Date.fm

Be sure to download the latest version of date.fm from the App Store, now updated for iOS 7.1!  Download here.

Date.fm co-founder Andrew Chalkley says that Heroku has been integral in bringing his company from the red and into the black in just six months.

“Heroku enables us, as a very lean startup. We’re not venture-backed. We’re not going into debt, we’re financing everything through our app development,” says Chalkley. “We didn’t want to go down the route of traditional hosting because we didn’t want to deal with scaling up the traditional way. We know that if and when we need it, we can scale our architecture with relative ease compared to the traditional way of doing things.”

Check it out! 

eHarmony Love Doctor, we know you have a foolproof matching formula. But there is something seriously missing from the magic equation that has worked pretty well since the dawn of time: the spark check. Photos, asynchronous messages and “winks” all have their place in the online dating scene, but our partner Date.fm is taking it one step further.

They realized that the real-world dating cues are totally lost in translation when you bring the experience online. Face-to-face interaction is important. Primarily to verify there is a spark, and secondarily to verify that their Prince Charming, who looks like Brad Pitt in his profile picture, doesn’t actually look more like Willem Dafoe. No offense to anyone who finds Willem Dafoe attractive.

Get.fm is featuring Date.fm as one of their success stories!  They also list Date.fm as one of their 'spotlights' on the homepage!

Date.fm co-creator Andrew Chalkley will be on The Peter Levy Show on BBC Radio Humberside today after 1PM BST.

We might already be ruffling some feathers in the online dating industry.

Firstly, before launch we wrote a blog post, put up our initial marketing video and got some interest generated via hacker news. A well established dating company contacted us to offer to buy us out before launch. All they'd seen was our promo video and blog post. Hadn't used the app, just liked the idea. We politely declined.

Fast forward to today and we're publicising that Date.fm is now the first video chat dating app. We got covered for the first time in the major tech press on GigaOM. No one has ever before integrated live video chat in an app and made it so easy for people to connect and verify who they're speaking to on the other end. This is revolutionary.

Date.fm also received a review on iTunes today for our current version 1.1.2, from a guy called "Bostonian", and this is what he said:

"No gay fellas in Boston. Lame.

The design itself is simply alright. The video chat feature is cool, but it's a paid extra."

That's a complete and utter fabrication. Date.fm is free to use, there is no In-App purchase, no cost to download, it's completely funded via iAds and is completely free to the end user. Not only is it inaccurate with regard to our business model, it also is untrue that there are no gay fellas in Boston on our service. There are!

Maybe a disgruntled competitor doesn't like what we've set out to achieve and are resorting to spreading missinformation through a fake review.  Who knows.

Apple doesn't seem to have an easy way to remedy this other than filing a "Report a Concern" link in iTunes.

We're happy to announce that Date.fm has become the first video chat dating app in the world.

Working with TokBox, the provider of the OpenTok iOS SDK, we were able to integrate video chat directly in to our app and become the first in the App Store to utilize the SDK. We think it provides great value to our members and will revolutionize how people will interact with potential partners, adding a level of safety and real life interaction not seen in any other dating service.

Press coverage

Date.fm now includes language localizations for Chinese (simplified), French and Spanish!  So if you have your iPhone set to one of these languages, Date.fm will automatically display the app's text in your language.  If you have Date.fm installed, be sure to update to the latest version.

We've just pushed an update for Date.fm v1.0.2, and we're currently featured in the large image "new" space at the top of App Store Social Networking Front Page for iPhone!  To see it, open iTunes then click on 'Social Networking' under the App Store tab.  

Our user base is growing nicely each day!

Of course building an iPhone app and API aren't free.  They're complicated projects, and require some very specific skills sets.  Here are some explanations of how we're making Date.fm happen without initial investments or capital.  

Costs

We do have one very critical expense, and that is our database.  We need it to be fast and reliable, and that costs money.  We’re using a dedicated PostgreSQL database instance on Heroku. Alternately, a shared database would run the risk of down time to upgrade or slow response times if another application beyond our control was sucking up resources.  Since the database speed is usually the performance bottleneck, we feel that if we’re going to spend money anywhere, it should be here.  

The design could have certainly been expensive.  We feel very strongly about having professional marketing materials and design, but since we have that talent in-house, we were able to build our initial promotional video, animated logo and other design elements without spending money.  

