Why Veram exists: the questions you ask at 11pm

Most dating apps start with the same request. Describe yourself. A few lines, a prompt or two, and a photo where you look like you're having a better time than you were.

Most people are bad at this, and not because they're boring. You end up writing for an audience: a bit funnier than you are, a bit more outdoorsy, a bit less tired. Everyone knows everyone else is doing it too. In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, 71% of Americans who had used online dating said it was very common for people on these platforms to lie about themselves to seem more desirable.

That isn't a character flaw. It's what happens when you ask someone to sell themselves in a text box.

What your AI has already heard

A lot of us now talk to an AI assistant most days, and we don't perform for it. We ask how to word a message to a sibling we haven't spoken to in a while. Whether the job in another city is worth the move. Why we keep having the same argument. What to cook for someone who's had a bad week.

Those are the questions you ask at 11pm, when nobody's watching and you're not trying to impress anyone. Taken together, they say more about what you're like to be around than anything you'd write about yourself on purpose.

That's the idea behind Veram. You ask the assistant you already use (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, whichever) to write a portrait of you from what it knows from your conversations. You paste it into Veram. Every claim in the portrait says how the AI knows it, and roughly when: several chats about trips, say, in 2025. The AI is told not to invent anything, and to say so when it doesn't know enough.

Where it can be wrong

An AI portrait can be wrong. It might read a stressful month as your personality. It might mistake a friend's problem you were helping with for your own life. It might be right about who you were two years ago and not about who you are now.

So you check every claim and mark it right, partly right, or wrong. Each claim shows where it comes from, so you can see why it thought what it thought, and push back when it got you wrong. Then you keep the portrait by signing in.

What no AI can know

Some things don't come up in your chats, and some things shouldn't be guessed. So after the portrait come seven one-tap questions:

• what a good week with a partner looks like
• how you handle a disagreement
• kids
• the shape of relationship you want
• smoking
• where you'll be living
• what the next two years are about

Then you say who you're looking for and which state you live in, and add at least one photo. At that point you're counted in your state.

What an introduction looks like

An introduction shows a match percentage, the places where you rhyme (shared themes, each with a line from both of your portraits), and one honest point of friction. I'd rather you see the friction now than find it on the third date.

There are no names and no photos at that stage. If you choose to meet, that's a reveal: you see their name, their photos and the full report. If they choose to meet you too, a private conversation opens.

A reveal costs $9.99, or 3 for $24.99, or 5 for $39.99. The first 20,000 members get their first reveal free. If a reveal doesn't become a conversation within 7 days, it comes back to you as a credit. You pay at the moment you decide someone is worth meeting, and you don't pay for a reveal that goes nowhere.

I should be clear about what this can't do. In two speed-dating studies, researchers collected more than 100 measures of people's traits and preferences before the dates. Their models could predict who tended to be liked in general, but not who would be drawn to whom in particular (Joel, Eastwick and Finkel, 2017). Chemistry happens between two people in a room. Veram's job is to give you a good reason to walk into that room, with less guessing about the basics.

Why we make you wait

Introductions open in a state once 150 people are counted there, at least 40% of them women. Until then, you're in a founding waiting room.

I know waiting is annoying. We could have opened everywhere on day one. You'd have signed up, found an empty screen, and left, reasonably concluding that nobody was here. Fifty people isn't a crowd, but it's enough that an introduction can mean something when it arrives. If your state isn't open yet, the quickest way to open it is to tell one person who'd want this.

A few plain promises

Veram is for adults 18 and over, in the US only for now. Portraits are never sold. Photos stay hidden until someone chooses to meet you.

I'm building this because I think people are easier to like when you can see them a little more clearly, and because the clearest picture of most of us isn't the one we'd write ourselves.

If you're curious what your AI would say about you, make a portrait at veram.io. Read it. Correct it. Then see who's out there.

Daniel

Sources

• Pew Research Center, The Virtues and Downsides of Online Dating (survey of 4,860 US adults, Oct. 16 to 28, 2019), 2020
• Samantha Joel, Paul W. Eastwick and Eli J. Finkel, Is Romantic Desire Predictable? Machine Learning Applied to Initial Romantic Attraction, Psychological Science, 2017