An App Proposal · Prepared for Alan Rodriguez
The same song.The same room.
Mixtape matches Miami through music taste — romance, concert crews, and collabs — and gives every match a real show to meet at. This is the plan to build it: ninety days from kickoff to the App Store.
Nine years in the crate.
Alan Rodriguez has carried this idea since before the tools existed to test it. As Alan Amarozzo he plays the rooms this app is written for — a residency at ZeyZey in Little River, nights at the Miami Beach Bandshell orbit, sessions as a producer and songwriter. Every weekend he watches the thing the app is about: strangers becoming friends because the same song got them to the same room.
In May 2026 he stopped waiting and built the prototype himself — three months of nightly iteration, alone, until it held a whole product: three separate reasons to match, a genre taxonomy lifted from Beatport's own categories, artist overlap weighted by rarity, studio suggestions for musicians instead of small talk. It is a designed product with decisions already made, not a napkin with a name on it.
What the idea needs now is the engineering to make it real — a matching engine, a live events layer, an App Store listing — from a builder who already ships for this exact scene. That is what this proposal prices.
The idea arrives — nine years before the tools existed to prototype it solo
May — Alan builds the first working prototype himself, iterating nightly for three months
The walkthrough: two working mockups, a decided product, and this proposal
Target: live on the App Store before New Year's — Miami's loudest season
The apps are fading. The shows are selling out.
In 2025 the dating-app category posted the first annual revenue decline in its history while live music set another all-time attendance record. The demand for connection did not shrink — it moved out of the swipe queue and into the crowd. Mixtape is built at exactly that crossing.
“I want it to be more — you meet cool friends, go record shopping, grab a drink, and you end up at Dante's HiFi.”
Highly structured and can be intimidating to a user under 30 … They just want to do it in a low-pressure, low-stakes way that doesn't feel like a job interview.
Dating-app consumer spending in 2025 — the category's first annual decline on record
Business of Apps, Jan 2026 · Tier B
of dating-app users report burnout — 79% of Gen Z. The top reason: they can't find a real connection
Forbes Health · OnePoll, 2024 · Tier B
tickets already sold for 2026 concerts by mid-July — live music keeps breaking its own records while the apps shrink
Live Nation Q2 2026 earnings · Tier A
The U.S. Surgeon General calls loneliness an epidemic: half of adults report it, and in-person time with friends has fallen roughly seventy percent for people under 25 since 2003. The need never left. It is standing in a crowd, waiting for the drop.
People didn't stop wanting to meet. They stopped believing the swipe.
Four exhibits on where the connection market actually stands — every number filed, surveyed, or verified this month. Advance at speaking pace.
Three intents. One taste graph. A city of shows.
Mixtape v1, designed from Alan's own prototype: link your taste, declare why you're here — romance, concert crew, or collab — and match with the people heading to the same Miami shows. Your profile carries a track that plays on arrival — the MySpace move, swappable daily. Four tabs, no maze, navigable at 2 AM.
Miami's calendar, scored against your library — every show carries your taste-match and who else from Mixtape is going.
One match, told as a weekend.
Not a feature list — a Thursday-to-Saturday. Here is how one connection actually moves through Mixtape, from a dead group chat to a shared rail at the Miami Beach Bandshell.
00 :0000 PMThursday · the couch
Camila's group chat has been dead for a week and Khruangbin plays the Bandshell Friday. She downloads Mixtape and builds her taste in three taps — links her library, adds the artists an algorithm can't guess. The rarer the overlap with someone, the harder it counts.
Your taste · three taps, no essay
KhruangbinFred again..RosalíaFour TetODESZAAdd any artist…The rarer the overlap, the harder it counts
00 :0000 PMOne intent, declared
Romance. She will only ever be shown people who chose the same thing — no crossed wires, no crews pitched a date, no daters pitched a demo. Three minutes in, she's done; the app does not ask for an essay.
Why are you here · pick one
Romance
A date who knows every word
Concert Crew
Platonic · never solo again
Collab
Producer seeks vocalist
You only ever see people who chose the same
00 :0000 AMFriday · the match
Rafa, 92%. Four shared artists and two of them rare — the kind of overlap that means something. The card says the quiet part in type: you could both be at the Bandshell tonight. He was already going. So was she.
