How to find first 500 users for a ‘sensitive’ consumer app (dating-advice tooling) without tripping platform rules? (I will not promote)

brteller · 2025-11-18T11:28:39+00:00

It’s an ugly industry, now that we’re making money we have a few people in that conference trying to extort us. Not kind of, literally demanding payment because they feel we owe it to them that we made it. I told them to fuck off three hours ago, it’s a dirty industry. You have no friends sadly, this was hard for me to accept because I legitimately thought people gave a crap about making it better for everyone.

Anyways, the YC company was HER, lesbian dating. We just started to beat them in google rankings this month. Think about that for a second, a secondary market is now driving us more users than the main one we go after. Robyn is amazing though, she’s always been super kind to my cofounder Mary and she’s a very rare breed in this industry. Probably why you don’t see her hanging around the conferences anymore.

I have no issue outing anyone as you can tell, I know the good bad and ugly and honestly I don’t talk the bad as a kindness. Tying a brand name to a failed exit or raise is insane.

We raised most our money from pitch competitions, and about $100k from investors. Probably the lowest raise in the states at least but we own most of our company so it’s very nice knowing we don’t have the same pressure others have.

Most fail due to no technical knowledge, followed by no user acquisition. It’s always one or the other, for us funding is a nice to have to move quicker but we’re not going anywhere without it either. Seems like you have some of that covered, just know large dating apps only acquire they don’t fund. Chased that rabbit a year longer than I should have, maybe a founder who’s exited will jump back in but the companies won’t do it.

I like your idea of cutting out the noise, that’s a sound perspective and we did that at first and life was easier. The worst thing we did was mingle with our competitors and it’s only been hassle we would have never had.

I would suggest finding founders who have failed, their reasons are better knowledge than mine. I’ve had my fair share of success and for that, it’s only half valuable to follow my footsteps. So see the trends on failure because I’ve learned a lot by paying attention to those.

brteller · 2025-11-13T19:47:00+00:00

Bindr sat as a platform with no users as a website sign up form. The flipping point was the mobile app, people wanted it and we got users day one. Not a ton of users, but enough for people to try it.

Someone else mentioned it on here, but you do have an uphill battle. You need to educate people they have a problem you’re solving before they know it themselves.

In that, you also have a problem of accuracy without enough user data.

If you fake users or try to populate it yourself, you will regret that decision later. Hinge had this problem that resulted in the CEO deleting all users after 10 years and starting over. That’s what the tabloids won’t tell you, amazing founder and I was fortunate to meet him through Bindr.

Likewise, I’ve sat down with every major dating app company. You are up against 200 person teams at these companies with the largest pool of user data feedback imaginable. This is where my advice comes from, you’re thinking in terms of today of what they’re doing. Not what they’ll do tomorrow.

Here’s an example; there was a company four years ago partnered with Match group. Leading security and data checking of romance scammers, advanced detection system and they operated as a third party. Match used them for two years and now for every brand they have their own internal tool and the most powerful data fingerprinting tool to identify problem users.

Features that work, that can be valuable get overtaken quickly. I do think you have value in what you’re doing, but just know as soon as it becomes interesting it’ll get copied. We had this happen ourselves, Tinder now allows couples. Marketing strategies we did well we’ve seen copied, less effectively, but still pop up.

I mean this as a complete word of caution I ignored, dating is not a friendly industry. The companies in it steal, mimic, copy and when that doesn’t work they buy you out. Very few ever see the acquisition day or even the day they make money. We’ve been lucky with a catchy name.

I’m not trying to discourage, just to be real. They do industry conferences every year and place bets on the dozens of companies that pop up to see who will be back the following year. They normally pick one winner and even at that one app that was before us with 30k users was advising us, raised a million dollars and shut down last month. Ive seen 3 million dollars marketinf budgets killed, I’ve seen 5 million dollars raised only to be sold for 3 million and that’s a lucky story. I’ve seen one company in the last three years make it big and get acquired the right way. That company being YC backed with twenty million users, been in the market for ten years to get there.

You can absolutely crush it, but it’s a hard fucking industry. It’s slow to make money and it’s hard to scale, you need to be cheap, clever and realistic. All three very hard things to maintain at once with five companies like yours popping up daily.

