iD8u: The Idea That Won't Die

I’ve had this idea since COVID. March 2021. Sat at a friend’s kitchen table, two of us brainstorming what dating should actually look like if you stripped away all the rubbish.

No swiping. No endless chats that go nowhere. No bots. No catfishing. No “hey” messages at 2am. Just… book an adventure together and meet in person. Cooking class, bouldering, axe throwing, escape rooms, wine tasting. Both people pay equally (sorry leeches, it ends here). You show up, you do something fun together, and if there’s a spark, great. If not, at least you learned how to throw an axe.

We called it iD8u. I Date You. And 5 years later, it’s still not built. But it won’t go away.

The concept

The pitch is simple. You sign up, pick an adventure category, and the platform matches you with someone and books the experience. No chatting beforehand. No profile photos in the early vision (we wanted a 30-second voice intro instead, to avoid the superficiality). A feedback system after each date so both people actually grow from it. And even if the date didn’t go well, they still learn new skills or have a new experience out of it.

The business model is like Airbnb for dating experiences. Date creators (individuals, businesses, activity centres) host adventures on the platform. We take a commission. We don’t own the experiences, we just connect people through them. The platform creates real jobs for real humans… date hosts, experience creators, adventure planners.

I still think the concept is solid. A competitor called Breeze launched with a similar no-chat approach, which honestly just validates the idea. The market wants this.

The team problem

Here’s where it gets real.

I couldn’t build this alone back in 2021. I needed a tech lead, a marketing person, someone to source and manage dating experiences, someone for financials. So I started pulling people in. Friends, contacts, people who said they were interested.

And this is where I learned the hardest lesson in side projects: everyone’s excited at the start. Not everyone’s still there at month 3.

One co-founder missed two deadlines in a row. Three months, zero progress on their assigned work. Another potential member loved the concept but couldn’t commit because of their own career. Another said yes then went quiet. Someone we’d lined up to host our first live test caught COVID the week before, and we had to cancel and refund everything.

I’m not bitter about any of this (honestly, I’m not). People have lives. They have day jobs, families, priorities. A side project will always come second to paying the bills. That’s just reality.

But it taught me something important about equity. Early on, someone wanted equal shares for everyone. I said no. Responsibility, time, and effort is rarely equal, and equity should reflect contribution. I called it the “university group project” problem… you know the one. Where 2 people do 80% of the work and everyone gets the same grade.

So I built a contribution tracking system. Hours logged, work tracked, equity proportional to what you actually put in. It was uncomfortable to set up (nobody likes talking about this stuff early on), but I’d rather have the awkward conversation at the start than the resentful one at the end.

Four pauses

iD8u has been paused 4 times. Each time for a different reason. Each time the same root cause: people and priorities.

Pause 1 (October 2021): Our proof of concept host got COVID. Other team members were ill or busy. We cancelled, refunded, and agreed to pick it up in January. We had a promising signal though… about 1 in 100 leads actually booked and paid, which for a concept nobody had heard of felt like something.

Pause 2 (Early 2022): Momentum just… evaporated. Team members had moved on. The equity conversations had been uncomfortable. Nobody said “I’m out” but nobody was showing up either.

Pause 3 (Late 2022): Our tech lead built a working prototype in React. It looked great! But he had to focus elsewhere to pay the bills (fair enough, we all do). He handed over what he’d done, and then I got consumed by another project. I couldn’t do both. Something had to give.

Pause 4 (July 2025): Relaunched with my mate Derek. Right person, right energy. Ran Facebook ads again. Summer was the wrong time (everyone’s on holiday), and the ads performed terribly compared to 2021. Agreed to hold off until autumn.

The Facebook saga deserves its own paragraph honestly. META has been consistently awful across both 2021 and 2025. Accounts locked for no reason, billing issues, ad credit expiring because they blocked our account, support agents contradicting each other. I once spent 2 months trying to get our business account unblocked despite being a registered UK company with all the right documents. I won’t go into the full saga but let’s just say I have strong feelings about META’s small business support.

What I actually learned

Stop spreading yourself too thin. This is the big one. In 2021 I was trying to run iD8u, hold down my day job, and do everything in between. I was spreading myself across too many things and none of them were getting my best. I eventually learned to focus on one thing at a time and give it everything. That’s why iD8u went on hold… not because it’s a bad idea, but because I needed to focus.

The idea surviving is the validation. Bad ideas die. You forget about them after a month. iD8u has survived 4 pauses over 5 years. Every time I put it down, it comes back. Every time I see another “I hate dating apps” post online, I think about it. That persistence isn’t stubbornness. It’s a signal.

You don’t need a team if you have the right tools. But you do need time. Back in 2021, I needed a tech lead, a designer, a grant writer, a project manager. A full team just to get an MVP off the ground. Now? I’ve spent 3 years working with AI. My SST3 workflow and Claude Code can do what a small team used to do. The biggest blocker (needing reliable people to build it) might not be a blocker anymore. But realistically, even with AI, a project like this would take me a year alone to get production ready. The tools changed. The hours didn’t.

Why it’s coming back

Here’s the thing that gets me excited about iD8u in 2026.

AI is replacing human work everywhere. Customer service, content writing, data entry, coding. Jobs are disappearing. But iD8u creates human jobs. Date hosts. Experience creators. Adventure planners. Photography packages for your date. Local business partnerships. These are roles that need a real person being present, being creative, being human. You can’t automate throwing axes with a stranger.

The platform could be built with AI. But the product itself is fundamentally human. That’s a nice position to be in.

Derek and I are still talking about it. The website’s still up. The concept hasn’t aged (if anything, post-COVID people want real experiences more than ever). I just need to find the right window to actually build it.

Some ideas just won’t die. I think that’s how you know they’re worth building.

I will build this… one day.

Below is the website I wrote and designed on Squarespace. I won’t be maintaining it until I finish building the actual app in the future.