Howdy founder Mia Ryan created a dating app for farmers and rural Australians

These days, dating is hard. Single people living in the city find it tricky enough to find love but what about those living in the bush?

Mia Ryan was one of those singles struggling to find romance in the country and set out to do something about it.

That’s when Howdy was born – a dating app for farmers and other Aussies living in rural Australia.

Watch the video above.

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“It’s a new dating app that’s for people in the bush, people in rural and regional areas,” the 23-year-old tells Today‘s Karl Stefanovic and Sarah Abo.

But Ryan didn’t just create the app she also got in on the action creating her own profile in the hopes of finding her own special someone. It was an act of “product testing”, she says, and lead to her finding love on the other side of the country.

Ryan, who is from the Hunter Valley, found her partner who lives a couple of hours outside of Perth.

“It takes like minimum 10 hours to get there, two flights, a couple of hours driving, yeah, we try [to see each other] once a month,” she says.

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When asked what it was about her partner that caught Ryan’s eye, she says “his photos were really real, they were just in the tractor and he wrote a pretty cheesy bio about himself”.

His down to earth nature charmed Ryan and their relationship blossomed from there.

She says its been the same for many couples who have met on the app.

“I’ve found love myself, but so have so many other people,” Ryan says.

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Ryan credits this to the fact that the app is “really wholesome” which she says differs from other dating apps.

“It’s about relationships and it’s just real people, you know, even all the profile pictures you see that people post are just real, there’s no filters, there’s no mirror selfies, it’s just real people,” she says.

Originally created just for farmers looking to find love, Howdy is now available for all rural Aussies looking for someone special.

“The country lifestyle’s amazing,” Ryan says.

“It can be really hard sometimes but living in the bush is just, yeah, it’s a different way of life and it’s just, I don’t know, it’s nicer for a lot of people.”

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As rural Aussies are no stranger to a long drive, it seems plenty of Howdy dating app users aren’t phased by distance just like Ryan and her partner.

Ryan says there are plenty of couples from the app who will travel “massive distances” for love.

“We’ve got an Australia-wide function. It just means that people are open to moving and it’s actually shocked me that more than three quarters of the couples that we’ve got out of this are long distance,” she adds.

Howdy has already introduced plenty of rural Aussies to each other with more than 14,000 on the app right now.

Ryan says it’s all “going so, so well”.

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