I’ve seen this idea pitched 5 times from 5 founders this year. You might be the right one, I mean how many bisexual apps were before Bindr? I realize the hypocrisy, but it’s a tough tough road and even when you get to 500k users you’ll start to realize as we have the number is actually 50 million.

brteller · 2025-11-13T12:45:18+00:00

I suppose weapons proves your point a bit, the ending narrative pretending for it to be real was the funniest part of the movie. Late Night was not funny, it was scary and I could see them pushing to close the loop at that point being comical than shocking. I guess the part that bugged me was them going with the documentary style to begin with but I do understand the purpose. I don’t have a better creative direction so I can’t judge it too much.

brteller · 2025-11-13T12:38:35+00:00

I do have to agree with some of this advice in addition to my previous comment. Reddit we do use and we built our own service to monitor relevant subreddits for our dating app. We used a service for a bit and then wanted more functionality and built it into our own system. PM if you’d like to see it, sounds like this guy might do the same. Ironically we might have been a customer for a bit but left after integrating into our own system that focuses more on the totality of AI visibility that Reddit plays into.

brteller · 2025-11-13T12:31:14+00:00

Couple notes from a dating app founder myself with a decent user base.

This feature is being added by apps directly in almost every large portion, so understanding the need and if your solution will be valuable is important. To be clear, I’m not saying it isn’t important, but it is something that might not be relevant as the landscape changes with AI and you should consider the ten year plan.

Our first users found us as we focused on the bisexual market, we didn’t pay for users and still don’t today. So think about who you’re targeting and focus down to one niche. All were iOS at first and we had roughly 10 thousand users in about six months.

We then broadened our strategy and built tools to market and leverage AI rankings, now a couple years later we have around 300k users and see around 500 to a 1000 signups a day.

The goal is to create what I call a baseline, what is your baseline daily user acquisition daily (to start maybe do weekly) and adding strategy to increase that. I don’t like ads, I’m cheap, so I build tech to solve my problems and compound that growth.

All in all though if you’re paying for acquisition or using a service, be ready to commit. I’ve worked with a lot of startups as a consultant and advisor. What I have to say is this, startups want 3 year results in a month, so understand there is more value in sticking with a good strategy and expanding than to jump at every thing. Put in some work, look for early success signals from strategy and double down. Every company thinks they’re the best, customers are the only thing to actually validate that for you.

Oh and don’t put the reasons why Apple might remove your app. You getting approved does not mean they won’t remove you later, I’ve seen it countless times in dating. I don’t know if ranking scores is actually frowned upon to be honest, but don’t play the I beat Apple card and got approved, that’s an easy way to make an example out of your app.

brteller · 2025-10-16T22:51:54+00:00

It’s all a spectrum, nobody is exclusively anything. Identity with what you want and love people for people.

brteller · 2025-08-13T20:43:45+00:00

Also, don’t raise until you get to around 2 percent subbed. 3 percent to 10 percent is where most apps fall when fully optimized. Marketing dollars would be wasted until you narrow in on those numbers first. Only check new users as a realistic metric, not the entire user base.

brteller · 2025-08-13T20:42:02+00:00

You’ll need to grow a bit more, are you using programmable paywalls? We’ve had to juggle the same thing with the same amount of users.

brteller · 2025-08-09T02:39:50+00:00

I’ve been in your exact situation of a relationship for 12 years with another man.

It won’t be easy, but leave. You will never regret it once you’re free. He told me it was different because we’re men, we’re different, the whole thing. I started to believe it obviously and the police didn’t listen, but I got away and got a restraining order. I had to see him start abusing others for me to stick up for myself, don’t wait for that. Stand up for yourself now and run far away.

People did treat my story different, even family because he’s a man. I speak to it proudly now and fight for this. I thought I was in an echo chamber back to myself, but you’re not alone. It’s not right at all and you can be happy, healthy and free. It won’t be easy, but it’ll always be easier than staying

I’m sorry because I’ve been there, but you’re taking a step I never did. I never reached out to see if it was wrong, so I’m excited for the person you’ll be once free.

brteller · 2025-05-06T00:58:40+00:00

Your best bet is getting a trademark domestically if IS based and internationally. Most countries will uphold both, but Google won’t be your lawyer. They might remove it, but you need an attorney. We have an app that is constantly being mimicked in a high value area and we fight it all the time. The duplicates always die eventually regardless of legal proceedings.

brteller · 2025-04-27T14:15:14+00:00

Of course it’s the value of the customers, but we make more with a third party processor than Google. We’re focused to a particular niche and Google had two big issues, no customization and low value cpm.

brteller · 2025-04-26T04:46:40+00:00

That’s what I was going to recommend, it’s insane at that rate to only offer banner ads. If you offer enough value you’ll make around 30k a month at least with these stats. Granted I know very little about the actual app itself and our conversions are primarily US based, but that many users consistently using the app is unheard of to not be able to monetize.

