A personality first matchmaking app

Hi HN, I'm William.

ember is a matchmaking app I built because after 10 years of using every major dating app, I'd close each one feeling worse than when I opened it. To me they all look the same and feel the same. The apps reward looks over substance and swipes over conversations. I crave deeper connection and wanted to see if a personality-first format can work.

It's a "Love Is Blind" structure: you do an interactive onboarding that builds a persona, get compared automatically against other users, and connect through conversation before ever seeing a photo. Photos unlock after you've actually matched.

A few things I tried to solve that bother me about existing apps:

- Ghosting: a common issue where people just stop replying. I've implemented a system that discourages this — repeated ghosting eventually results in being removed from the app.

- Safety at its core: photo scanning, real-time moderation for harassment and grooming patterns, behavioural flagging.

- No swiping feed: you spend your time actually talking to matches, not browsing profiles.

Stack: Supabase, Railway, React Native, and Claude Code did a lot of the heavy lifting on the backend logic.

I'm a solo builder, this is my first real launch, and I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback. Happy to answer anything in the comments.