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.

The platform has since evolved well beyond matchmaking into a global social club operating across New York, Los Angeles, London, Tel Aviv, Miami, Chicago, South Africa, Sydney and Melbourne, according to Gordoun. You do not have to be single to join. You just have to be Jewish, vetted and looking to connect with intention.

Where SHMZ differs from mainstream dating apps is in its process. Matches are made by humans rather than algorithms and presented one at a time with an explanation of the pairing. If both parties agree, they enter a 48-hour chat window designed to encourage real conversation before either person can move on.

“Most apps optimise for attraction first and everything else later. We do the opposite,” Gordoun said. “We check values, lifestyle, background, goals and future fit first.”

It is not an entirely new idea. The now-defunct Lox Club ran a similar exclusive, culturally Jewish model, and established platforms like SawYouAtSinai have long offered human-led matchmaking to the Orthodox community. SHMZ is pitched at a younger, less religiously defined demographic, with branding that leans more social club than traditional shadchan service.

Gordoun said the community side of the platform grew from her own experience. After relocating to Los Angeles, she found it surprisingly hard to find a strong Jewish social circle. SHMZ hosted its first major event in June at a private Beverly Hills tennis court, complete with branded robes embroidered with “Certified Schmoozer” and partners including Jewish-owned coffee company Laurels Lattes.

According to Gordoun, the platform has received thousands of applications and facilitated more than 100 matches in its first weeks of operation. The couple run the entire operation themselves with no outside investment.

For Australian Jewish singles navigating a much smaller dating pool than their American counterparts, the idea of a curated global network is appealing. Whether a two-person team based in Los Angeles can sustain it remains an open question, but Gordoun’s Sydney roots suggest the local community is more than an afterthought.

For more information, visit shmz.app or follow @shmz.app on Instagram.