Вікторія Горбік Startup 16 May 2025, 09:00

“Often, a friend or girlfriend of an acquaintance, whom you didn’t know about before, can turn out to be interesting people.” The developer used ChatGPT to create a dating site for “normal people.” How does Normis work?

Oleksandr Viter has been writing code for 11 years, having worked in various companies from giants of the Ukrainian market SoftServe and Luxoft to small startups that most IT specialists have never even heard of. Recently, the IT specialist launched his own project Normis — a dating site, but not for everyone, but only for ordinary people, normies, as they are called on the Internet. Artificial intelligence became the main assistant in creating his own project for the developer. My colleague Oleg Onoprienko and I learned from Oleksandr what prompted him to create a dating site, how the project is developing, and who and when will be able to find their soulmate on the site.

The fourth, which could become the first

The founder of the Normis project, Oleksandr Viter, spent most of his life in Mykolaiv, and has been living in Odessa since 2018. It was in Mykolaiv that he received two higher educations at the Admiral Makarov National Shipbuilding University — engineering and economics.

«I was always attracted to these two things — technology and money. I couldn’t decide which I liked more, so I decided to professionally understand both areas,» the developer recalls.

Oleksandr Viter, startuper and experienced Python developer (Photo from personal archive)

Normis is not the first project he has created. Back in his student days, Oleksandr was the founder of the intellectual games club «Sad Kameniv» in Mykolaiv, but unfortunately it did not gain enough visitors to become profitable. After moving to Odessa, the developer created two more projects — a Telegram bot for cryptocurrency trading and a YouTube channel Cassandra Tales with short films generated using AI. Both projects showed some success, but faced difficulties in scaling.

«So Normis is the fourth project I’m creating from scratch, and I hope it will be more successful than the previous three,» says Oleksandr Viter.

Synthesis of the personal and the universal

Oleksandr says that the idea for the project came to him when he first encountered difficulties in finding romantic relationships. His analytical mind immediately seized on the opportunity to understand the patterns of such situations. And the developer began interviewing many people about their experience of finding warm communication on sites and platforms.

«Listening to hundreds of stories about failed dates or bad experiences from my friends, acquaintances, and just strangers on the Internet, I realized that existing dating services have significant shortcomings,» he recalls.

The key shortcomings were:

many inadequate people,
insufficient information about the person in their profile,
a strong discrepancy between how a person looks in the photo and in reality,
There is a big difference between what people write as dating goals and actual dating goals.

This prompted Oleksandr to create a dating service with two main features:

The ability to register only after receiving a personal invitation: that is, to get on the platform, you need to be known by one of the organizers or one of the other registered users.
The ability to leave reviews about people you’ve dated or just chatted with.
To gather «normal people» in one place, given the complaints of many visitors to dating sites and apps about the presence of a large number of inappropriate people there.

Oleksandr immediately chose the idea for the project name — Normis, the meaning of which he wanted to put into the project. This is the term used on the Internet to refer to ordinary people who live by the generally accepted norms of society and do not stand out in anything. In another sense, normies are those who do not actively spend time on the Internet, but choose to live offline. It took him about 80 hours to create the MVP platform, if we count only the time dedicated to the project. But due to other things, these 80 hours stretched out for 3 months, because there was only time in the evenings and on weekends, and even then not always.

Search connection

Currently, users can receive an invitation to register on Normis, view other users' profiles, and invite people from the same environment to join the community, which, according to Oleksandr, is one of the main ideas.

«Everyone is in more or less the same social circle, and often a friend or girlfriend of your acquaintance, whom you didn’t know about before, can turn out to be interesting and suitable people,» he explains.

Users can also filter other people on the platform by age, location, and whether their profile includes links to social networks — Instagram, Telegram, and LinkedIn. Oleksandr Viter finds the latter particularly interesting, because on LinkedIn itself, posts are often made that say, «LinkedIn is not a place to find romantic relationships,» or, conversely, «Why LinkedIn still won’t add the Open to relationship feature.» After all, you can learn a lot from a person’s LinkedIn profile — their profession, education, interests, and even their communication style based on comments and posts.

«My current girlfriend and I just met in the comments under a post on LinkedIn,» the developer says.

«No, thank you, we’re out of the way.»

One of the most important features of the site, according to the developer, is the ability to leave personal reviews and read them about other people. That is, for example, a person may have a minimally completed profile, but they could go on several dates and receive several reviews from other people. You can read this and also learn a lot about a person before starting communication.

«It is important to note that the same things can be a red flag or a green flag for different people,» Oleksandr is sure.

He gives an example of someone being a big fan of tattoos, and for someone even one small tattoo on a person’s body is an automatic: «No, thank you, we’re not on the same page.» Or children from previous partners — for some it’s a problem, for some it’s not. Or a passion for motorsports. That is, the developer emphasizes that you should treat other people’s reviews subjectively, assessing whether what is described is right for you. «If someone wrote that 'on the first date, a guy rode me on a motorcycle, and I hate it,' and you, on the contrary, are looking for a biker — then this is a positive review, not a negative one, from your point of view,» he explains.

In addition, according to the developer, the closeness of everyone to everyone will be another additional filter so that people choose softer wording for their reviews and do not pour mud on each other. Oleksandr emphasizes that it is not necessary to give everyone five stars, you can also describe things that seem to be shortcomings in a person, but do it adequately.

