Serhiy Taran, a resident of Kharkiv, created a dating service for IT specialists, DateCoders. The idea to create such a product was born from the desire to help a developer friend who could not find «his person» in ordinary dating applications.
Serhiy Taran, a resident of Kharkiv, created a dating service for IT specialists, DateCoders. The idea to create such a product was born from the desire to help a developer friend who could not find «his person» in ordinary dating applications.
«My friend is a great specialist, but his personal life wasn’t going well. He wanted to find someone with whom he could be on the same wavelength: discuss tasks and deadlines, go to a conference together, or share the joy of a solved problem. It’s difficult to share the joy of a solved problem with someone who is quite far from IT. It was almost impossible to find such a „soulmate“ on well-known dating services,» says Serhiy.
How IT people get to know each other — without any strings attached, through common interests and professional backgrounds — Serhiy told dev.ua.
Serhiy started the development on his own — a former developer, now a business analyst, he decided to do everything on his own. «For me, it wasn’t a difficult task. It was more of a pet project, I was working on it in my free time. In a few months, I created the main functionality of DateCoders — registration, member cards, search, messaging,» Serhiy says.
The Aitov resident was eager to launch his startup as soon as possible to understand whether this idea had the right to life. It turned out that the idea was of interest to the community, but there was still work to be done and how to improve the service. And after the launch, he invited a familiar developer to the team, who redesigned the main page. After that, the number of new users began to grow steadily.
The development of the service required almost no costs from the founders — only basic costs for hosting and domain. «All the code and design were done in-house,» Serhiy emphasizes. Despite this, without any advertising costs, the service reached the top of Google for queries like «IT dating» and similar ones.
«This shows that the platform has enormous potential. If it gets funding for marketing, the service can quickly reach a wide audience,» the startuper shares.
The application interface is as intuitive as possible. The user registers, specifies the city, age, and who they are looking for, and must add a photo, each of which is checked manually by the administrator).
«We can’t guarantee that the photos are real, but even so, it’s better than random pictures. Most users actually upload their real photos, and this is visible during moderation,» says Taran.
In the future, the team plans to introduce verified user status — which can be obtained through LinkedIn to increase the credibility of the profile.
Currently, the service has a little over 100 registered users. «This is our main challenge — it’s difficult to scale without funding. But even without advertising, people find us and register. Of course, you can create the illusion of rapid activity and add thousands of bot profiles to the system. But we don’t add bots in principle — we have a small but real and relevant audience,» says Serhiy.
According to Taran, this is just the beginning, and the number is only a matter of time: there are already over 18 million IT users in the world, and this number is growing rapidly.
The service is currently completely free. Premium accounts with additional features will appear later, but the basic functionality will remain open. «We want to create a community, not just another Tinder for IT people. If we find partners and get support from experienced market players, the service can grow to a million-strong audience,» says Taran.
Serhiy is open to investments and partnerships with companies in the dating and technology sectors. You can register for the service here .
