How I jumpstarted a tech industry dating app from scratch

Swoon (http://joinswoon.com/) is my tech industry dating app I've been hacking at on nights and weekends. I created the MVP in 2 weeks... I wrote it Angular and launched it on a free Heroku account. I haven't spent any money on it so far. Here's what it looks like:

At first, Swoon was a generic "date someone nearby" app but it wasn't different enough from the other major dating apps and so my target users (anybody who is single) didn't have a sense of why they should install it.

I was running out of friends and co-workers to have try my generic dating app when I realized I had a free stream of attractive strangers who were contacting me all week long: gorgeous recruiters from all around the Bay Area.

So, I "repackaged" my app being exclusively for the SF recruiting and tech market. To get the first wave of users, me and a few engineering friends customized a Gmail filter to automatically send a Google Labs "Canned Response" if someone emails me with the words "opportunity" and "recruiter", the filter is set to instantly return a reply email notifying them about the app and that it is designed for recruiters.

Due to the volume of job opportunities I get per week, this converts into about 25 virtually guaranteed impressions per day. It turns out most of the feedback I get from recruiters is positive!

In order to create ongoing user retention, I then created a singles match alert allowing users to be notified when someone is nearby them.

That seemed to work.. most of my traffic is now returning users:

At this stage, I have 50 daily active users. Though that's not a lot compared to Tinder, it's certainly not bad for a minimally viable product which has been in development for a few months and worked on by one coder.

Try Swoon at http://joinswoon.com/

For more information about swoon, email chris@joinswoon.com.