You’re right that the 'traditional' playbook (SEO, viral loops) is largely broken for new dating entrants. Largely because I believe there's a lot of dissatisfaction with current offerings, I've been able to build a decent sized list of folks who want to try it out.

I'm curious. Given your experience, do you think there's any room left for hyper-local, community-first growth, or is the market truly locked by the incumbents regardless of the tech?

I’d love to hear more about where you saw the biggest friction points during your release.

The basic idea is daters "teach" an algorithm what they like and then the algorithm uses the collective set of preferences to match everybody (or as many as possible) for single in-app "get to know you" chats. Everything is one-on-one to avoid overload and dead-end chats.

I now have working versions in the app stores and I'm currently testing in Seattle.

[1] geml.co [2] App Store - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/geml-dating/id6756629998 [3] Play Store - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geml.andro...

Another side benefit of this approach is recruiting. I've always felt that "salary negotiable depending on experience" is such a waste of ink. Being transparent let's individuals who have expectations way out of alignment opt-out entirely. Then you get a nice clean signal for when your pay is out of alignment with the market...good candidates don't apply.

Another idea to add a veneer of legitimacy...at the bottom of the splash page, have a scrolling list of recent courses for which users signed up. If you are just getting started, create a list of 15 courses you THINK your likely visitor might be interested in (i.e., "fake it tell you make it").

For an entrepreneur this means that 99.9% of the sucky code written should stay that way...because no one will ever use it. Write something that "works" and then see how and how much it is used before going on to optimize.

It's not a binary question of sucks vs. doesn't suck. It is a question of how much of an issue the suckiness is creating. I'll spend 100X the time trying to improve beautifully written code that is taking up the largest chunk of CPU time rather than focus on a function that is rarely used but makes me throw up in my mouth when I see it.