YourMove AI · B2C · AI dating assistant
Build a keyboard app that suggests texts right inside the dating app
Performed much worse than the plain copy-paste flow; over budget and broken inside
Failedfeature-developmentproduct-activation
What they did
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.
What happened
Performed much worse than the core web flow; build ran over time and budget
- Stage
- growth
- Effort
- Full outsourced dev project, the first with a dev team
In their words
The Superwall Podcast · Dmitri Mirakyan - he had nothing.. until he built a stupid simple $30k/mo app with AI“we had a keyboard app, which that, in itself, turned out to be a really bad product that actually performed much worse than literally just our core flow”
“it looked and felt like what we needed, but it was like deeply broken on the inside and took like longer and cost more than it was intended to cost”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- YourMove AI: Post in small dating-help subreddits like r/swipehelperGot early attention; old posts still bring search traffic
- YourMove AI: Hand out flyers in a busy city parkDidn't work well; founder calls it a naive move
- YourMove AI: 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
- YourMove AI: 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
- YourMove AI: 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
- YourMove AI: Try many small products on one website and keep the ones that earnAbout 12 tried; texting help, profile tools and AI photos stuck
- YourMove AI: Keep the cheap text tools behind a soft paywall; hard-paywall AI photosStill how it runs; photos gated because compute is costly
- YourMove AI: Use your job salary to pay 10-12 part-time Upwork contractorsScaled to ~$17-18K/month while employed; ran unprofitable the final year
- YourMove AI: When starting a new channel, hire someone who does the work and teaches youFounder learned what good looks like, making the next hire easier
- YourMove AI: Keep your job until the app covers your costs: here, $20K/month revenueQuit at ~$17-18K/month; laid off with severance weeks before leaving
- 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