Community first. Dating second. Nobody gets in unchecked.
COSINCO started in July 2024 as a Facebook group meant to be a safe space for Colorado singles. This is where that group grows up: a members-only platform with verified applications, paid memberships, private profiles, events, partners and a shop. She was my first paid client, it was my first WordPress build, and the beta went live on October 2, 2026.
Live, in beta, taking real members
The beta is live on cosinco.com and memberships are taking real payments.
Everything pictured here is the live site. The member side stays out of the pictures on purpose. Those profiles belong to real people, and the whole point of the place is that strangers don’t get to look at them.
A Facebook group, turned into a platform
She didn’t need a brochure. She needed a door, a front desk and a way to keep the room safe once people were inside, plus everything a small business needs to actually run: payments, events, a shop, partners, a way to talk to her community and a way to change all of it without calling me.
It came out to 35 pages, plus every profile, event, product and partner that lives on them, and about 53,000 lines of custom theme code underneath. It’s since been valued at around $40,000. Not a bad first one.
How someone actually gets in
A dating community lives or dies on whether people feel safe in it. So the front door does real work before anybody sees a single profile.
- 01
They apply
An application with their profile, their socials and their birth date. You have to be 25 or older to join, and the form checks it, so nobody has to do the math by hand.
- 02
The owner checks them
Subscriptions are only open to approved members of the original Facebook group, so she verifies the person and their socials against the group first.
- 03
A private link goes out
Once she approves them, the site emails a private subscription link. Nobody finds the checkout by wandering around.
- 04
They subscribe
$10 a month through Stripe. There’s no free tier, because a free tier is how a safe room fills up with people who aren’t serious.
- 05
Then they’re in
Profiles, the member directory, events and everything else behind the door. An approved account that hasn’t paid yet can only reach checkout, the legal pages and Delete My Data.
The rules I wouldn’t bend
Only the owner of a profile can edit it. Not the site owner, not her admins, nobody. Admins can approve and ban people, but the words on your profile are yours. One filter in the code closes every path to editing someone else’s profile, including the ones a plugin quietly leaves open.
Every member gets a share link with a random 32 character code. It opens that one profile for whoever has it, keeps working through a username change or a move, and never shows up in search. A dead or expired code gets a friendly page instead of an error.
Search engines only ever see the public pages, and that rule maintains itself. Open a page to the public and search comes with it. Put one behind the door and it disappears from search on its own.
And anybody can leave. Delete My Data is always reachable, and a member with an active subscription is asked whether to cancel it in the same step, so nobody gets billed for an account they erased.
A sun that rises under whatever you click
The whole palette came from a Colorado sunset, and it’s named that way. So when you click anything in the navigation, a small sun rises right under that link, gold melting into magenta, before the next page loads. It takes less than half a second.
It isn’t a feature anyone asked for, and it doesn’t make anybody’s membership work better. It’s just absolutely perfect, and she loves it as much as I do. It follows you onto a phone too, rising under the open menu.
Everything it does
This is the biggest thing I’ve built, so here’s all of it, one piece at a time.
- 01
Memberships and money
Applications, approval, private links and $10 a month through Stripe. Free-month codes push the first charge back inside Stripe itself, so a promotion is a code, not a favor someone has to remember. Members handle their own billing, order history and cancellation, and there’s a Support COSINCO page for anyone who wants to chip in, with preset amounts or their own.
- 02
Profiles
Photo tiles, the details each member chooses to share, and contact options they pick themselves, like email, WhatsApp or text, with a nudge toward a Google Voice number instead of their real one. Each member decides whether they show in the directory and whether search engines can ever see them.
- 03
The member directory
Members find each other by distance and then narrow it down: relationship type, orientation, religion, politics, kids, drinking, smoking and marijuana. The things people actually filter for, without having to ask awkward questions first.
- 04
Events
Members-only, filterable, and ticketed when an event costs money. The ticket is set up in the shop automatically, so there’s no second product to build. Members can subscribe to the events calendar, and the calendar’s own add button is covered so someone whose membership lapses can’t keep the feed.
- 05
The shop
Thirteen products printed on demand, priced with shipping already baked in, so checkout never adds a surprise. The personalized ones, connection cards, stickers and pins, are made by hand: the product asks the buyer for their name, city and photo, fills in what it can from their profile, and flags the order “By hand” so it can’t slip past. A product that isn’t ready yet can sit in the shop as launching soon, unbuyable, collecting an interest list she can download. Anyone can browse the shop now and see what’s in it, but opening a product or buying one takes a member login. Some of the blog posts are public too, and the rest stay with members.
