Daredate

The short version

I wanted to build a dating app that matched on how people actually make decisions, not the usual photo-and-bio roulette. Two years later I had a live product, a 1,000-person waitlist, and a much better picture of how hard the retention problem really is.

What I owned

Everything, basically. There was no co-founder and no team:

• The product itself. Positioning, brand, UI/UX, the technical build, and the launch copy.
• The growth loop. Organic content, a small community of early users, and the operational work that turned attention into a waitlist.
• The hard calls. What to ship first, what to cut, and when to keep going versus when to wrap.

What was hard

Scoping. When you are the only person in the room, the temptation is to keep layering features in parallel and call it "progress." The discipline that made the project actually go somewhere was holding the line on the smallest useful version of each thing.

Why I stepped away

Dating apps are won or lost on retention, and retention is a multi-year, multi-person problem. By spring 2026 I was deep into Tetherlab and a new round at TU Delft, and I owed Daredate a clean ending rather than a slow fade. The code is in the repo, the brand is intact, and anyone who wants to pick it up has a clear starting point.

What I took from it

Shipping the smallest useful version of an idea is how you earn the right to keep building it. Knowing when to stop building it is the harder lesson.