I launched a dating product. Building it was easier than getting the first users.
I recently launched my first consumer product, REZYCO — an 18+ dating platform built around a proprietary compatibility model.
Building the product was difficult, but after launching I realized something: distribution is a completely different problem.
A dating product makes this even harder. One user alone gets very little value. You need enough relevant people in the same place, at roughly the same time, before the product can really demonstrate what it does.
That changed the way I’m thinking about early growth.
Instead of spreading early acquisition across many locations, I’m considering concentrating the first users around specific cities and real-world singles events. The idea is to partner with event organizers and let attendees privately explore compatibility before meeting in person.
I’m still very early, so I’m treating this as a hypothesis rather than pretending I already know the answer.
For founders who have built marketplaces, social products, or anything with a cold-start problem: what actually worked for your first 100–1,000 users?
REZYCO: https://rezyco.com
Its hard. But good luck 🤞
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
With the city-and-event approach, what would convince you the first users are creating enough mutual value to validate the local wedge rather than just generating signups?
That’s exactly what I want to figure out. Signups alone wouldn’t mean much to me. I want to see whether people actually complete the experience, get relevant candidates, and then do something with those results.
One metric I can already track is how often someone clicks “Message” on a candidate surfaced by the model. For an event pilot, I’d also want to see whether the pre-event experience leads to real engagement around the event itself.
So for me, 100 signups isn’t the goal — 100 people actually finding value in the experience would be much more interesting.
The “Message” click gives you a concrete behavior to follow. Could take this over email too if that’s easier.
Sure, happy to continue! You can reach me at support@rezyco.com, or through any of the social links on my profile — whatever is easiest for you. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the approach.
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
First users are the hardest product you'll build. We learned this at €150 CAC via Ads. Organic channels (Threads replies, cold DMs, build in public) compound. Product is table stakes; distribution is the moat.
€150 CAC definitely makes me want to test organic channels first 😅 I’m still very early, so right now I’d rather learn where I can get real engagement before spending heavily on ads.
Which worked best for you — Threads, cold DMs, or build in public?
Interesting. How are you measuring whether it is working?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
That is generally the case with building apps these days. The barrier to entry used to be the amount of time and the cost of development. Now, there are more apps than you can try. You have to find a way to get the right attention. That is harder.
The event organizer route is right, and I would push it one step further: for the first few months the organizer is your customer, not the attendee.
I run the same shape of play in a different category. My product is consumer, but the fastest route to concentrated users has been organizations that already have the audience standing in one room. What decides yes or no is almost never the product. It is how much work the partner has to do. Every time I made the ask smaller, the reply rate went up. "Let us run this for your members" loses. "One event, two weeks, I do the setup, you get a one page write up of what happened" wins, and the write up does real work because the organizer needs something to justify the decision to whoever is above them.
On measurement, I would not count signups from the event. Count the share of attendees who got at least one match they themselves judged relevant before the event started. That is the number that tells you whether you hit density. If it is low, you do not have a distribution problem, you have a threshold problem, and running ten more events will not fix it.
One practical thing. Ask the organizer for the headcount and the gender split a week out, not on the day. If a 60 person event is 45 and 15, your compatibility model has almost nothing to work with, and the result will read as the product failing when what actually failed was the room.
This is extremely useful — and interestingly, part of what you described is already very close to how I’m thinking about the first REZYCO pilot.
I want the organizer’s workload to be as close to zero as possible: no technical integration, just a ready-to-send invitation and simple instructions for attendees, while I handle the rest.
But I hadn’t thought about giving the organizer a one-page summary after the pilot. I really like that idea.
On measurement, REZYCO already gives me one useful behavioral signal: users can only message candidates surfaced by the model, so a “Message” click tells me that someone didn’t just receive a result — they actually wanted to start a conversation with that person.
And your last point about the composition of the room is especially interesting. REZYCO applies users’ preferences as filters before compatibility is calculated, so raw headcount alone may not tell me whether there is enough potential density in a particular event.
That’s definitely something I need to account for when designing the first pilot.
Thanks — this is the kind of practical feedback that is genuinely helping me think through how to structure the experiment.
Dating products live and die on the chicken-and-egg problem more than almost any other category. How are you trying to solve the cold-start side?
That’s exactly the problem I’m trying to solve right now :)
My current hypothesis is to avoid spreading the first users across too many locations and instead concentrate them around specific cities and, even more narrowly, specific singles events.
