"Elitist" dating app helps users find perfect match

A new dating app claims it will help you find the right partner -- provided you fit in.

Like many other dating services, The League is free to sign up to, but unlike others, it's not so easy to join. It's only active in San Francisco and already has a wait list of 75,000 people, reports CBS News correspondent Anna Werner.

"Dating is the number-one pain point in a young professional's life," co-founder Amanda Bradford said.

She said if she had to boil her perfect guy down to one word, it would be 'ambitious.'"

It's a word that describes Bradford perfectly. She worked at Google, then got her MBA at Stanford University. Newly single, she waded into the sea of online dating. EHarmony, Match.com, Hinge and Tinder showed her hundreds of potential matches, but few likely prospects.

"You know nothing about the person except whether or not you find them attractive," she said. "I felt like it was very superficial."

So Bradford started her own service, The League.

To join, prospective members have to apply, and share both their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. A computer formula helps sort through applications, and then Bradford's team decides whether to approve people based on selective criteria including their education, job, interests and even photos.

Some people have already tagged Bradford and her app as elitist.

"I think it's less about pedigree and where you went to school and where you work and more about ambition and passion," she said. "We don't want everyone to have an advanced degree. We don't want everyone to be a math major."

But unlike some other dating apps which show users thousands of profiles to choose from, The League sends members just five prospects per day on the theory of quality over quantity.

"You can't create an algorithm that says, this person's quality and this person's not. But we can put people into the community that seem to be serious about dating," she said. "And we can look at making sure they are a really good fit with the community and they are adding diversity to it."

The app launched in November and already has about 5,500 members.

"It's really hard to spend a lot of time researching people, which is what you have to do with most of the other dating apps," The League member Liz Curtis said. "You know who your mutual friends are, where they went to school, what their profession is, how tall they are, which makes it a lot faster to decide if you want to engage with the particular person."

Thanks to The League, she and other professional women said they're finding the kind of guys -- and they're not alone. A 2015 study of American singles found the number-one way first dates start is online.

The League member Louella Aquino admitted she still harbors dreams of more romantic encounters.

"I'm very much still the person that wants to tell their children one day about how I met their father because we reached for the same avocado at the grocery store," she said.

Another member, Rachman Blake, agreed.

"I would like to think I have been that guy reaching for the same avocado and it just happened," he said.

But Blake said working 80-hour workweeks at his new company makes that unlikely. He joined The League in December, and within weeks had met a special someone.

"It's gonna make your life a little bit easier because she's trying to solve the problem of just connecting two people that are really excited to meet each other," Blake said."

After all this, Bradford might get closer to answering the ultimate question: Who are the perfect men?

"I'm still looking for him," she said.

Dating sites are a lot like the people that use them: different personalities and looking for different things. Right now The League operates in such a tight knit community, it's difficult to say how well it would fare in other parts of the country with totally different demographics. Amanda wants to expand, but as she said herself, you can't write an algorithm to find quality people.