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.”
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.
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 think this review, like our early buy-out offer, is a good indicator we’re on the right track. Watch this space.
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.
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.
Our user base is growing quickly, be sure to tell your friends. We have quite a few cool new things in the works, so watch this space for more news!
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.
We’ve just released an update for Date.fm (v1.0.1), and we wanted to post a quick reminder to please update the app. This fixes a problem we had with push notifications, so it’s highly recommended for all users. Once you’ve installed the update, please log out (on the ‘me’ tab) then log back in again. This should enable push notifications on your device. We also wanted to take a minute to thank all of you for being the very first users of Date.fm. Launching a new service like this can be daunting, but we feel very strongly about providing an independent ecosystem for meeting new people, and did not want to piggyback on another service or integrate with other social networks. As our userbase grows, you’ll start seeing more potential matches in your search results. We’re growing each day, and as more of our users tell their friends, who then tell their friends, we’ll all be building something very special together.
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.
Check it out! 