Rather than trying to build density everywhere at once, I want to test whether REZYCO can create enough activity around one real-world event for participants to actually find relevant people and get value from the product.
I don’t know yet how many participants it takes for that to happen consistently — that’s exactly what I want the first pilot to teach me.
If it works in one concentrated group, I’ll have something real to learn from and potentially repeat. If it doesn’t, I’ll still learn much more than I would from having scattered registrations across dozens of cities :)
Your instinct to concentrate geographically is correct — it's the only way a dating product ever works. A thousand users across fifty cities is zero users; a thousand in one city is a scene. Flip the organizer pitch: don't pitch "let attendees explore compatibility before meeting." Pitch the after: "we'll run the matching for your event's afterparty." Organizers' nightmare is one-time attendance. If you show up with "37 mutual matches came out of your last event, all in this private pool for the next one," you're selling retention, not a gimmick. Structural notes: 1. Concierge the first city. Manually onboard the first 200 — verify profiles yourself. Dating apps die on fake/empty profiles, not algorithms. 2. Measure matches per active user per week, not signups. Signups will lie to you for months. 3. Trust is the moat question you're not asking. Publish your safety approach early and loudly — verification, reporting, data handling. In dating, safety is the feature that gets press and partnerships. Pick one city. Be the app that actually works there.
This gave me a lot to think about — especially the retention angle.
I’ve been thinking about events mainly as a way to create enough density before people meet, but I hadn’t really considered the organizer relationship from the “after” side in the way you described it. That’s interesting.
I also agree that signups alone aren’t a meaningful metric. I’m much more interested in actual behavior. For example, I can track when someone clicks “Message” on a candidate surfaced by REZYCO. Since users can only message people surfaced by the model, that gives me a much more concrete signal of intent than a registration number.
There are also limits to what I can — and want to — measure. I can see things like where registrations are coming from and engagement with messaging, but following what happens to a couple after that is much harder. They might start talking on REZYCO, move to another messenger, meet at the event, or continue completely outside the platform. And honestly, no dating product can guarantee what happens between two people :)
On trust and privacy, that has actually been a core part of REZYCO from the beginning. Registration doesn’t require a phone number or email, REZYCO doesn’t request precise geolocation, private conversations are end-to-end encrypted, and questionnaire answers are protected and kept separate from public profile information. Even I don’t have access to users’ private conversations.
But I really like your distinction between selling an organizer a “feature” and giving them a reason for people to come back. I hadn’t looked at the event partnership from that angle, and I’m going to think about it.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed comment.
That Message-click metric is exactly the right instinct — it's the first action that costs the user something (social risk), which makes it the closest thing to intent you can measure without following people off-platform. The honest limit you named is a feature, not a gap: any dating product that claims to measure 'what happens after' is either lying or surveilling.
One step further on the density question: track conversations per active user per week at the city level, not just clicks. Clicks can be curiosity; a reply back within 48 hours means the pool is actually liquid. That's the number that tells you whether a city is ready for the next event partnership.
And since trust is already core: make it loud. A public safety/transparency page — what you collect, what you can't see, how reporting works — is the thing that gets you press coverage and organizer partnerships in dating. Your competitors can't copy it with a feature; it's architecture.
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Yes — one thing surprised me quite a bit.
I expected the hardest part after launch to be simply finding users. But I’m realizing that the more interesting challenge is finding the right context for the product. For example, I’ve started talking to singles event organizers. Some immediately see why compatibility before an event could be interesting, while for others it goes completely against the experience they want to create.
I actually find that fascinating. The same idea can fit naturally with one organizer’s vision and go completely against another organizer’s philosophy — and both approaches can make sense for the experiences they’re trying to create.
So I’m learning that early distribution isn’t just “How do I get more people?” It’s also “Where does this product naturally belong?”
I didn’t think about it quite that way before launching :)
Good write-up. What would you do differently if you started again?
Oops — apparently I decided to answer that one in Russian first 😂 Here’s the English version:
Honestly, I think I’d do pretty much the same thing again :)
I deliberately wanted to build the product myself and have something real and working before trying to convince people that the idea made sense.
REZYCO didn’t require a huge financial investment to build — mostly a very large investment of my time (and probably an unreasonable number of hours staring at my screen 😄).
With an unusual idea, I think explaining it before it exists can sometimes be harder than actually building it. People hear the idea and naturally imagine their own version of it — which can be completely different from what you have in your head.
Now I can simply say: “Here it is. Try it. This is what I meant.”
