charles, who she met while working in real estate. Speaking of their connection, which started before her research into personalities began, she says, “I was in a long-term relationship with my perfect personality match and I actually didn’t even realise at the time; it wasn’t a conscious decision, but it was a good one.” Fate, I’d call it. The couple even did a part-time master’s degree in Real Estate Development together (Louella earned her bachelor’s degree in Economics from Cardiff University).

Despite their perfect pairing, I’m curious to know how they manage working from the same home office, daily. “We usually have a morning chat about our day and say if we have any important calls. If the calls overlap, one of us goes next door, depending on whose call is less important or who needs their screen. He also has to go and visit sites around the country a fair bit so it’s nice to get the odd day to myself, too.” And when it comes to their relationship overall: “[As an introvert,] my boyfriend likes his alone time, he needs his space. I can understand that a bit more now, whereas [before] I’d be like, ‘Why doesn’t he want to spend time with me?’” That’s certainly not the case with her sister: “We’re just in constant contact, there’s so much to talk about all the time,” Louella says. “Every half hour, at least,” Jessica agrees.

While Louella’s background is in real estate, Jessica spent five years delving into company strategies while working in investment banking – something that’s proven invaluable to navigating start-up life. “It’s quite a cool job to have at such a young age,” she says. I can imagine. Jessica was 22 when she started out – the same year she completed a master’s degree in Computational Chemistry at the University of Bath – and climbed her way to a research associate level position. She tells me she spent a lot of time building financial models alongside budgeting and forecasting revenue and earning potential. That’s after a year of working as a chemist, before having a change of heart. Finally, a series of interviews with various firms led to her “dream job” at Morgan Stanley.

Jessica’s last year at the firm saw her transfer to their offices in Sydney, where her boyfriend at the time lived. After a year together, the pair split and she backpacked around the world; this was when she began researching personality type compatibility, as a way of understanding the break-up. She says she’d talk to people and families she met and stayed with while travelling, as well as “obsessively reading things online”.

On returning to London, while having drinks with Louella who talked about the “terrible app dates” her friends and colleagues were going on, conversations around So Syncd began. Admittedly, “Lou was a bit sceptical at first”, but after applying personality matching to real-life scenarios, such as friends, family and relationships they knew of, the idea started to make sense.

She’s now excited to be on this “completely different” journey with So Syncd. As is Louella, whose work at the real estate start-up meant that she gained a 360-degree view of how a business operates. “I worked with the CEO and was kind of like his right-hand woman, doing anything and everything for him, from board papers to getting his wife’s birthday present,” she recalls. Understanding how a start-up company develops is another reason the pair are managing to run the business as the only full-timers (they have a part-time chief technology officer, contractual developers and occasional collaborators). This requires a lot of tenacity, no doubt, and capital, which makes me wonder how they’re funding it all. Jessica tells me they’re currently raising a fundraising round, “which is really exciting, so fingers crossed”. I copy her and cross my fingers too, which causes Louella to giggle, “We don’t want to jinx it too much”. As well as seeking funding from investors, the duo are working on a paid subscription membership package to enhance their business model (the app is currently free to sign up to).

As for their demographic, it’s mainly people in their late twenties to early thirties. “It’s the kind of age group that are looking for something more meaningful and longer term than just a hook-up,” Jessica explains.

And when it comes to women in business looking for love: “If you really want a relationship, you need to carve out time for it, like three hours a week, which generally [equates to] three one-hour dates. It’s not a huge amount of time if something is important to you,” Jessica says. “If you are very good at keeping schedules, which lots of business owners are, you have to allocate time to [dating] and stick to it.” She also points out that you can’t manage love in the same way you do business: “You just have to let things happen. Lots of business owners are quite proactive and they’re like, ‘right, let’s do this, let’s get results’, like it’s all very tangible, input-output; you have to a be a bit more easy-going about dating.”

So Syncd requires a three to five-minute psychological test when you first sign up and figures out your personality type, before creating a personal profile. Factors such as your strengths and weaknesses, how you are in relationships and ideal dates are identified, before a compatibility percentage is generated using an algorithm. This shows your chances of forming a strong connection with a person.

And while the sisters have avoided introducing a swipe feature to place emphasis on personality over image, I’m curious to know how much of a role looks still have to play when using the app (which includes photos). “Actually, you can tell a lot about someone’s personality from photos as well. So, if they’re out there rock-climbing or doing something that you’d really like to do as well, or maybe don’t like, you can get a better idea about their personality as well as just their looks,” Jessica explains. “We put the personality types everywhere on the app because we want to remind people, this is a person with a personality, not just some image that you swipe past.”

Louella gushes about the couple who recently got married after being matched on the app. “He’s from the UK, she’s from France and they met on the app last March. They were doing virtual dates for three months, and then they met up in Paris for the first time in June, and just clicked straight away; they had a great connection,” she enthuses. “We actually spoke to them the first weekend they met for our podcast, which was really sweet as it kind of opened the doors for a great relationship with them. Since then, I think in October, he moved out to France and they got married in December.” Another couple has just announced their engagement; and while “some people are a bit more private”, the sisters spend a lot of time talking to people they’ve matched so they can share their stories.

So, how are they finding start-up life, generally? “It’s definitely eventful. Every day there’s so much going on, isn’t there, Lou? And it’s quite a rollercoaster as well: some great things, some not so great things, but it’s definitely not boring, I think that’s fair [to say],” Jessica explains. “Yeah, completely,” Louella agrees, highlighting that moving back to their family home in Cornwall during the pandemic allowed evenings and weekends to be spent working on the business while balancing their former full-time jobs.