Candlelyght: Date, Don't Swipe

HN, I never had any success using dating apps and eventually found my way to using a matchmaking service to find my partner. Matchmaking services are prohibitively expensive for the general public and I'd like to see about changing that.

Please let me know any thoughts you may have as this is in the market discovery phase. Thank you.

For the tech stack: Docker: To have self-contained services running easily.

Go with Gin web framework: For the web server, it's what I know already and thankfully it's scalable to huge levels.

Frontend: Is very basic, there is no JavaScript. Only HTML/CSS with a form that makes a request to back to the web server.

Database: For all the emails, PostgreSQL.

Hosting: DigitalOcean - quick and easy.

Of course CloudFlare for DDoS protection.

Even as someone who's had pretty good results on dating apps (and met my partner through one), I still agree that they're generally a pain to work with. I briefly looked at matchmaking services back then, but as you said, they were prohibitively expensive. Even if I could afford one (I couldn't, but just hypothetically), I still wouldn't sign up for one because I didn't want to limit my dating pool to other rich people.

If your sell is "quality, affordable matchmaking for everyone", that sounds like a cool thing to pursue. But how does it work? You might think your tagline is clever, but it doesn't really explain anything on its own. I think your site needs a LOT more information and polish. It doesn't look anywhere near ready.

Your competitors have been around for a decade or more and are very polished (and largely owned by the same company). In contrast, your site looks like a website test page instead of a real service, and your immediate call to action is "give us your email", something people are generally reluctant to do without a good reason. In short, it's hard to trust your site at all, much less for something as intimate and personal as dating.

Like how does it even work? What happens after you provide an email? Is there a profile that goes with it? Who looks at it? Who (or what algo) does the matching, on what criteria? How do you review potential matches and accept/decline them, and how is that different from swiping in any other app? You talk only about "three strikes" and nothing else, and even that isn't super clear (like does rejecting a date count as a strike?). And "you don't share info with anyone"... how do matches learn about each other then?

Also, a big part of any dating service is its network size. How many profiles are there in my area? How many of my religion/income/orientation/diet/whatever? Etc.

You really only talked about your tech stack here, but IMO that's the least interesting bit of it (sounds like any other standard website). If you can figure out a business behind low-cost real-human matchmaking, that would be much more interesting, but it's totally unclear from your site. I hope it's not just some GPTs analyzing profiles and suggesting matches :)

I think you need a clearer and more up-front indication of how you're different from other sites before asking for an email address.