YourMove AI · B2C · AI dating assistant
Use your job salary to pay 10-12 part-time Upwork contractors
Scaled to ~$17-18K/month while employed; ran unprofitable the final year
Workedteam-processfinancing
What they did
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.
What happened
Scaled to ~$17-18K/month while still employed; found it much easier to scale with help
- Stage
- growth
In their words
The Superwall Podcast · Dmitri Mirakyan - he had nothing.. until he built a stupid simple $30k/mo app with AI“I hired people pretty early on. Not full-time people, but like literally like contractors on Upwork”
“Our our dev was working 40 hours a week, but like everybody else, like people that helped me write email sequences, people that helped me with SEO, people that helped me manage ads, people that like like a designer, people that helped with Webflow”
“So, I actually wound up being unprofitable for the last year that I was at Opendoor, cuz I was spending I I would like pour extra money into experimenting with things, experimenting with new growth channels”
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: 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
- 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: 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