In February of last year, YouTube celebrated its 15th anniversary. A blog post from CEO Susan Wojcicki laid out a few marquee milestones, including the statistic that 500 hours of new video—enough to fill 20 uninterrupted days—are uploaded every minute. By contrast, the dawn of the platform, which launched a public beta in May 2005, was uncharted territory, as Lisa Donovan explains in a Zoom conversation from London. “Nobody knew what YouTube was. People thought I was making porn or something,” she jokes of the initial skepticism. “Friends were like, ‘My brother said he saw you, maybe, in some weird video?’”
Donovan, 40, wearing a cream sweater and the healthy glow of a good skin-care regimen, lets out a laugh. “I was like, ‘It’s a thing, it’s a thing! You’ll see—it’ll make sense someday.’ But the site was incredible. You could just see what it was going to be.”
The young YouTuber had attempted to register her own name, but “Lisa Donovan” was already taken. “I was like, "Oh, gosh. What do I call this, then?” she recalls. “I mean, our car growing up was a Chevy Nova." Words like Casanova and supernova also floated to mind. So she excised a few letters from her surname and ushered a new alter-ego into the world: LisaNova.
A digital star was born. The steady stream of parody videos—in the rotating guises of Sarah Palin, spray-tanned Jersey fiancée, Lady Gaga mid-makeup tutorial—made her an early trailblazer on the platform. In 2006, she earned a spot on Madtv, and three years later she cofounded Maker Studios, with a plan to corral new talent and rake in billions of views. But present-day Donovan in the Zoom screen—LisaNova without the heavy eyeliner—has a different set of stars in her sights. Since a soft launch in 2017, Donovan has been the engine behind The Pattern, an app algorithmically tied to astrology but stripped of its polarizing verbiage: sun signs, planets, “Mercury in retrograde.” Instead, the daily prompts and assessments seem to peer, with a non-judgy X-ray vision, into the dustier corners of the psyche. Some people, like Issa Rae, take the insights in stride. Others, like Channing Tatum in a viral 2019 video, are left shouting into the void: “You need to DM me right now and tell me how you know this stuff! I don’t even know if I want to know this stuff.”
For Donovan, that kind of mirroring back to self lies at the heart of The Pattern. “Everybody wants to feel seen and heard and be given a certain kind of attention, acknowledgment, for their existence in this life. You know what I mean?” she says. It’s a bit of a twist, to hear this from a woman—once so visible in her work—who has played the unseen wizard behind this curtain: writing the site’s introspective prose poems and largely self-funding its execution. (London-based Sweet Capital supplied seed money in mid-2019.)
“I think of myself as more like the shepherd of The Pattern, the protector of The Pattern—@motherofpatterns is my Instagram,” says Donovan, making me wonder if there’s a Daenerys Targaryen spoof video out there. “I feel a sense of responsibility to this because it's a different kind of product. It's not like just selling a shampoo,” she says, sounding at once wholly sincere and like a convincing pitchwoman for a 21st-century mental-housekeeping tool. “It's emotional and it impacts people and it's powerful. You can't, for lack of a better word, fuck around with that.”
It’s hard to imagine a facet of digital life that didn’t experience a pandemic boost. Video-conference platforms boomed and then, in an equal and opposite reaction, sucked the air out of our workdays. Podcasts and algorithm-generated playlists filled every waking moment with erudition and sound. Even in the isolating period of lockdowns, dating apps surged—supply artificially low, demand achingly high.
The Pattern, too, caught that wave. The app, which recently crossed the threshold of 15 million generated profiles, is accustomed to seeing a natural, steady rise. “Our users are very good at getting us more users,” says chief growth officer Alan Fung of the word-of-mouth spread. (The company has, up till now, foregone PR and marketing.) But over the course of 2020, time spent in the app doubled, as people grasped for a sounding board. The Pattern’s tool for comparing two users’ compatibility, or bond, has also seen a 150% rise. “I kinda feel it’s been programmed to aid in COVID-era life support,” a friend and Pattern user wrote me in a DM. A few days later, my daily Pattern—bite-size pronouncements delivered in eight or so swipes—had me at hello: “You enjoy connecting emotionally as long as you can keep your critical distance and objectivity.”
What if the app about self-awareness were to edge further into that maelstrom of relationships? That’s what The Pattern is now testing out, with a beta function called Connect, rolling out in California this week, with more regions to follow. “Users have been asking for it from day one, but I was very hesitant to do it because I didn’t want us to be pigeon-holed as a dating app,” says Donovan. “The way astrology is divisive, so is dating, and this, to me, is an app for everybody.”
Connect builds upon monetized add-ons that arrived last fall. (The company takes pains to note that “we are not in the business of selling our users’ personal data.”) In addition to the across-the-board offerings—everyone has access to Your Pattern, Your Timing, and World Timing, for a sense of bigger-picture shifts that refreshingly have nothing to do with a pandemic—there are subsequent ways to engage. A Go Deeper subscription ($15 quarterly) allows a user to explore people’s patterns and to run unlimited bonds, beyond the three-per-day limit. Those cross-referenced connections, which fall into one of six qualitative designations—Soulmate, Extraordinary, Powerful, Meaningful, Complex, Delicate, or Challenging—are a point of differentiation from the swipe-centric apps. You can think of a certain bond as a premonition, if you’re the type to lean hard into the algorithm. Or consider it a breezy weather report ahead of a walk outside. Maybe it’s just a side door into a conversation, bypassing the formal living-room introductions and heading straight for the confessional-style kitchen banter.
