I created this app for a few reasons:
For people interested in the last item, I will include a technical summary at the bottom of this page. For everyone else, I figured I would address the first item here.
I believe that modern dating apps do not have their users' best interests at heart. Most apps make their money from subscriptions where users pay a set amount every month for additional features. Because of this, apps are incentivized to keep users on the app for as long as possble. This is a conflict of interest because if users are using a dating app to find relationships, they want to get off the app as fast as possible.
When designing this app, I wanted to make sure that my interests were aligned with the interests of my users. Because my end goal is to help people find meaningful relationships--ones that ideally eventually lead to marriage--I knew the subscription model would not work. This goal led me to a couple of conclusions.
First, this app needs to be cheap to run. For the technically uninitiated, apps like this one need to be run on special computers that are running 24/7, called servers. Any computer can be used as a server, and if you use a server in the cloud (like on Amazon Web Services), you are charged based on how much you have that server do. Thus, to keep costs down you need to have a very efficient app. That is one of the reasons I chose to write this app in Rust, a very efficient, but difficult programming language. By having efficient code, I can use free server platforms to host this app. This reduces the overall need for any sort of funding, especially from subscriptions.
In the event this app gets big enough that I do need funding, I have considered asking for donations from successful users, having a business-sponsored date idea list, or a one-time purchase of the app. Each of these methods allows the app to be funded while keeping my interests aligned with my users. Asking for donations from successful users incentivizes me to help users be successful. Having a business-sponsored date idea list would get the app more funding when users go on dates, which is what users want. A one-time purchase of the app, while last in what I would want to do, prevents me from wanting to keep users on the app, thus keeping our priorities aligned.
Second, if my goal is to help people find meaningful and long lasting relationships, the app should be focused on matching people with whom they will likly be compatible. Other apps use "interest" tags or other similar profile attributes to let users decide. I wanted to take this a step further. Upon signing up for this app, each user takes the Big Five personality assessment. This assessment, to my knowledge, is the one with the most actual psycological research behind it and is more meaningful than astrology-for-guys (sorry, 16 Personalities). After completing the assessment, users are added to the potential list of people with whom they have similar personalities. From my preliminary testing, it seems that most couples are within 50 points cummulative distance from each other, so this is the cutoff value. Then, users can be assured that the people they are shown on their potentials page are people they would likely get along with.
Third, profile prompts/responses should be meaningful and focus on topics that are important to relatioships. To that end, I included prompts about:
This should help people find those with whom they are in agreement on these important topics. Additionally, to make sure that answers are actually detailed, I made each prompt require a 50 word length minimum. This will require that people put time and effort into their prompt responses.
I believe all of these features should help people find their HelpMeet :D
HelpMeet is written in Rust, using the Axum library, with a HTML/CSS/JS front-end. The database is currently in memory only and not persistent. That part is WIP. We are working on moving the front-end to ReactJS and the backend database to Supabase. The production version will be running on AWS Free Tier. Until then, it is running on my home lab :D