Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

I love your "RFC" post. I'm a SRE by day who dabbles in code at night (Go). I've long wanted to find a co-founder to moonlight on a project together. I am a remote worker, far away from the Bay Area and it seems really hard to meet others interested in this given where I live. I would love to see more "co-founder dating" here on HN (pardon the pun...)

That said, for your app, I'm kind of a doubter because I never had any luck with dating websites for many of the reasons you mentioned. I went on lots of dates and nothing ever connected but finally got some good advice from a friend:

"Take care of yourself and do what you love and she will find _you_."

I did exactly this: started running every day after work... learned how to cook and started making my own food...spruceded up my apartment with some nice furnishings...and lo and behold, my future wife literally (nearly) ran into me. I was out running one night and she almost hit me at a stop sign when I ran across the road. She turned out to be my neighbor and fast-forward 11 years: we have two kids and 10 years of marriage under our belts.

In retrospect, I should have spent the hundreds of dollars on a life coach instead of eHarmony.

Survivorship bias dialed to 11

Happy you met someone but there are tons of people who followed a similar path and never met their match.

Yes, I agree and understand. Oh, believe me, I was "looking" for years. For the sake of brevity, I left out a lot of other important details, like honest self-assessment, learning listening skills, etc.

But--bottom line--without getting myself on the path to being a better adult, I was unlikely to have any luck with a dating app. I realized (or rather, my friend help me realize) that I had to improve my product before anybody else was going to be interested.

There are no "survivors" that never leave their basement , play video games and watch porn all day. Take care of yourself is relevant.

Hold up.

1. "Doesn't work for some people" is subject to the same fallacy as "worked for me." Not letting you get away with that one.

2. Working on yourself is very obviously the best way to attract someone else. Statistically speaking we get the most attention from those who perceive our value to be slightly above theirs (people tend to aim for the best around that they don't think are "out of their league"). Increase your own value and you will get more attention from higher value potential partners.

There's a little bit of a catch 22 in that if you work on yourself just to try to be more attractive you probably won't succeed. Things like genuine enthusiasm for a hobby are very attractive and hard to fake, for example. But if you become a person anyone would be lucky date it's not going to be hard to find dates, provided you leave the basement once in a while.

There have been a few attempts at a life coach kind of app. None of them done well I think.

I don't think the parent would be asking for such an app based on the other content, and sometimes that's the most important answer in tech: to know where it isn't needed.

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