So far, the system does not block profiles for a large number of negative reviews and is being tested in a completely open format. That is, theoretically anyone can write a review about anyone. But Oleksandr plans to add changes to this logic so that people must first confirm that they really know each other and have met and communicated in real life before they can write reviews about each other.

«Regarding negative reviews and profile bypassing, I hope people will not only look at the numbers, but also read the text,» says the developer.

Serious service

The startup is currently in the MVP testing stage with the first real users. Oleksandr Viter tells how, even at the idea description stage a few months ago, several dozen people expressed a desire to register and try the new format. Now they are registering little by little, and the developer is collecting feedback on what can be improved. Registration of new people and their invitation to new users is already available, the ability to add reviews and read reviews (both about yourself and about other people), give ratings from 1 to 5 stars and filter by age, gender, city of residence, etc.

«It’s interesting that this idea simply split society into 2 camps,» Oleksandr shares his observations.

Some people think the idea of the project is cool because it will allow people to get to know those they are just planning to start communicating with better. Others think it is a terrible idea because it gives the impression that you are in an online store and choosing a product based on the reviews of other buyers. The developer himself says that he is not yet sure what this will lead to, whether it will be more useful or harmful. «So let’s see if the review system annoys people more than it helps — it can be turned off completely,» he adds.

Currently, Normis allows you to view emails in the user’s profile, which is not a very good feature from a cybersecurity perspective. However, the developer notes that email will be one of the ways to contact people until the internal chat in the app appears. As soon as this happens, he says, email will be removed from public access.

According to Oleksandr, the product can be useful for single people who are looking for a romantic partner for a long-term relationship, and ideally, for starting a family.

«The market is already oversaturated with sites and apps where people are not looking for anything serious, but just a way to have fun and have fun. Normis has a more mature and serious positioning — it is a service for people who clearly know what/who they want and what they are looking for in people,» says the developer.

About users

So far, some of Oleksandr’s acquaintances and just interested strangers from Linkedin have started using the product. Most of the people are IT specialists from Kyiv and Odessa, but there are also people from other cities in Ukraine. In total, about 15 people are currently testing the product.

The developer plans to primarily attract people in Ukraine, and then expand to European countries and possibly North and South America.

«I think you should consult a lawyer before going outside Ukraine, because the laws of other countries can be quite strict when it comes to reviews about people,» he adds.

Although he notes that reviews are moderated, and especially harsh and negative ones are deleted. However, Oleksandr also emphasizes that different people have different worldviews and what may be assessed by moderators as «acceptable content» may be a strong personal insult to someone and lead to complaints about the service.

About creation

Oleksandr says that two people took part in creating the startup — he and artificial intelligence. «Having extensive experience in development, both from the backend and frontend sides, I decided to try to create the project on my own, without gathering a team of specialists in various fields,» the IT expert explains. According to him, AI greatly accelerated the work process. Although Oleksandr notes that if he personally had no experience in programming, he is not sure that anything would have worked out.

«Because the code generated by AI had to be edited quite often to make it work properly,» he explains.

The main assistant was the free version of ChatGPT.

The developer also benefited greatly from his experience working in startups, because usually a startup is when everyone works on everything. You have to be not only a backend and frontend specialist, but also a designer, tester, DevOps engineer, manager (including financial), marketer, and a bunch of other different roles.

About money

Oleksandr plans that the platform will operate according to the fairly popular freemium model — some of the functionality will be available to all users for free, and full features will only be available to Premium accounts.

Regular, non-Premium users will have a limited number of people they can see on the platform and limited ability to view reviews about other people. Right now, everyone who signs up automatically gets 10 days of Premium, plus another 10 days of Premium for each person they invite. Everyone can invite up to 5 people, so the maximum period for which you can get free Premium is 60 days (10 + 5×10).

Further prices will be approximately as follows:

30 days — $10
60 days — $18
90 days — $25
180 days — $45
360 days — $80
Lifetime Premium access — $1000

At the moment, the startup is fully financed by Oleksandr’s own funds, so, as he notes, the budget does not really allow for hiring other specialists. So far, about $200 has been invested in the project. A small part of it went to buying a domain, and the rest to renting a cloud server and infrastructure.

According to him, depending on how things go — whether it will be possible to attract investments, whether the audience growth will be rapid enough — it will be possible to think about expanding the team. The developer suggests that if there is money, it will be possible to involve at least 5 more specialists in the project: a backend developer, a frontend developer, a designer, a tester, and a manager.

About plans for the future

The startup’s plans for the near future are to reach the mark of at least a few thousand first registered people.

Also, in the next update, Oleksandr intends to add the ability to «complain about a review» and each such complaint will be considered. In situations where the author of the comment cannot provide evidence for his or her opinion or can provide it but does not want to formulate the opinion more gently, the reviews will be deleted.

In the future, it is planned to add the ability to hide profiles of users you don’t want to see from your feed, as well as to file a complaint not only against individual reviews, but also against the author of the reviews. Those who collect a lot of complaints against themselves will be removed from the platform. The exact figure for an objective assessment of «a lot», according to Oleksandr, is still being discussed. It is also planned that it will be possible to complain about users who lie about their intentions and profiles. Those who have collected a lot of complaints will be removed.

As a next step, speaking about a more distant period of time, Oleksandr plans to bring Normis to profitability and expand the team.

«And the most important thing is to fulfill my mission of helping people find their norm,» he emphasizes.

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