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Comment by firedating | Hacker News Reader

I develop https://firedating.me - my hobby project and a place for FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) enthusiasts to find friends and a partner. My goal is to help FIRE people build meaningful connections and decrease the amount of loneliness in the community.

I don't make any money, instead I've spent around $130 and 400 hours so far. It is actually a lot of fun to learn web development and encounter various unexpected challenges everyday. There are also rewarding aspects - 9 couples, who met through the site, have reached out to me and were grateful. This feeling of changing people's lives in this way is amazing! I have no clue where this brings me, but I enjoy it so much. I try to spend at least 1.5 hours a day in 2021. In 2020 I had a goal to spend at a least 1 hour a day on my side projects and that's how firedating was born ;)

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What made you decide to show the ratio of male:female?

At 1/3 I think it's smart. I would have assumed a much worse male to female ratio without that.

I agree, I was also assuming a worse ratio. However, I tried comparing this with other dating sites and they report better ratios. At the same time, I suspect that FIRE community might be biased towards males (even though I heard that majority of Mr Money Mustache followers are women).

It's a really smart move regarding sustainable growth. Males will refrain of signing up without an "healthy" ratio. Not doing it would just cause early abandonments and decrease goodwill. Everybody wins.

I personally perceived this as a signaling to female users to motivate them to join more. But the way you phrase this is also interesting.

To be fair, the ratio was not public at the very beginning.

To be honest, everyone was always asking for this. I already had a public stats page back then, so it was very easy to just include it there (to save my time calculating this manually).

I love your analytics page! So cool to have a transparent view of what's going on on a website

Thank you!

I value transparency and happily share stats and why I make specific decisions.

I've got an idea of such "open" page from levelsio's https://nomadlist.com/open.

This is the sweetest and most wholesome thing I've seen in a very long time. Kudos to you!

Thank you for your kind words! I definitely remember the first 3 months of development when I had 0 users and how it felt. I appreciate your support!

Dude! I’m in!

Happy dating and let the FIRE be in your heart!

Any chance of open sourcing the code for others to contribute as well?

To be honest, I am not sure whether engineering is a bottle neck as of now. Site's functionality has actually pretty much converged and it already works. Full blown open sourcing seems like a large endeavor and I just spend 1.5 hours a day. I tried finding collaborators, but unfortunately people just get busy with time and don't contribute. If you are interested to collaborate (Django/Python) or have specific ideas/advice on open sourcing, I would appreciate to discuss more (https://firedating.me/feedback).

My previous experience was that it was taking more of my time to collaborate than to do stuff on my own. I agree that this might change and that's why I am open to explore :)

how did you get your initial users?

I've got an idea during a FIRE meetup, so there was already initial interest (~10 people). Once I had the site running, I made a post on Reddit and people just joined. In 1.5 months around 500 users joined (there is a graph here: https://firedating.me/open/). It was indeed a chicken and an egg problem, because a dating site without users provides 0 value. Fortunately, people joined even despite this. Nowadays, it is much easier. Just saying "we are 2800 users" is already much more convincing.

oh wow, this is peak FIRE

Each to their own I guess!

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