And I actually love that.
Distribution is a whole new adventure now, and I’m learning as I go. But if I started again tomorrow, I’d still build the product first.
Ask me again in a year though — I may have a much longer list 😂
Если честно, думаю, я бы снова сделала практически всё так же :)
Я сознательно хотела сама создать продукт и иметь что-то реальное и работающее, прежде чем пытаться убедить людей, что эта идея имеет смысл.
Создание REZYCO не требовало огромных финансовых вложений — в основном очень больших вложений моего времени (и, вероятно, совершенно неразумного количества часов, проведённых перед экраном 😄).
Когда идея необычная, мне кажется, что объяснить её до того, как она существует, иногда сложнее, чем действительно её создать. Люди слышат идею и совершенно естественно представляют свою версию — которая может полностью отличаться от того, что находится у тебя в голове.
А теперь я могу просто сказать: «Вот он. Попробуйте. Вот что я имела в виду».
И мне это на самом деле очень нравится.
Теперь привлечение пользователей — это совершенно новое приключение, и я учусь по ходу дела. Но если бы завтра пришлось начинать сначала, я всё равно сначала создала бы продукт.
Хотя спросите меня ещё раз через год — возможно, тогда у меня будет гораздо более длинный список 😂
The city concentration approach is the right call for a compatibility product. Spreading early acquisition thin means nobody in any location reaches the threshold where the network starts generating its own gravity.
The singles events partnership angle is interesting because it solves the cold-start and the cold approach problem at the same time. Attendees have already said yes to the idea of meeting someone. They are pre-filtered by geography, availability, and intent. A compatibility preview before the in-person meeting is a hook that works specifically on that audience.
Tinder's campus-by-campus rollout is the classic template. They seeded by getting one side of the market into a contained space first. For you the contained space is the event itself. The question is what event partners get from the partnership beyond a feature benefit for their attendees. If the organiser gets something concrete, the outreach converts faster.
What cities are you targeting first, and how many event organizers have you had initial conversations with so far?
I haven’t locked in the first city yet. I did a very small first round of outreach — around 10 emails to event organizers — but didn’t get any responses. At that point I basically only had the REZYCO website to show them, so I don’t think that was enough to learn much from.
Now I’m thinking more carefully about the offer itself. Your point about what the organizer gets is exactly the part I’m trying to solve. For attendees, the value is easier to explain: after buying a ticket, they could use REZYCO before the event and potentially discover people there they’re compatible with.
But for the organizer, “this could be useful for your attendees” probably isn’t a strong enough reason on its own. So before doing a bigger outreach round, I want to make the pilot offer much clearer from their side too.
That’s actually one of the most useful things I’m getting from this discussion — it’s making me rethink how I approach the organizers.
Your instinct is right, but go narrower than a city. The unit of liquidity in dating is not a metro, it is one room on one night, so run a single event where every attendee is on the product before they walk in and count the matches made in that room. If it works you have a playbook you can sell to organizers, and if it does not you learned that for the price of one evening instead of a city launch.
I really like the “one room, one night” way of thinking about it.
My idea is actually to test this with an existing singles event rather than organize the event myself — attendees would get access to REZYCO before the event, and then I could see whether the compatibility results lead to actual interest and interaction.
If I can make one event work first, then I agree — that gives me something much more concrete to take to other organizers. Thanks, this is a really useful way to frame the first test.
Curious how long it took before you saw the first real results?
Honestly, I’m not there yet :) REZYCO only recently launched, so I’m still at the stage of getting the first users and testing different ways to reach them. That’s actually why I wrote this post — building the product turned out to be only half the challenge. I’ll definitely share what works (and what doesn’t) as I learn.
The city may be the acquisition boundary, but the event is probably the test unit. A city can accumulate registrations while every individual event stays too thin to create a useful match. I'd look for one event where the scarcer side reaches enough density for people to actually interact; that tells you more about the local wedge than the city's signup total. What would count as enough density for a first event?
That’s a good point. I honestly don’t know what “enough” looks like yet — I think that’s something the first pilot should help me figure out.
Right now I can track when someone clicks “Message.” Since users can only message people surfaced by the model, that gives me at least one real signal that they saw someone they actually wanted to talk to.
So I’d rather learn from that behavior than make up a number like “50 people is enough” before I have any real data.
And I really like your point about treating the event, not the city, as the test unit. I hadn’t thought about it quite that way. Thanks for the perspective — it gave me a different way to think about the first pilot.
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