How appflame Built Two Dating Apps by Keeping Hily and Taimi Separate

Kyiv-founded appflame took an unusual route into dating: instead of building one platform for everyone, it developed two products with different purposes. Hily serves the broader dating market, while Taimi focuses on LGBTQI+ users across sexual orientations, gender identities, and relationship preferences. Both launched in 2017, and the company says it has grown them profitably without traditional venture-capital backing.

That separation is the central lesson in appflame’s approach. Dating products depend on relevance, trust, and enough compatible people in the same market. A single product that tries to serve fundamentally different audiences can become harder to understand—and harder to make liquid.

The strategic choice: two products, not one generalized app

Hily and Taimi are positioned as distinct products rather than two versions of the same service. Appflame describes Hily as a dating app for people seeking genuine connections, while Taimi is designed as an inclusive LGBTQI+ dating app for exploring diverse romantic and sexual preferences.

That gives each app a clearer product promise and lets the teams make different decisions about onboarding, matching, safety, positioning, and growth. It also avoids treating the LGBTQI+ market as an afterthought inside a product designed around a heterosexual dating model.

The approach reflects a broader marketplace principle: audience segmentation is not only a marketing decision. In a dating app, the target audience affects who is shown to whom, which preferences are collected, how visibility works, what safety risks matter most, and how the service creates enough local activity for matches to happen.

Why Taimi moved back to dating

Taimi initially experimented with a broader LGBTQI+ social-network proposition that combined social interaction with matchmaking. Coverage of the company’s strategy says appflame eventually concluded that the concept lacked a sufficiently focused user purpose and moved Taimi back toward core dating functionality.

The pivot did not mean narrowing Taimi to a single identity or relationship model. Instead, the product retained an inclusive approach to sexual orientation, gender identity, and relationship preferences while making dating the central job to be done. Taimi describes this as a fluid, choice-led environment rather than one constrained by a conventional heterosexual dating model.

This is a useful product distinction: inclusion is not the same as adding more labels to an existing interface. The experience must also reflect how people describe themselves, whom they want to meet, what kind of relationship they want, where they are located, and whether they want to be visible to particular users.

Inclusive matching is a marketplace problem as well as an identity problem

For any dating app, a match requires more than a recommendation algorithm. It requires two people whose preferences, identity settings, location, timing, and mutual visibility overlap. Taimi says its matching experience accounts for identity and interests while supporting users across the LGBTQI+ spectrum.

That creates a more complex product and marketplace challenge than simply replacing a male/female toggle with a longer list of options. The service must give users meaningful control without making onboarding confusing or exposing information they do not want to share.

It must also maintain enough activity across different communities and locations. A user can receive technically relevant recommendations and still have a poor experience if too few suitable people are active nearby. This is why dating growth is not measured only by registrations: recurring, high-quality interactions are what make the marketplace useful.

Safety and privacy are part of retention

For Taimi, privacy controls and safety features are central to the product promise. The app promotes tools including verification, moderation, and stealth-style visibility controls; its website says Stealth Mode allows users to browse incognito and share their profile only with people they have liked.

Those controls address a practical tension in dating products. Users need enough information to decide whether to connect, but they also need control over who can discover them and what personal information is exposed. Research on location-based dating apps has likewise recommended user control, data minimization, and stronger API security as privacy countermeasures.

The business implication is straightforward: safety is not merely a compliance layer added after growth. If users encounter harassment, impersonation, scams, or unwanted exposure, they may stop participating. Lower participation reduces the number of viable matches, which can make the app less useful for everyone else.

What appflame’s reported scale means

Appflame is reported to have approximately 350,000 daily active users across Hily and Taimi and to be targeting 2 million daily active users as a threshold for IPO readiness—nearly a sixfold increase.

Taimi separately reports more than 38 million cumulative users and 1.5 million monthly active users. Those measures are not directly comparable with combined daily active users, but they indicate the scale the company claims for the product.

The claims require careful reading. Profitability, user counts, safety performance, and IPO readiness are presented substantially through company materials and industry coverage based on company statements. The available evidence supports describing them as reported figures, not independently audited conclusions.

Using a dating audience for research

Taimi also uses its user base as a source of research. One U.S. survey published by Taimi included 928 active app users aged 18 to 45, including men, women, non-binary respondents, and transgender men and women. The fieldwork ran from July 29 to August 26, 2024.

This kind of research can help a product understand what its own audience wants from dating and where users experience friction. It may also surface perspectives that are underrepresented in broader dating-industry research.

But the sample should not be treated as representative of all LGBTQI+ people. It was an opt-in, in-app sample of active users, so its results describe that participant group rather than the population as a whole.

Ignite extends the company’s product model

Appflame’s ambitions are not limited to its two dating apps. In 2024, the company launched Ignite, an internal venture initiative intended to give employees a path toward becoming founders. Coverage also identifies investments or backing for ventures including Every Health.

The model attempts to reuse capabilities developed inside a successful product company—product management, growth, operations, and capital allocation—across new businesses. In principle, that can diversify the company beyond dating. In practice, each new venture still has to prove that it solves a real problem and can develop its own sustainable distribution.

Supporting Ukraine through the Foundation

Appflame’s Foundation reports support for military leadership education, humanitarian aid, mobilized employees and their families, and prosthetics-related education and infrastructure in Ukraine.

Its work on prosthetics includes support for the ADDEX initiative, which combines additive-manufacturing technology, specialist training, and production localization. A prosthetics, medical rehabilitation, and occupational-therapy laboratory opened at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in December 2025 with support from appflame founders and the Genesis for Ukraine Charity Foundation.

These programs sit outside the dating-app operating model, but they are part of the company’s broader identity as a Ukrainian product business that directs resources into local education, veteran reintegration, and humanitarian efforts.

Why AI does not eliminate the cold-start problem

AI can reduce the cost of building some dating-app features, including profile assistance, recommendation systems, moderation workflows, and marketing content. It does not remove the hardest constraint: a new dating app needs enough compatible and trustworthy people in the same places at the same time.

That is the cold-start problem. Early users judge a dating app by the quality and availability of potential matches, not by how quickly the company built its interface. If the local pool is too small or poorly balanced, users leave. Their departure makes the pool thinner, which can cause still more users to leave.

Appflame’s two-product strategy addresses only part of that challenge. Clear positioning can improve acquisition and relevance, while inclusive controls and safety features can support trust. But reaching 2 million daily active users will still depend on building durable liquidity across markets—not simply adding AI to the product.

The takeaway for product builders

Appflame’s reported growth rests on a set of connected choices:

• Separate incompatible use cases: Hily and Taimi have different audiences and product promises.
• Pivot toward a clear job: Taimi’s move from a broad social-network concept back to dating sharpened its purpose.
• Treat identity and privacy as product architecture: Inclusive matching requires control over identity, preferences, visibility, and discovery—not just additional profile fields.
• Build trust into marketplace health: Safety affects whether users remain active and whether the pool of potential matches stays viable.
• Use owned audience insight carefully: In-app research can guide product decisions, but opt-in samples should not be generalized to an entire population.
• Keep the claims in perspective: The reported profitability, scale, and IPO target are ambitious, but independent verification is limited.

The company’s most defensible lesson is not that two dating apps are automatically better than one. It is that a marketplace becomes easier to build when users understand exactly what it is for—and when the product’s identity, safety, and growth systems are designed around that purpose.