YourMove AI · B2C · AI dating assistant
Keep your job until the app covers your costs: here, $20K/month revenue
Quit at ~$17-18K/month; laid off with severance weeks before leaving
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- growth
In their words
Dmitri Mirakyan - he had nothing.. until he built a stupid simple $30k/mo app with AI
Joseph ChoiYeah.
Dmitri MirakyanUm, so the line in the sand was explicitly the moment where like I can cover all of my expenses like I without burning any savings. It was like 20k profit it wound up being like or sorry, 20k revenue wound up being like 10k profit a month without having to like cut any staff. New York is expensive. Um, and I didn't want to cut down on my lifestyle either, cuz I like partying in New York and being an idiot. Um, again, lots of variables in that equation. If you're willing to be more frugal or if you're willing to play things less safe.
Joseph ChoiThat's actually a very interesting mindset that I don't know if that many people take that mindset of you're almost treating your job, your full-time uh W-2 job as It's like when people have an agency business on top of their tech business and they're building a product, and the product costs a lot of money to build, so then they do agency services on the side and then use that cash flow to fund the thing that they actually care about.
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New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Post in small dating-help subreddits like r/swipehelperGot early attention; old posts still bring search traffic
- Hand out flyers in a busy city parkDidn't work well; founder calls it a naive move
- Get national press on a novel AI angle, mainly for the links backPress sent few users (TV < one Reddit post) but gave strong domain authority
- Write blog posts for easy, popular searches like pickup lines, with pop-ups for the appNearly half of all traffic; has declined since Google's AI answers
- Send Google ads for each search topic to the matching product on your siteAds worked well for some products and not at all for others
- Try many small products on one website and keep the ones that earnAbout 12 tried; texting help, profile tools and AI photos stuck
- Build a keyboard app that suggests texts right inside the dating appPerformed much worse than the plain copy-paste flow; over budget and broken inside
- Keep the cheap text tools behind a soft paywall; hard-paywall AI photosStill how it runs; photos gated because compute is costly
- Use your job salary to pay 10-12 part-time Upwork contractorsScaled to ~$17-18K/month while employed; ran unprofitable the final year
- When starting a new channel, hire someone who does the work and teaches youFounder learned what good looks like, making the next hire easier
- Split the app into 3-5 parts, price each one, and cap the build at ~$2,000Never pays more than ~$2,000 per iOS app; host relays it, no revenue numbers
Tags: quit-threshold, side-project, day-job