Yeet built its dating app from a 1,600-member Discord first

Yeet had a Discord server before it had a finished dating app.

The company opened what it calls a "Founder Club" while the product was still undefined, and asked young users what they hated about online dating. Co-founder and marketing lead Penny Chen says the app was built alongside that community.

The recruitment came first, and it was not about the product. Yeet used short-form video on TikTok and Instagram, talking about dating problems rather than features.

"We put out the pain points people could resonate with," Chen told PR Daily. The pitch for joining the server was a shared cause: flip the dating script together.

That distinction matters for anyone copying the method. People joined to argue about dating apps, not to hear from a brand.

The server was split into channels for dating talk, general life, surveys, and questions about how the company was handling what it heard. The team's stated posture inside it was silence. "We just really sat in there as the listeners," Chen said.

One complaint recurred: swipe fatigue. Yeet's answer was an app that uses an AI agent to put two people into a live conversation, with no swiping.

Chen says 84% of surveyed community members preferred real-time connections to blind swiping. That figure is the company's own, drawn from its own community, and it is a small self-selected group — but it is the number Yeet says shaped the core of the product.

The community also pushed back. Members raised concerns about how much control AI should have in dating, and Yeet narrowed the agent's job in response. "It's just there now to help them start and keep the conversation flowing," Chen said.

Contributions that changed the product earned the contributor a badge in the forum. That is the cheapest incentive in the playbook: visible credit, no discount codes.

Staffing was a deliberate choice too. Yeet put its Gen Z employees into the server rather than training moderators to sound young. "The (moderators) just act more like their friends," Chen said. "Or like college students interacting with each other."

Her general rule: if you already employ people who belong in the community, do not teach someone else to imitate it. "It's more genuine that way. People are willing to tell us more."

The community sits at roughly 1,600 members, and Yeet intends to keep it between 1,000 and 2,000 rather than grow it. Reddit is next, and Chen says the plan is to join conversations before promoting anything.

For a founder, the transferable part is the sequencing. Recruit around a problem, not a product; give people channels where they can say things you would rather not hear; and bring them in early enough that their objections can still change the build, because feedback collected after a decision is only decoration.

The cost of the method is patience. A community of 1,600 people who joined to complain about your category is a research panel that answers for free — and one you cannot spin, because they were there before the product was.