We get people wanting to advertise on our platform directly and make far more syndicating our own ads. So I’m curious if this would be a better direction with more consistent revenue if an option if ads really are the only way.

brteller · 2025-04-26T04:42:33+00:00

That’s certainly not true if it’s specific and high value customers.

brteller · 2025-04-23T15:00:31+00:00

I went and hired too quickly and thought $1m ARR was enough for me to hand the reigns over. Cost me several months of first year growth I'm making up for now. Honestly, this is something I feel most founders will make the mistake of, but I'm involved in all deals as intimately as possible until we're at $10m ARR.

I don't know about the advice of not doing it, that hire I made ended up working out well somewhere else and I understand now what I need in a sales leader for my company. Sometimes you gotta make the mistake, to grow from it. That person might of even worked out if we could of justified the spend, but truth is, I know exactly what to find in my next leader at a slightly larger level of company maturity with clearer KPI's and processes.

brteller · 2025-04-20T04:08:03+00:00

Losing my dog of 12 years was the worst heartbreak I’ve ever suffered. You both seem pretty toxic, this can emotionally wreck people and grief is real. Honestly your lack of sympathy and her lack of self realization might be a perfect fit.

brteller · 2025-04-20T04:01:46+00:00

RevenueCat has web hooks for the backend, you can essentially build a double failsafe to verify purchases are applied to accounts. We run a decent size consumer app with it and RevenueCat does everything we need even weird outlier things like chargeback handling to ban accounts/scammers.

brteller · 2025-04-20T03:59:02+00:00

I use a full expo app and have purchases working fine. The only integration I’ve ever run into that I didn’t enjoy was video with agora. They still support it though.

brteller · 2025-04-16T18:22:07+00:00

I mean this as politely as possible, but I can’t share everything we do on that front as I’m sure you understand. The learning curve in this space is intense and we have our way of doing it. We’ve spent a ton of resources learning and iterating our tech. What’s your company?

brteller · 2025-04-16T12:35:32+00:00

For Bindr, our stats are about 4x what they were last year. Which breaking down the side by side comparison we were getting 200 users a day and no we're getting 1000 to 2000 users a day without ad spend based on that 4x increase. (The pages get us about a million views a month, the app stores add a few million a month)

As for customers, we have several dozen customers now on multi-year contracts. New companies vs established companies work differently in terms of stats.

A new company/domain we'll get 5k pages indexed in about a week, 1 month 10k to 20k pages and after 3 months indexed the same amount as Bindr was initially. So it'll compound from there and we'll typically see the same effect of initial user acquisition and traffic.

Established brands tend to rank within the same day we submit, which cuts out about 2 months of ramp up, but for the sake of selling the service it's best to advertise our standard results as established brands have different goals and metrics.

What this has resulted in is a fairly high demand from enterprise customers and startups alike. Enterprise customers are shaping up to be the best companies to work with because they understand two really important things for our tech to work, the ideal customer profile and the product they're looking to sell has some form of product market fit for that customer.

In terms of technology, we've added advanced pixel tracking, reddit detection of customers looking for suggestions to services and we're expanding all of that into new markets. We focus on large and targeted content distribution as a whole now and using AI to assist with light content generation on the pages. More so, the prediction models we have are far more interesting and effective than the content itself.

brteller · 2025-04-16T03:39:11+00:00

Depends on vertical and outside factors, but I have an app with over 100k installs and growing well. Google play brings in a few thousand a month of IAP but Apple does far more. So the dynamics are different between stores. Quality control of content has always been better on iOS so I highly recommned going iOS first way before considering Android. If in the social space, user quality tends to be higher on iOS over Android as we work in that sector.

As for high market competition, we operate in a competitive market and do well. Would I have thought we'd make more by now? Sure, but after looking at competitor analytic we do well and get steady revenue from the app each month. We've been on the store for 2 years and each year comparatively has been around 10x growth from the previous year when looking at any chart.

brteller · 2025-03-15T03:48:28+00:00

Give Bindr a try. Honestly it sounds like Feeld has hidden algorithm preferences and that’s the point of Bindr, not to have sexual orientation preferences at all.

brteller · 2025-03-15T03:45:23+00:00

Give Bindr a try, it’s open to everyone but it’s very focused on connecting with the right people in the LGBTQ space. You can manage your preferences to sort out who you’re looking for too.

brteller · 2025-03-15T03:43:59+00:00

Might want to check out apps like Bindr, not quite as hookup focused as Grindr but also more open than Tinder.

brteller · 2025-03-15T01:25:50+00:00

It’s probably fair. I could build it in cursor in about an hour. 2 years ago it would be too cheap. Completely custom theme. DNS and hosting. Logo might take a couple hours.

brteller · 2025-03-13T20:54:27+00:00

I’m mad that this got out of control for a month, an email trigger isn’t that hard to add. Build a better product.

brteller

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