I agree the idea seems solid enough, but accommodating the increased complexity of scaling it up sounds quiet difficult. Out of curiosity what did you learn about your coworkers? Something about their motivations for creating such an app or what?

One guy liked to send dick pics, another was doing a lot of drugs and sent deranged messages for 48 hours straight to random people and the last was "just" a compulsive liar, who seemed to invite a prostitute to the office who then stole servers. I wasn't even sure why we even had the servers, since we barely bad any software written yet.

> You weren't able to scale enough initially to be profitable on your own operations, I presume? At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate?

Bootstrapped, COVID hit right before the launch date.

Infra costs were ~$200 a month to support 10k DAU. I'd just come off of working on embedded, so I was used to writing really efficient code. :)

> At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate?

Just needed to cover my living expenses mortgage and salaries!

Obviously to scale money was needed for ad campaigns, but people are lonely and offering to solve loneliness has a high conversion rate!