SHMZ: Jewish social club ditching the swipe

When Lexee Gordoun built a matchmaking form from her honeymoon hotel room, she was not planning to launch a startup. She was just trying to help her friends stop swiping.

Gordoun, a JMC Academy graduate and filmmaker who grew up in Sydney’s Jewish community, co-founded SHMZ with her American husband earlier this year. What began as a side project with a cheeky persona called Yenta has grown into a vetted Jewish social club and matchmaking platform, now available on the Apple App Store and claiming a presence in nine cities including Sydney and Melbourne.

The couple’s own story reads like the kind of meet-cute the platform is trying to engineer. They matched on a dating app despite not being each other’s type on paper. An eight-hour FaceTime call on day two, another the next day, and an international flight shortly after led to a relationship and eventually a marriage.

But as they watched friends around them battle what Gordoun calls “dating fatigue”, they decided to try something different. Days before their honeymoon, she built a simple online form, gave it some branding and put it out into the world. She said 100 young Jewish people from around the world signed up within three days without any marketing.

“We worked through our honeymoon, joking that we were making sure other people got theirs too,” Gordoun said.