Interview Questions › Root Cause Analysis

Dating app DAU dropped 10% last month

Daily Active Users on your dating app dropped 10% month-over-month. Investigate whether this is a gender ratio imbalance, match quality issue, or bot invasion.

Context

New user signups are steady, but D7 and D14 retention for female users declined significantly.

Clarifying questions to ask first

• Is the drop uniform across genders or isolated to female users?
• Did match rates and message exchange rates change before the drop?

How to approach it

1. Segment two-sided marketplace dynamics: Male vs Female active users, swiping activity, and match rates
2. Evaluate Match Liquidity: Swipes per user, Matches per active user, First-Message Sent Rate, Response Rate
3. Investigate spam/bot accounts, harassment reports, and trust & safety flags
4. Analyze algorithmic feed changes (ELO score matching updates, paywalls on rewinds/likes)

Framework: Two-Sided Marketplace Health -> Match Quality & Liquidity -> Trust & Safety / Spam -> Algorithmic Paywall Changes

Sample answer

• Spam bots and crypto scammers degraded female user trust and experience
• Paywall placed on seeing incoming likes reduced active swiping incentive
• Algorithmic change clustered top 5% profiles, leaving the majority with zero matches

1. Data reveals female D7 retention dropped from 42% to 28% following an influx of unverified bot profiles sending spam messages
2. Match response rate dropped 40%

Bot spam degraded female retention, creating a negative two-sided liquidity spiral; deployed mandatory selfie video verification and AI proactive harassment filtering.

What interviewers look for

• Gender Ratio (M/F)
• Match Rate per Swipe
• Chat Initiation Rate
• Female D7 Retention
• Trust & Safety Report Volume