Of course building an iPhone app and API aren’t free.  They’re complicated projects, and require some very specific skills sets.  Here are some explanations of how we’re making Date.fm happen without initial investments or capital.  

Costs

We do have one very critical expense, and that is our database.  We need it to be fast and reliable, and that costs money.  We’re using a dedicated PostgreSQL database instance on Heroku. Alternately, a shared database would run the risk of down time to upgrade or slow response times if another application beyond our control was sucking up resources.  Since the database speed is usually the performance bottleneck, we feel that if we’re going to spend money anywhere, it should be here.  

The design could have certainly been expensive.  We feel very strongly about having professional marketing materials and design, but since we have that talent in-house, we were able to build our initial promotional video, animated logo and other design elements without spending money.  

The development obviously took time, and we’ve been taking on contract development work for our “day job”, then working crazy hours to bring this project to life.  Being freelance iOS developers can be difficult enough: getting yourself out there, finding projects and so on.  We don’t want to understate the level of sacrifice it takes to create something like this.  And that includes having some very understanding partners.

Revenue

We currently have about 20 apps in the app store.  While Date.fm is still growing, we can use some of this app revenue to pay expenses.  Once Date.fm gains traction, we hope its ad revenue will offset our expenses and make a profit.

Advertising

We currently have six free iOS apps in the App Store which contain iAds, along with AdMob ads to increase our fill rate.  Once we launch, we’re going to remove these banners, and replace them with a Date.fm banner for a promotional period.  

One of our apps, FaceJack Free, has been downloaded over 30,000 times and continues to have steady daily downloads.  It’s main demographic is ages 25-34, which should be great for Date.fm.  We get this data through Facebook Insights, since we allow users to share FaceJack videos through our Facebook app. 

We also have several educational apps, so we’ll have a nice range of potential users to market to.  

Of course we’ll temporarily lose the potential revenue from these ads, but this is a huge marketing channel at our disposal.  While we’re running this promotion, the paid apps will shoulder Date.fm’s financial burden.  

We are also advertising on our website Screencasts.org, which receives a solid amount of monthly traffic.

In Conclusion

We see a lot of companies sink huge amounts of money into projects before they ever see the light of day.  This isn’t always bad, but as developers, we have the huge advantage of spending our own time and talent on projects instead of money.  And having the independence from investors means we’re in control of our product’s future.

Date.fm is available now for free in the App Store.  Download it now.