RRafa, 29
92%Khruangbin · Helado Negro · 2 rare overlaps
FRI11You could both be at the Bandshell tonight
He’s going. So are you.
00 :0000 PMFriday · same room
Front rail, open air, the song they matched on a block from the ocean. Nothing to invent and nothing to pretend — the night carries the first date. Mixtape's job ended at the door, which is exactly the design.
Tonight · open air
Miami Beach Bandshell
Khruangbin · doors 7 PM · North Beach
11:58
PM · FRI DEC 11
CR2 on the rail
The mechanic is engineered occasion — a dated, ticketed reason to meet. It is the same mechanic Timeleft converted into founder-reported €18M of annual subscriptions, run here on nights that already sell out.
Timeleft founder-reported metrics, Aug 2025 · Tier C
Membership is the business.
Free members get three matches a day — enough to fall for it. Mixtape+ is $9.99 a month for unlimited matches, who-liked-you, and travel mode in every future city. Subscriptions are the whole early business: no ads, no ticket inventory, no scalper drift — the values stay aligned with the members.
what Match Group actually collects per payer per month — Mixtape+ at $9.99 undercuts the incumbents by more than half
Match Group Q2 2026 SEC filing · Tier A
median download-to-paid conversion for North American subscription apps — the honest planning number, not a hockey stick
RevenueCat State of Subscription Apps 2026 · Tier B
a year per member, recurring — revenue that compounds with every scene Alan seeds, before a single ticket commission exists
Mixtape+ · $9.99 a month
Founding member
Run the pointer across it — the foil answers
Seeded from the booth, not bought from Meta.
The waitlist
The pitch
Tinder's users after the documented door-download launch parties and sorority tour — up from 5,000. The same playbook, run here by a resident DJ in his own rooms
Miami-Dade's one-year net international migration — the largest of any U.S. county. Every arrival lands here without a crew
Built to outlive every platform mood swing.
The matching engine runs on Mixtape's own taste graph — never on borrowed access. Spotify closed its API to new apps in 2026 (five test users; extended access now requires a registered company with 250,000 monthly users), so v1 ingests taste the resilient way: search-and-add any artist for everyone, Apple Music import on day one, and a Spotify adapter kept ready behind a flag for the day the quota opens. The show layer starts free: Ticketmaster's public API, Edmtrain's Miami listings, and a curated table of the twenty rooms that matter.
Mixtape — this proposal
- Taste graph & rarity-weighted matching
- Three intent pools, never crossed
- Shows feed · Miami, curated
- Chat with show context & crews
- Mixtape+ subscriptions
Taste inputs — provider-agnostic
- Artist search & add — day one, everyone
- Apple Music import — same $99 developer account
- Spotify adapter — built, flagged, quota-ready
The city layer
- Ticketmaster Discovery API — free tier
- Edmtrain Miami listings — free
- Venue-direct: the 20-room curated table
- Collab studio table — North Miami & Hialeah rooms
Trust and safety ships inside v1 because Apple will not approve a dating app without it: an 18+ gate, block and report on every profile, selfie photo verification, automated image moderation on upload, a published safety center, and data deletion on account close. The same checklist already satisfies Connecticut's and New York's new dating-app statutes — cleared for expansion before Mixtape ever leaves Florida.
The receipts, with sources.
Figures below come from SEC filings, government data, peer-reviewed research, and — where marked — the platforms' own reporting. Numbers that could not be verified were dropped; two popular ones were checked and set aside on purpose.
Hinge's 2025 revenue, up 26% while Tinder shrank — declared intent is the category's growth engine, and intent pools are Mixtape's spine
Tier AMatch Group FY2025 8-K
what Match Group paid for The League; it bought Salams in 2023 and HER in 2025 — niche apps with dense communities are standing acquisition targets
Tier A/CMatch Group filings & industry trackers, 2022–2025
of Gen Z say sharing music strengthens emotional bonds — and peer-reviewed work shows shared taste predicts attraction, strongest when the shared artists are rare
Tier A/CSpotify Culture Next 2026 · Boer et al., Pers. & Soc. Psychology Bulletin 2011
fans at Live Nation shows in 2025, an all-time record with 2026 pacing higher — the supply of anchor events is the healthiest input in the whole social economy
Tier ALive Nation FY2025 & Q2 2026 earnings
of Gen Z Tinder members added Spotify Anthems, lifting matches ~10% — the market leader proved the signal, then left the position unoccupied
Tier CTinder pressroom, 2021 · vendor-reported
single men to single women in Miami — the most male-skewed singles market of 118 U.S. cities studied; women-first scene seeding is built into the launch plan, not bolted on
Tier BSmartAsset analysis of Census ACS, 2024
Two stories we chose not to tell: the “$13.9 billion dating market” (research-mill estimates disagree by 2.5×, so we cite SEC filings instead), and any user count from the apps that circled this space (unverifiable). The case holds on filings, government data, and journals.
