What were the steps between having this thought and diving into the project?

I’m guessing there’s a valuable lesson there.

As I mentioned in one of my comments, after having the original idea/thought I got too excited too soon. At the time I did not know mobile or web development and so jumped on Google, did a quick search and filled some forms on some mobile app developer companies website and literally hired the first company that called me back. Then spent about $6k for just logo design, wireframe and a landing page. That stage took about 4 months and then they gave me a $50k quote for iOS and Android app. I did not have that money.

That's when I came across Upwork and posted a job there. The quotes were much lower as you may know since most of the freelancers/agencies are based outside the US. I finally hired a company from Pakistan since their CEO personally called me and kind of lured me into not only giving them the job, but also told me he is interested in the project and he could be my advisor/mentor. Again, I got excited and thought that was a great deal. That ended up being the worst experience of my whole professional life.

Their company just broke apart in the middle of the project. Cofounders parted ways and the one who contacted me (the CEO), he said that all their team members left with the other guy and took the source code for our app with them. So I had to contact the other cofounder and have them share the code with a new team that the CEO hired. It was a mess and the project was delivered poorly and way after deadline. However, in the middle of all that, I decided to learn web and mobile development. So, I took a lot of Udemy courses and watched many Youtube videos. That was I guess the only silver lining and maybe I needed to go through the whole excruciating process to get there.

Anyways, long story short, after taking loans and spending about $35k for design and development of the iOS and Android apps, I had to redo everything else myself while having my full-time engineering job (I still needed to pay bills and had just got engaged. So no way I could quit that other job). It was a lot of non-stop 15 to 18-hour workdays.

This might not have been what you asked for, but I thought I'd share part of my story :)

Having read over this and a few other replies I would definitely say it would be worthwhile taking a step back now, don’t fall into the sunk cost fallacy and continue to burn through cash/time building things you think will help, spend a bit of time away from the keyboard, reading The Mom Test as others have suggested, it’s honestly a fantastic book, very actionable and probably won’t take you long to get through. That will put you in the right mindset for where you are in your journey and what you need to do next - which boils down to trying to validate some of your ideas, the correct way.

Finally you mention someone offering mentorship/advice, and you taking it, just be cautious with who you take advice from, the best person to take advice from is probably someone a few steps ahead of you, that means finding someone who may have just secured their very first bit of seed money as a solo/duo founding team, or an indiehacker who’s reached say $1000 MRR for a B2C app.

Good luck.

Yeah. Unfortunately, he caused more harm than help. I ended our relationship when I realized that he was not really the best mentor for what I started. I am going to take a step back and read some of these materials that you and others mentioned

Did you ever stop to figure out the answer to this question or did you just assume that the other dating apps had all made a terrible mistake?

Now the question that I should have tried to investigate more is this: Do people really want all these features in a single app, or they were fine using multiple apps/websites?