firedating

I am building https://firedating.me/. This is a community of people interested into FIRE (Financial Independence / Early Retirement) & looking for friends / romantic partner. My goal is to decrease amount of loneliness in the FIRE community by helping people to build meaningful relationships.

I was looking for projects to do and this one seemed quite obvious, but at the same time FIRE folks are extremely frugal, so this couldn't be a for-profit project. I decided to try it as a passion project instead.

Kickstarting the community was a challenge - definitely experienced chicken & egg problem, but eventually reached critical mass.

https://firedating.me/ - the first and only community of FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) enthusiasts looking for friends and/or romantic partner. This is my passion project - it is 100% free and there are even no ads.

1) people - everyone knows what FIRE is and more financially minded than an average person 2) profile questions - some are FIRE related and can matter greatly for FIRE folks, e.g. fat vs lean FIRE 3) design - no swiping, incentivizing talking to people today instead of waiting for a perfect match

https://firedating.me/ - the first and only dating website for FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) community. It is cool, because it dramatically affects people lives, e.g. I am aware of multiple couples marrying as a result of meeting through the site. Looking forward to FireDating babies :)

I am working on https://firedating.me/ - a community for FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) enthusiasts seeking friendships and/or romantic relationships.

This passion project of mine aims to decrease the feeling of loneliness within the FIRE community. The site is 100% free and doesn't even have ads.

The site will soon be 4 years old.

The stats are public - https://firedating.me/open/

My current goal is to reduce friction & to reactivate people who signed up, but stopped using the site.

I am working on firedating.me - a community of people interested into Financial Independence / Early Retirement (FIRE), who look for friends and/or partner. FIRE people rarely advertise they are into FIRE for many reasons: - at work this sends a message "I will leave soon" and may have repercussions - socially this might be perceived as "I am rich" or "I am retiring early" = weird and crazy.

As a result, it is hard to meet other FIRE people. At the same time, this interest defines lots of their life - they are usually frugal & save a lot, so dating non-FIRE people is also a challenge. That's why I made the website and my goal is to reduce loneliness in the FIRE community.

I am working on firedating.me - a community of people interested into Financial Independence / Early Retirement (FIRE), who look for friends and/or partner.

FIRE people rarely advertise they are into FIRE for many reasons: - at work this sends a message "I will leave soon" and may have repercussions - socially this might be perceived as "I am rich" or "I am retiring early" = weird and crazy.

As a result, it is hard to meet other FIRE people. At the same time, this interest defines lots of their life - they are usually frugal & save a lot, so dating non-FIRE people is also a challenge. That's why I made the website and my goal is to reduce loneliness in the FIRE community.

I wouldn't call it 'advertising', but I do mention it in FIRE subreddits every now and then. r/financialindependence is (understandably) super strict about self promotion, but the existing users mention the site in comments there. Thank you!

Thank you!

These days I am doing my best to know what users want, but it gets harder and harder. Previously I could talk to 1-2 users and already get a lot of insight. Nowadays there are often conflicting requests or just too many of them. I think this is the price of growth. Still didn't figure out how to scale this well. The stats are public, by the way, https://firedating.me/open/ :)

I've spent 9 hours coding firedating.me (my hobby project and community of people interested in FIRE (Financial Independence / Early Retirement) looking for friends and a partner).

Features: 1) Searching for multiple specific genders. Previously this was only 'one gender' or 'any'. However, often people want to search for 'one gender' + Non-Binary. Unfortunately, the code didn't support the new functionality well, so I had to refactor a lot (especially tests). Now it should be much easier to maintain though.

2) Searching by children preferences (whether their matches have and want children). This just reused logic from (1).

Overall, it is surprising how much complexity there can be in a dating site :)

React.

I've been developing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27627381 using Django and its templates for UI. This became unmanageable fast. These days there are wonderful volunteers, who help me. We've chosen React for the UI and I learn it to be able to contribute to and maintain the new UI.

https://firedating.me/ - a community of FIRE (financial independence, early retirement) enthusiasts looking for friends and a partner. Stats are public: https://firedating.me/open/.

Thank you! I posted on r/leanfire, r/fatfire is on the list :) Unfortunately I wasn't able to reach out to r/fire moderators.

It is interesting that so many people think of gold diggers, but so far this haven't been a problem (there is a way to report users and the number of reports is very small).

My impression is that FIRE folks are not that good of target. But I understand that this could become more of a problem when the site grows and I have couple ideas how I could tackle it then.

I am interested. I can't find any way to reach out to you, please reach out to me via https://firedating.me/feedback. Thank you!

