Dmitri Mirakyan - he had nothing.. until he built a stupid simple $30k/mo app with AI

Found small subreddits focused on optimizing dating apps (e.g. r/swipehelper) and posted the product there. Posts kept ranking in search afterwards. A single decent Reddit post out-performed a Fox Business TV appearance in views.

Founder handed out flyers for the app in Washington Square Park, New York.

Being an early AI dating product before ChatGPT drew coverage from Fox (Business), CNBC, Wired, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal ('Can You Flirt Better Than Artificial Intelligence?'), plus a Newsweek op-ed by the founder. Never paid for or hunted backlinks; the press links gave the domain high authority from the start.

Using the domain authority from press backlinks, found keywords with relatively low competition and high volume (e.g. pickup lines, good morning texts, best dating apps) and targeted them with blog posts. Posts carry in-article pop-up ads for the product, with experiments on which product to promote on each post; different posts route to different products. Upwork contractors helped with SEO. Space was undersaturated: only one serious SEO competitor, the rest cheap content farms.

Ran Google Ads alongside SEO. Because it was primarily a web product on one site, ads and blog content could each point to a different product (texting help, profile writer, profile review, AI photos). Hired an Upwork contractor to run Google Ads who also trained the founder.

Treated the single yourmove.ai site as a collection of products: message replies, profile writer, profile review, photo picks, AI-generated photos, a keyboard app and human dating coaching among ~12 tried. Kept the money-makers. Dating coaching was a decent product but too high-maintenance and was dropped.

First outsourced dev project: a keyboard app so users would not have to switch screens; it suggested what to text inside the dating app. Interviewed many devs and was aggressive about budget, but the build was broken internally and took longer and cost more than planned.

Core texting/profile product runs on a soft paywall; AI-generated photos sit behind a hard paywall because compute cost is high.

Hired contractors on Upwork early: one dev at 40 hours/week, the rest a couple of hours per week each, covering email sequences, SEO, ad management, design, Webflow, and a ~$5/hour support/generalist person. Paid for it from his tech salary, took no pay himself, and ran the business in the red for his last year at Opendoor to fund growth experiments. Reasoning: his time was worth ~$150/hour, contractors ~$50/hour and more expert. First dev hire was terrible; the second was good and helped vet later hires.

When ramping up on something new (e.g. Google Ads), hired a contractor to both do the work and train the founder, so he could run and understand the process and judge future hires.

Set the quit line at the point the business covers all personal expenses without burning savings or cutting contractors: ~$20K/month revenue = ~$10K/month profit (New York cost of living). Decided to leave at ~$17-18K/month and gave notice for December; laid off in November with severance. Worked nights and weekends meanwhile, with a 'Ship It Sundays' friend group chat.

Hires Upwork devs for every app. Breaks the app into 3-5 functional parts and sets a fixed price per part (e.g. $500 / $1,000 / $200) to stop cost bloat; uses ChatGPT to estimate each feature's complexity against cost benchmarks; negotiates on price; caps each iOS app at ~$2,000. Notes the core feature is usually the least labor-intensive part and onboarding the most. Apps are pain-point, hard-paywall utilities.