Team-M8tes

I just finished building Team-M8tes, a dating app for sports fans where fandom is the filter.

The basic idea: instead of only matching on generic dating-profile answers, users connect through the teams they actually ride with. Favorite teams say a lot about someone: loyalty, patience, heartbreak tolerance, rituals, weekends, travel, family traditions, rivalries, and how they spend their time.

One of the core mechanics is that users pick a limited number of teams based on their membership tier, and those teams lock permanently. The point is to keep the experience authentic and prevent people from jumping between teams just to chase matches. If you say you’re a Knicks fan, Bears fan, Arsenal fan, Lynx fan, etc., that should actually mean something.

The product has been a long road. I don’t come from a coding or IT background. I originally went down the outsourced app-builder path and got burned pretty badly when the company I was working with ran into major problems. For a while, I thought the project might be dead.

Then I started seeing what was possible with AI-assisted coding and decided to try pushing it forward myself.

That turned into a much bigger journey than I expected. I’ve been using AI to help me understand the codebase, rebuild features, debug issues, write product copy, create onboarding flows, design mock profiles, think through launch strategy, and even develop early ad/storyboard concepts.

It is not “AI built the whole thing while I watched.” It has been a grind. Lots of broken builds, confusing errors, false starts, and learning things I never expected to learn. But it also made me realize that a non-technical founder can now get much closer to a real product than would have been possible even a few years ago.

Team-M8tes is currently functional as a mobile-first web app. The bigger challenge now is not just building the product, but figuring out how to get the right early users into it. Dating apps need density, trust, and a reason to come back. Sports gives us a unique angle, but the launch still has to be handled carefully.

Some of the marketing angles I’m exploring:

• “Fandom is the filter.”

• “Would you date a rival fan?”

• “Same game, different sections.”

• “First date? Give it one period.”

• “Road game in Vegas? What are the odds?”

• “Missed your shot at the game? Get another chance at bat.”

I’m sharing this here because I think it sits at the intersection of a few Indie Hackers topics: building after a failed outsourcing experience, using AI as a non-technical founder, launching a consumer subscription product, and trying to solve the cold-start problem for a marketplace-style app.

I’d be curious how others would think about the early launch.

Would you start city-by-city around sports-heavy markets?
Would you focus on specific teams/leagues first?
Would you lean into the founder/AI-build story, the dating concept, or the sports-fan community angle?

Happy to hear any honest feedback.