ZORRO
Consumer dating app for the gay and queer community, iOS and Android
What it is
Shipped solo to both app stores in June 2026, reaching 700+ users with 50% D1 retention in three weeks. Semantic matchmaking with embeddings and pgvector plus cross-encoder reranking, and self-hosted vision-language moderation of user photos handling GDPR special-category data with no third-party processors. Polyglot backend in Kotlin/Spring Boot, Elixir and Python.
Semantic matchmaking
Profiles are embedded and retrieved with pgvector, then reordered by a cross-encoder reranker: the same retrieve-then-rerank architecture as a production RAG pipeline, applied to people instead of documents.
Self-hosted photo moderation
A vision-language model screens user photos on my own infrastructure. Sexual orientation data is GDPR special-category data, so it never reaches a third-party processor.
Polyglot backend
Kotlin and Spring Boot for the domain, Elixir for realtime chat and presence, Python for the AI services.
Traction
700+ users with 50% D1 retention within three weeks of launch.