DateFlo

DateFlo was a date night concierge I built and ran as a project at dateflo.com. A couple would tell us about themselves through a short form, and we would plan their entire night for them: the venues, the timing, the route, the dishes picked for each of them, and the table booked under their name, with a real person reviewing every plan before it reached the couple. I did not build DateFlo to make money, and it never made any. I built it to answer one question: do people care enough about an effortless date night to hand the planning to someone else?

I developed DateFlo through ZIP Launchpad at San Diego State University, where student projects get mentorship, structure, and a lot of honest questions. Pitching DateFlo there sharpened how I told its story, and along the way I won the Mintz Award, ZIP Launchpad’s best presenter award, which I still count among my proudest moments from the whole project.

The biggest test of whether people cared was live. My team and I hosted SDSU’s first ever blind dating show, a one night event produced by DateFlo from scratch. We turned a backyard into a stage with standing tables, glow in the dark drinks, and a cotton candy machine that ran all night. Contestants came down the stairs hidden inside cardboard boxes, then sat blindfolded in front of a full crowd and answered the questions everyone wanted to ask: their types, their red flags, their honest truths. Round one ended with her saying yes and him saying no. Round two had two guys, one girl, and a FaceTime call to her mom. In round three, a girl who was never supposed to be on stage walked up from the audience, pitched herself, and closed the night with a kiss. Three rounds, two matches, and a crowd that did not want to leave.

In the end, the answer to my question was honest. People cared, just not enough of them to keep the project going, so I eventually brought DateFlo to a close. I have zero regrets. Between designing the service, building the product end to end, producing a live show, running the brand’s marketing, and presenting the idea on stage, DateFlo taught me more than any single class ever has, and it is the project I still talk about the most.

• Product Design: Turned one question, whether couples would hand off their date planning, into a working service with a form, a personalized plan, and a delivery flow.

• Full Stack Development: Built the product with Next.js, TypeScript, and Supabase for the database and authentication, with Stripe, Resend, and Cloudflare handling payments infrastructure, email, and images.

• Demand Validation: Treated the whole project as an experiment, putting DateFlo in front of real couples and reading the signal honestly instead of hearing what I wanted to hear.

• Event Production: Planned and hosted a live blind dating show end to end, covering staging, sound, drinks, contestants, and filming.

• Public Speaking: Pitched DateFlo at ZIP Launchpad and hosted the show on stage with a microphone in hand, two very different rooms that both taught me presence.

• Marketing and Content: Ran DateFlo’s Instagram, turning the service and the show into content made to reach couples.

• Team Leadership: Coordinated the crew that showed up early and stayed late, running mics, cameras, drinks, and nervous contestants on show night.

• Knowing When to Close: Learned to end a project I loved with gratitude, taking the lessons instead of forcing the outcome.