Adoptly, the Tinder for child adoption, is indistinguishable from parody

Technology startups are fleeting and prone to failure, cropping up and disappearing as fast as our screen-addled attention spans. But rarely does one stick out quite like Adoptly, an apparently earnest attempt at making a Tinder-like mobile app for child adoption. The four-person operation, which quietly launched a Kickstarter campaign last week, says it wants to connect prospective parents with adoptable children.

In a concept video, adults swipe right or left to accept or reject kids looking for a family. It’s a dark vision, marrying the superficial nature of modern dating with the important work of finding homes for orphaned children. But is it the real deal, or a scheme designed to highlight the shallow and tone-deaf stereotype of Silicon Valley?

Adoptly co-founder Alex Nawrocki insists the company is authentic. “We’re not trying to gamify or make fun of this experience,” he said in a phone interview this week. “The adoption industry at large is a little bit underserved by the tech industry. We saw this unique opportunity to disrupt it, particularly when you’re talking about online adoption.”

Still, it sounds like something out of HBO’s Silicon Valley. The art mockups, website, and Kickstarter campaign page for Adoptly are so basic and benign as to be suspicious. They’re the kinds of press assets anyone with a background in marketing and moderate design skills could throw together in no time at all. There is no Adoptly Twitter account, and Nawrocki and his business partners have no public profiles on social media sites. There is no clear indication the company, if it does exist, has partnered with any adoption organizations, foster care specialists, or state agencies of any sort.

The introduction video posted on Kickstarter also veers into satirical territory, using the tackiest staples of the format. Co-founder Josh Weber is shown on camera talking viewers through Adoptly, which he describes as “something that could bring families together at the speed of modern life.” Designer Ankush Desai describes the app with the cliché turns of phrases fit for a SNL bit. He calls Adoptly a “seamless, app-based platform that connects prospective parents with adoptable children nearby,” as if proximity is the biggest factor in deciding to become the legal guardian of a human being.

In a jarring example of the app at work, a woman shows a smiling child’s profile to her partner, who disapproves and swipes left on the boy’s face. The video then runs through a series of safety reassurances. Children are “legally pre-approved through licensed government agencies,” while parents must go through “state-mandated background checks.” The video ends on the high note of a well-crafted slogan: “Parenthood is now just a swipe away.” All the while, aspirational royalty-free music swirls in the background, as in so many other hopeful Kickstarter videos before it.

In one sense, what’s interesting about Adoptly isn’t that it’s suspicious. Rather, it’s that Adoptly, in many ways, is indistinguishable from so many other misguided startups with self-righteous claims and cookie-cutter marketing material. The app could be a hoax, sure. But even if it were real, what would be the difference? Somebody out there thinks Tinder for child adoption is an okay idea: in its first week, 12 backers have pledged $2,957 toward the campaign. (Admittedly, Adoptly still seems likely to fall short of its $150,000 goal.)

Strangely, the only member of the four-person Adoptly team not shown on camera in the Kickstarter video is Nawrocki. That leaves open the possibility the other employees in the video were actors, while “Nawrocki” itself could be a fake last name. The voicemail I reached when initially contacting him was barebones, advising callers that they’ve reached an “Alex.” Nawrocki told me he’s a brand strategist and planner for a marketing agency, but would not tell me where he works.

Despite this lack of information, Nawrocki was earnest and articulate about Adoptly’s purpose. He stressed that the app is not designed to replace adoption services, nor is it even supposed to make money. (He says Adoptly chose not to seek venture capital funding for that reason.) Instead, it’s supposed to act as a free network to get conversations started and help parents more easily begin the first steps toward adoption. As for the swiping mechanic, Nawrocki says the app is modeled after how people connect nowadays. “Our target demographic is millennials who are beginning to reach the age of parenthood,” he said. “Our thinking is that it’s important to take technologies that keep tempo with them, and the swipe is something that group is particularly familiar with.”

Adoptly

I encountered some additional red flags in my conversation and follow-up emails with Nawrocki. He said he and the other members featured on Kickstarter met at the SXSW festival in Austin back in 2014, and then stayed in touch through a Facebook group. He would not disclose to me the name of the Facebook group. He also said that his Facebook profile was nonexistent because he had been “disengaging from social lately.” Neither him nor Weber, Desai, or marketing head Laura Schipper have Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter profiles I could locate.

Nawrocki did offer an elaborate backstory for Weber. He said his co-founder studied economics at Tufts University and afterward worked in energy markets consulting out of Houston. Weber then moved to the Bay Area, where he’s been active in the alternative energy startup scene. When I asked if I could speak to Weber directly, Nawrocki said he was on his honeymoon and unavailable.

When I asked whether I could see some proof of his colleagues’ online presence, Nawrocki said the entire team has made their profiles private due to a backlash from Adoptly’s critics. “As a result of this unforeseen feedback, which really surprised us, we've been taking our marketing approach into consideration,” Nawrocki said over email. “It appears that some of our comms strategy hasn't quite effectively illustrated the details of how truly positive and helpful this technology will actually be for people.”

So Adoptly and its likely unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign would appear to be one of two things: an elaborate satire not worth further debunking, or a bad idea not worth further exploring. If it’s a satire, perhaps the targets are both journalists too lazy to fact-check and the Silicon Valley startup community so eager to disrupt that it forgoes its humanity. And in the age of Donald Trump and the dilution of the term of “fake news,” it’s hard not to be suspect of possible attempts to hoodwink the media.

So far, at least two other news outlets have written up Adoptly, albeit with caveats that it’s not a stellar idea and does in fact seem as if it could be fake. As for Kickstarter, it doesn’t appear to care too much about potential hoaxes or parodies so long as the campaign is not an outright fraud. The company referred me to its trust and safety guidelines, and a representative said its integrity team’s algorithms scan for violations by relying in part on community reports. Kickstarter may not feel the need to investigate Adoptly unless it meets its unrealistic fundraising goal.

Still, I was and remain struck by Nawrocki’s pitch and the language that, in pretty much any other context, syncs up with standard, lofty Bay Area jargon. Regardless of who is really behind the company, it illustrates how outlandish startup ideas can seem while still retaining an air of legitimacy.

So many smart and well-meaning engineers and programmers in the Bay Area have stood up on stages at tech incubators like Y Combinator and professed to have disrupted laundry or wedding planning or some other mundane staple of modern life. Some of these founders dream of scooping up millions of dollars to build business out of ideas like “Turbo Tax for immigration” or “Getaround for India” or “BuzzFeed for Africa” — all of which are meaningful ideas, framed somewhat questionably. You could say the same about Adoptly, which means maybe it’s really not that far-fetched after all.