Ninety days. Thirteen weeks. One submission.
Kickoff to App Store submission inside a quarter — phases overlapped the way a studio actually ships, each closing with something Alan can hold. A December submission puts Mixtape live in the season Miami plans its whole year around: Art Basel week, New Year's, and the winter calendar.
Foundations
Weeks 1–2Scope signed before code.
- MVP scope locked in writing — the single source of truth for the build
- Design system from Alan's prototype: tokens, type, components
- Browse surface locked: feed-first discovery, Alan's explore-page call — never a swipe deck
- Data model, TestFlight, and analytics wired from day one
Ten thousand dollars to the App Store.
Agencies advertise dating-app MVPs at $50,000 to $250,000 across four to nine months, and the surveyed U.S. median for a custom app build runs six figures. Mixtape's MVP is $10,000 in 90 days — possible because Zen2 ships with the AI-accelerated workflow the rest of the market is still hiring around, and because this is priced as a partnership, not a vendor invoice: Zen2 keeps a ten percent share of gross proceeds through the operating entity, shaped together before kickoff. Zen2 earns when Mixtape earns, and Alan's cap table stays his.
Kickoff
Signature + scope locked in writing · the 90-day clock starts
Day 30
Working onboarding & matching, demonstrated on TestFlight
Day 60
Feature-complete beta in the field
App Store approval
Due only when Mixtape is approved and live
The scope is agreed in writing before kickoff, and the final $2,000 is due only on App Store approval — the delivery risk sits with the builder, where it belongs.
Included: the complete iOS app, App Store submission and review shepherding, and the waitlist site. Google Play submission is a $1,000 add-on when the Android timeline makes sense — Play's closed-testing gate adds real calendar, so it is priced honestly instead of hidden.
One shared React Native codebase serves iOS now and Android next — the same architecture behind Partiful, Discord, and Shopify's mobile apps.
Bug fixes are free for the MVP. New features and enhancements are quoted separately — and some will simply appear at no charge, at Zen2's discretion, the way Perkhaus is maintained today.
MVP · iOS
Everything above · App Store submission included
$10,000
Google Play add-on
Play submission, closed-test cycle, second billing rail
+ $1,000
Post-MVP
New features & enhancements, quoted per release
Scoped
The upside share only ever pays out of real revenue — it costs nothing until Mixtape makes money, and the final structure is shaped together before kickoff. Weekly demo builds on TestFlight from the first fortnight. Payments: $4,000 at kickoff, $2,000 at day 30, $2,000 at day 60, $2,000 on App Store approval.
The builder your scene already uses.
Zen2 is an independent design and engineering studio. The work is done by the principal who presents it — research, design, and code from one pair of hands, to one standard.
Before Zen2, that principal founded Taxfyle, the consumer tax platform that became Robinhood's in-app filing partner and earned Apple's App of the Day — an app with a matching engine at its core, scaled to eight figures of annual revenue. He was building data-driven scoring systems twenty years ago and teaching iOS development fifteen years ago; a rarity-weighted taste graph is a Tuesday.
The proof that matters most is already on Alan's phone: Perkhaus, the Miami nightlife app Zen2 built and actively grows — the reason this conversation started. Same city, same scene, same standard.
Taxfyle
Founded by Zen2's principal — consumer fintech at scale
Robinhood
In-app tax filing partnership
App of the Day
Featured by Apple, App Store
Studio
Zen2, Inc. — Florida, USA
Principal
Will Sahatdjian
Contact
info@zen2.ai · zen2.ai
In the wild
Perkhaus · Miami — live, fluid, and on Alan's phone