The development obviously took time, and we've been taking on contract development work for our "day job", then working crazy hours to bring this project to life.  Being freelance iOS developers can be difficult enough: getting yourself out there, finding projects and so on.  We don't want to understate the level of sacrifice it takes to create something like this.  And that includes having some very understanding partners.

Revenue

We currently have about 20 apps in the app store.  While Date.fm is still growing, we can use some of this app revenue to pay expenses.  Once Date.fm gains traction, we hope its ad revenue will offset our expenses and make a profit.

Advertising

We currently have six free iOS apps in the App Store which contain iAds, along with AdMob ads to increase our fill rate.  Once we launch, we’re going to remove these banners, and replace them with a Date.fm banner for a promotional period.  

One of our apps, FaceJack Free, has been downloaded over 30,000 times and continues to have steady daily downloads.  It's main demographic is ages 25-34, which should be great for Date.fm.  We get this data through Facebook Insights, since we allow users to share FaceJack videos through our Facebook app. 

We also have several educational apps, so we'll have a nice range of potential users to market to.  

Of course we’ll temporarily lose the potential revenue from these ads, but this is a huge marketing channel at our disposal.  While we're running this promotion, the paid apps will shoulder Date.fm's financial burden.  

We are also advertising on our website Screencasts.org, which receives a solid amount of monthly traffic.

In Conclusion

We see a lot of companies sink huge amounts of money into projects before they ever see the light of day.  This isn't always bad, but as developers, we have the huge advantage of spending our own time and talent on projects instead of money.  And having the independence from investors means we're in control of our product's future.

Click here to watch a video to see how it works

When designing Date.fm, we spent a lot of time weeding out bad ideas and planning for potential pitfalls.  What things might go wrong, and how can we prevent them?  We figured out what we wanted to do, and began planning to make sure our service could withstand misuse and abuse.  Even if an initial idea is great, it can be diluted by low-quality data or unnecessary complexity.  In this article we're going to share some pieces of Date.fm that we think are key to making it a quality product.   

1. Users Must Have a Photo 

We’ve spoken to a lot of people who have used “big name” dating services, and we commonly heard that profiles without images were very undesirable.  We feel that requiring a user's image is an important standard for Date.fm.

2. Face Detection Ensures Exactly One Face In Each User Photo

We’ve implemented new face detection software built into the iOS 5 SDK, which allows us to see if a user has actually taken a picture of a face for their profile image  (We don't store face detection data, it's just for validation purposes).  If no face is detected, we reject the image, and ask them to please take a clear picture of themselves.  If we detect more than one face in the image, we also reject it, and ask them to make sure they're the only person in the picture.  So without ongoing human intervention, we've ensured a level of quality with all profile images.

3. Date.fm is iOS Only

We always wanted Date.fm to be an iOS app. But we also discussed building a separate web client, later deciding against it, at least for now. If we open up the app to anyone with a web browser, we feel that the bar is too low for potential troublemakers.  With an iOS-only app, we limit the app's environment to iOS devices.  Simply taking the service off of the desktop significantly reduces the potential for scripted abuse.  

What about Android?  Well first, we're iOS developers, and don't currently have the in-house skill necessary to rapidly develop an Android client alongside the iOS client.  But additionally, we're using several key iOS features that would need to be mirrored on other platforms before we'd expand to them.  We may entertain development on Android and Windows Phone platforms if iOS is successful enough to warrant the expansion.

4. Location Data Collected via GPS

Since Date.fm is iOS only, we use each device’s GPS location to generate a user's city and state (which is the only information that is publicly shared).  Location data is required to create an account.  This prevents users from entering untruthful location information, and again increases the quality of user data for everyone.

5. iOS Environment & Match System Discourage Mass Messaging

Another iOS-only advantage is that it makes copy-and-paste mass messaging more difficult.  Copy and pasting the same chat message to many matches would be time consuming in iOS, and someone would only be able to send these messages to someone they like, who also likes them back.   Similarly, if you simply want to 'like'  every person that appears in your results (and who knows, maybe you really do!), you're still going to have to tap 'like' for each picture.  We hope these attributes will help increase the quality of user actions, and make them feel more genuine for the users receiving them.  

6. No Hyperlinks Allowed in Chat

Our chat doesn’t allow tappable hyperlinks, which eliminates common spamming where fake users send messages asking others to open a link.  An extra-gullible user who received a spam link would have to copy and paste the link out of the chat and into a browser (using the iOS copy and paste). And knowing how unlikely it is for users to do this, we think it will deter potential spammers from trying this trick in the first place.

