How to launch a dating app in 8 days

When building a new platform or app, enterprises traditionally faced investing time, money, and other resources into software development.

Whether using skilled in-house workers or bringing on board extra developers, coding can pose significant challenges for branching out — but generative AI (GenAI) could be set to change all of that.

AI platforms such as ChatGPT enable developers to launch new platforms and apps with record speed while easing budget concerns.

Take David Minns, for example, who runs a dating platform with over 600,000 global users. Minns, who has worked as a programmer in the dating industry since 2007, claims that the premium version of ChatGPT has enabled him to launch an Android version of his Greed Dating platform in just eight days.

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Not only has the OpenAI LLM saved him from hiring the equivalent of “two software developers,” he tells TechInformed, but it has also provided him with business and marketing support.

According to Minns, the launch of Greed Dating’s Android app is a proof-of-concept for the industry.“ AI can now assist in nearly every aspect of the development process, from creating basic app functionality to debugging and optimising code,” he enthused.

End of handwritten code

Greed Dating combines several dating niches under a single app — with the LLM allowing Minns to easily roll out new segments.

Some of the niche dating sites include Butterfly, a dating site for transgender people; Lisa50, a site for women over fifty; Bad Boys, described as “for the Alpha male”; and Dinky1, a site created for gentlemen with a below-average penis size, which Minns claims has now amassed 180,000 members.

Its foundations were built over many years through the manual development of the web platform, with the backend powered by PHP and MySQL.

Later, Greed expanded into mobile with a hand-coded iOS app written in Swift, which was developed entirely in-house using traditional methods.

This manual process, while effective, came with challenges, Minns notes. The programmer-turned-entrepreneur added that learning and mastering new programming languages, such as Swift, slowed the iOS development cycle.

As the project grew, Minns realised that continuing along the same path for the Android app would take additional time and increase costs.

“As a solo entrepreneur, to have any additional developers is costly, and knowledge transfer is difficult because all my code is written in my head — explaining a quarter of a million lines of code to someone else is challenging,” he explained.

Android: AI-assisted development

Minns decided to take the plunge and embrace AI for its Android app development. By using ChatGPT, Minns claimed that he could bypass the traditional, time-consuming methods of coding from scratch.

Instead of learning a new programming language or outsourcing the task, Minns used AI to write the code in the cross-platform development framework Flutter, using Microsoft’s integrated development environment, Visual Studio.

He explains: “With ChatGPT, I asked the AI to develop each section of the Android app step by step.

“Not only did it generate working code, but it also helped fix bugs and improve the app on the fly. It was like having an expert developer on hand, 24/7.”

Minns adds: “I’ve been using AI for 12 months, and it offers groundbreaking functions for developers. Even if you are vague on the first and last line of code, it will fill all the gaps in between — you can cut and paste that into the development environment, and it becomes easy.”

According to Minns, he was able to ask the AI to hunt out security failures and software–bugs, “which it does brilliantly”.

Legal, marketing and sales tasks

In addition, Minns adds that he was also able to use ChatGPT to generate name ideas for new sites and to help with trademark applications.

“We applied for trademarks for the name in all the main territories. We received rejections in some EU territories and used ChatGPT to find EU laws to argue our case. ChatGPT is strong in areas such as law, as well as software development,” he explains.

To avoid hallucinations, Minns suggested that users prompt GPT to find out whether it has any sources to corroborate the information that it initially offers.

To enhance sales, Minns also uploaded a picture of the site’s payment page and asked for ‘10 ways to improve sales conversation rates. “It will show you what’s working or not for your business,” he says.

Minns said that the decision to use AI resulted in a dramatically shortened development cycle, taking him just eight days to build the Android app, which would previously have taken around three months.

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Minns believes that AI tools will undoubtedly reshape how apps are built in the future and that Greed Dating’s experience with AI-assisted development is an exciting indicator of this.

Minns concludes: “For $20 a month, I’m not doing the work equivalent to hiring a couple of software developers and/or a marketer. In the future, I think we will see fewer traditional coders and more ‘conductors’ or ‘directors’ who guide AI in building out complex systems.”