A matching site for high school students, live at Avenues New York. Each student privately picks up to three people they’d like to connect with. A match appears only when two people pick each other. A one-sided pick is never shown to anyone.
Two students pick independently. Neither can see the other’s picks. Toggle the picks and watch what each of them sees.
Example students. Up to three picks each, as on the real site.
The real site is only for Avenues students, so it has a demo login. You get the full student view with made-up classmates. It runs in your browser and never connects to the real database, so you can’t see or change any student’s data.
Open the site and enter this code, or use the direct link.
Live totals the site publishes from its admin dashboard. They’re only numbers, with no names, codes or pairs. They fill in after rollout.
A match is two people who picked each other. “Picks in a match” is the share of all picks that turned out to be mutual.
A site like this only works if students trust that a one-sided pick stays secret. So the guarantees live in Firestore security rules on the server, where no one can get around them by editing the page.
A match is detected by asking to read a single document that the rules only open when both picks exist. A one-sided pick returns the same “denied” as no pick at all.
A student’s picks live at a path containing their own code, and no collection students can reach is listable. You can only read what you can already name.
Picks can’t be edited and can only be removed seven days after they’re made, so no one can pick and unpick repeatedly to test whether someone picked them.
A note is copied to notes/{them}_{you}, readable only by the person picked and only after a match. To prove who is reading, the browser links an anonymous sign-in to the student’s code.
Avenue & Me lets high school students find out whether someone they like likes them back, without anyone ever learning about a one-sided crush. We built and launched it at one NYC school in under three weeks, at almost no cost, and now have a sign-up version that works at any school with student email. Our focus now is growth: becoming the default at every school we enter and building a large, engaged user base. Monetization comes later, once that base exists.
Telling someone you like them is the riskiest social move in high school, so most students never do it. Dating apps don’t serve them: the major ones are 18+, and none are built around a single school’s community. Avenue & Me removes the risk:
Two versions exist. The roster version loads a school’s student list and emails each student a personal login. The sign-up version needs no list: any student with a school email signs up and confirms the address, so a new school costs us nothing to add.
The product is live at one school, and it is too early for usage numbers.
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Sign-up version built and tested; public launch planned for later | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Invitations to all 571 Avenues New York high schoolers begin, seniors first | Nov 2, 2026 |
| Terms of use, privacy policy and security hardening added | Nov 1–2, 2026 |
| Match notifications by email and notes shown only on a match | Oct 15–20, 2026 |
| First version built | Oct 14–15, 2026 |
Running cost is about $0 a month on free tiers (Cloudflare Pages, Google Firebase, Gmail). Sign-up rate, picks per student and match rate at Avenues will be the first numbers we report, in the launch dashboard above.
The product only works when most of a school is on it, so we win school by school: launch each one in a single push, aim for most of its students within two weeks, then move to the next.
| Metric (proposed targets) | Why it matters | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Share of a school’s students signed up | A school only works when it’s dense | 50% within two weeks of launch |
| Students who come back the next week | Shows it’s a habit, not a one-off | 40% |
| Students with at least one match | The moment that makes people tell friends | Tracked from launch; no target yet |
| Schools live | Overall reach | 1 now, 5 by spring 2027, 25 by end of 2027–28 |
NYC public schools are not in the plan yet: receiving public school student data requires formal Department of Education agreements, which fit an established company.
We are not charging anyone now, and we will never run ads to minors or sell student data. Once the user base is large, the natural options are paid seasonal events run with schools and a premium tier for college students, who are adults.
The biggest risk is that we hold minors’ most sensitive data; one leak would end the product. Everything else follows from that.
| Risk | How we handle it |
|---|---|
| A leak of who picked whom | Tested database rules; one-sided picks never leave the database to another student; data deleted when a school’s run ends |
| Laws on minors’ data (e.g. New York’s Child Data Protection Act) | Counsel review before expanding; collect only name, grade, school email and picks |
| Schools or parents object | Launch only where a school’s student government or administration invites us; an “unofficial, not endorsed” label until then |
| Harassment or students in distress | Rules against misuse, removal of accounts, escalation to the school or a parent in serious cases, and the 988 crisis line on every page |
| Fake names on the sign-up version | Only verified school emails can join; impersonation gets an account removed; a check against the school roster where a school provides one |
| Founders are high school students | We need an adult-run legal entity and advisors before signing school agreements |
Avenue & Me was built and is run by two Avenues New York high school students, Arjun Sarma and Nico, both in 12th grade. They designed the product, wrote the privacy model and launched it to their school in under three weeks.