7. Admin Tools and Flagging

We’ve also implemented an admin interface to review flagging, and automatically ‘hide’ users from the app if they’ve received a certain number of flags.  We can then review offenders and decide to ban them or not.  This is all pretty standard, but we definitely need a way to monitor and deal with inappropriate behavior.

8. Push Notifications Instead of Emails

Date.fm communicates with its users exclusively through push notifications to logged in devices.  We don’t send any emails, except when a password needs to be reset.  This keeps users instantly up-to-date when they want to be, and helps reduce clutter in the inbox.

In Conclusion

We think keeping Date.fm simple with quality user data will be key to its success.  With the choices listed above, we hope to encourage genuine human interactions and provide a great experience for all as our user base grows.  We hope you’ll give it a try and see for yourself.  Date.fm is available now for free in the App Store.  Download it now.  

Click here to watch a video on how Date.fm works 

Most people don't like online dating.  It’s an odd, unnatural process, it usually costs money, and feels really embarrassing.  What to do?

Here at Secret Monkey Science, we think we're now fairly savvy at iOS development, having built around 30 apps for the App Store.  We've had some relative success with FaceJack, and our Dinosaur Fun! app sells pretty steadily.  We’ve also worked on a lot of social stuff, and have learned plenty from these experiences.  We know how to wear a lot of hats, and know how to build a really solid service on a shoestring budget.   

The Current Online Dating Landscape

We chatted about why we disliked the popular dating sites, and why we felt most people would never use them.  Could we do better?  Would it be worth the effort?  

We thought about how most people meet.  Generally, a person will see someone, be attracted to them, and then approach to say hello.  If the other person is interested, a conversation might follow.  From there, it’s in these two individuals’ hands, and up to them to see if it’s a good fit.  

By allowing a dating service to sift through users based on an extensive list of criteria, you're doing something that rarely has a counterpart in the real world.  It can be argued that this sifting is beneficial for some users, but they could also be throwing out many potential matches that might have flourished in real world scenarios.  How many people have met others from different religions, and still fallen in love?  Or met people who smoked, who later gave it up for their partner?  We'd like to think that a simpler format such as Date.fm allows for these issues to get worked out naturally, if users are willing to invest the time and energy to get to know someone. 

Fix it

We started discussing how we might “fix” it.  What might most people want out of a dating app?  We think it’s simple:  They want to meet people who they’re interested in, who are also interested in them, and then have a way of starting a conversation.  And they want it to be really easy. And free.  

Maybe we could do for online dating what Twitter did for blogging, a sort of “micro-dating.”

Planning our new app

Here’s what we decided to build:  An app where users create an account with the bare-bones basics (location/age/looking for ages/pic).  

Users go through a stack of pictures, and like or dislike them.  When you like someone they’ll get a notification.  They can like you back if they want, and that creates a “match.”  The 'chat' tab in the app provides an SMS-like chat interface for each match, where users can strike up a conversation and get to know each other.  

We’re taking a difficult part of the dating process, the ‘finding out if you’re interested in each other’ part, and putting it into a painless app.  And as soon as a “match” is made, you can start a conversation and let it progress naturally:  you can reveal information about yourself as you feel comfortable.  Maybe take the conversation to a phone call, video chat or a coffee shop.  

Building a user base

For several reasons we decided to build a completely isolated ecosystem.  But who wants to use a “dating service” if no one’s in it?  We realized that the inclusion of push notifications would really help get things rolling.  Here’s how:  'User Zero' creates their account, and no one’s in it.  Bummer.  But they’ve created their account now and will receive notifications if signed in.  When a potential match signs up, sees User Zero and likes them, User Zero gets a push notification.  They can then like or dislike this person, and if it’s a match, maybe strike up a chat.  The app improves and offers more potential matches as more people create accounts.  

Free

The app has to be totally free.  But some revenue needs to be generated to offset server costs and other expenses.   So we’ve integrated an iAd bar (which can alternately load an AdMob bar when iAds fail) to generate revenue.  

In Conclusion

We're hopeful.  There are a ton of online dating apps and services out there, but we think that shouldn't deter us from trying to do a dating app right, when we feel that the other services are truly broken.