I don't want to artificially slow down the users, so I am considering donations. This would align my incentives with the users' the most. There is a vague idea to use financial contribution as a way to validate account and seriousness. Some people are extremely serious about their search. They can feel frustrated by the people, who spend less effort. I could make some "super serious" club with profile moderation and some contribution.

I am working on https://firedating.me - a dating site for FIRE (Financial Independence / Early Retirement) enthusiasts. One can also look for friends there. The stats are public: https://firedating.me/open

The site is 100% free and even ad-free. It is my hobby project and I just enjoy helping others, meeting interesting people and learning while developing it.

Looks like loneliness is widespread in the FIRE community especially during the current times, so there is a large demand for meeting like minded folks.

It took me at least 517 hours and 211$ so far, but I met a lot of people and learned so much. It definitely gets harder and harder to continue developing it on my own, since the code base and complexity grows. But I try to fight that and use more ready-made solutions.

I think most often 'retiring' is not meant literally. In other words, one does not work at an ordinary job anymore, but they pursue other endeavors. They might even 'work' more after 'retiring'. It is true that FIRE does not buy happiness, but it is a nice tool if for example you like your hobby more than the current job.

I am developing firedating.me using Django. It is a community of FIRE (Financial Independence / Early Retirement) enthusiasts looking for friends and a partner. Unfortunately the FIRE community is very dispersed and one can feel very lonely. So I made this site to help people build meaningful connections.

I am actually a huge fan of Django. It boosts my productivity a lot. The only minor issue I experience is that the way POST forms and templates work biases how I make UI. I.e. all UIs tend to be very page oriented - 1 page = 1 form - and some logic is leaking into templates. As a result, my UIs feel too coupled with the backend and this makes them harder to support. I am considering writing a separate frontend treating the backend as a blackbox instead. Wondering whether anyone experienced something similar.

I am working on firedating.me - a community of FIRE (Financial Independence/ Early Retirement) enthusiasts looking for friendships and love. All stats are public: https://firedating.me/open.

I think if you have intrinsic motivation to work on your hobbies, it won't feel like work and you will find a way (unless you are actually extremely exhausted - then the fix is to rest). 'I feel like I’m missing that spark' sounds like you don't believe that working on that project is beneficial.

http://mindingourway.com/guilt/ helped me to discover my intrinsic motivation. But you might end up doing something else instead of your original hobby.

I disagree that pursuing financial independence is a false pursuit.

"Financial independence" != "independence from the society". No one claims to be independent of the society. One just does not have to earn money anymore.

I agree that money are worthless without places to spend them and someone producing stuff to buy. This does not make financial independence less useful though.

I've been very busy lately with my hobby project - https://firedating.me/. It is a community of people interested in FIRE (Financial Independence / Early Retirement), who are looking for friends and a romantic partner. The stats are public: https://firedating.me/open.

To be honest, I am not sure whether engineering is a bottle neck as of now. Site's functionality has actually pretty much converged and it already works. Full blown open sourcing seems like a large endeavor and I just spend 1.5 hours a day. I tried finding collaborators, but unfortunately people just get busy with time and don't contribute. If you are interested to collaborate (Django/Python) or have specific ideas/advice on open sourcing, I would appreciate to discuss more (https://firedating.me/feedback).

My previous experience was that it was taking more of my time to collaborate than to do stuff on my own. I agree that this might change and that's why I am open to explore :)

I've got an idea during a FIRE meetup, so there was already initial interest (~10 people). Once I had the site running, I made a post on Reddit and people just joined. In 1.5 months around 500 users joined (there is a graph here: https://firedating.me/open/). It was indeed a chicken and an egg problem, because a dating site without users provides 0 value. Fortunately, people joined even despite this. Nowadays, it is much easier. Just saying "we are 2800 users" is already much more convincing.

Happy dating and let the FIRE be in your heart!

Thank you!

I value transparency and happily share stats and why I make specific decisions.

I've got an idea of such "open" page from levelsio's https://nomadlist.com/open.

I personally perceived this as a signaling to female users to motivate them to join more. But the way you phrase this is also interesting.

To be fair, the ratio was not public at the very beginning.

I agree, I was also assuming a worse ratio. However, I tried comparing this with other dating sites and they report better ratios. At the same time, I suspect that FIRE community might be biased towards males (even though I heard that majority of Mr Money Mustache followers are women).

To be honest, everyone was always asking for this. I already had a public stats page back then, so it was very easy to just include it there (to save my time calculating this manually).