Assuming dating depends heavily on geographic (location) and even demographic (especially age) properties, you will not need 'just' users, but also within the s

Assuming dating depends heavily on geographic (location) and even demographic (especially age) properties, you will not need 'just' users, but also within the same geo/demo group (ie same location, same age). You can use this to your advantage by focussing your marketing efforts to one such group. If you take your home town you can use local advertising (ie team up with bars/clubs) and even your own network. You could even think about naming/framing the dating app to the location (ie Boston Student Dating). This gives you a better chance of success, enables you to test the overal viability and you can learn and improve. Since you are doing this for fun, you'll probably have reached this goal at that point. To go beyond, you'd have to come up with something to make the thing spread (which by itself will be rather low for a dating app, so you'll need a trick here, or make money from your local users and use that for heavy advertising) or convince investors based on the initial results so you can have yourselves a marketing budget.