- 06
Partners and resources
A partner directory of local matchmakers, coaches and experiences, where every link tags itself so partners can see the traffic came from COSINCO, and each click can be counted in analytics. A resources library of books, programs and experts, sorted A to Z on its own (skipping “The” and filing doctors by last name), and affiliate links that label themselves, Amazon’s required statement included.
- 07
One filter panel
Resources, partners and events share one filter panel. Pick two topics and you get both. Pick a topic and a month and you get the overlap. The counts come off what’s actually on the page, so they can’t lie, and on a phone it all tucks into a Filters drawer.
- 08
Emails that look like hers
The site sends email from four different systems: the shop, memberships, member accounts and WordPress itself. Out of the box every one looked different and none looked like COSINCO. Now they all wear the same COSINCO frame.
- 09
Legal and safety
I wrote all seven legal pages: terms, privacy, a Colorado safety policy, community guidelines, refunds, shipping and returns, and an affiliate and partner disclosure. They’re public even though the member side isn’t, because anybody deciding whether to join deserves to read them first.
- 10
Accessibility and speed
Labels for screen readers where the eye doesn’t need them, shop results that announce themselves when a filter changes, and motion that stands down for anyone who has asked their device for less of it. For speed, content pages skip the membership plugins’ styles they don’t use, small scripts wait until the page is up, and whatever is already on screen shows straight away instead of fading in.
- 11
Running it without me
Every word, logo and photo on the site can be changed from the dashboard, including each page’s Google title and description. Every list that has an order, products, tabs, partners and categories, is dragged into place. And there’s a Site Guide built right into the dashboard, fourteen sections with a search box, covering everything from coupons to sales tax.
Phone first, because that’s where her people are
This community started on Facebook, which means most of them are going to show up on a phone. So every page was designed at phone size first and then let out to fill a desktop, not the other way around.
The glass panels and the sunset sky come along at every size, and the cards stack into one easy column with a thumb-sized button at the bottom of each.
What broke, and what I did about it
This page promises the bugs too. These are the ones worth telling.
- 01
Checkout crashed
One sentence of renewal text used a placeholder newer PHP refuses, and it took the whole membership checkout down for anyone signing up. It only showed for a logged-in applicant with no membership yet, which is why a normal crawl never saw it. Fixed the sentence, and made that spot fail safely so a typo in editable copy can never take a page down again.
- 02
Every product page lost its name
A rule meant to hide the theme’s own page headings also caught every product’s title, because they share a class. The products were all there, just nameless. Narrowed the rule.
- 03
The personalized products would have printed the sample
The print on demand supplier prints one stored file per product, every order, forever. The connection cards would have shipped with the placeholder name and stock photo on them. Those three products are now locked away from the supplier and made by hand instead.
- 04
Payment buttons came back on their own
Stripe replaced its old express payment buttons with a new element that ignored the code switching them off, and Amazon Pay and Link reappeared. Turned them off in Stripe’s own settings, where the new element actually listens.
- 05
Dead links showed the login page
Every missing page sent people to log in, which tells search engines the page exists. Missing pages get a real 404 now, and the members-only pages still go to login.
- 06
The new host was smaller
Moving to the live host meant fitting inside a tighter memory limit, so a page builder the site never used came out.
What she says
I had originally planned to build my COSINCO website on my own, and I'm so relieved I didn't. It never would have looked this good, and honestly, I'm not sure I would have finished given how big the scope was and how the project evolved (bless Alyssa for her patience!).COSINCO’s founder, in her Google review
I'd been overwhelmed thinking about everything I still needed to add (descriptions, terms of service, privacy policies, FAQs, and so on), only to discover she'd already fleshed those sections out for me.COSINCO’s founder, in her Google review
She walked me through everything and gave me a searchable guide so I can find what I need later instead of trying to take notes or remember it all (definitely not happening 😂).COSINCO’s founder, in her Google review
If you're thinking about working with her, do it.COSINCO’s founder, in her Google review
One community, counted
Counted against the live site.
- 1stPaid client, and my first WordPress build.
- 35Pages, plus every profile, event, product and partner that lives on them.
- $10A month for membership, through Stripe.
- 0Free tiers. You get verified, then you subscribe.
- 25+Age to join, checked by the form itself.
- 7Legal pages, all public, all written for this community.
- 53,000Lines of custom theme code holding it together.
- 0.46sHow long the sun takes to rise under the link you clicked.
Beta first, then the real numbers
Beta is where a site meets its real people. The first members’ notes are coming in and getting fixed as they land, and what her team finds goes in before the full launch.
The biggest one so far: once they got in, they weren’t sure what to do next. The site already explained it, but explaining wasn’t enough. So I built guided sections into the main parts of the site that give a little nudge toward the next step, and added a connect section to every profile, so members can see they’re free to reach out to anyone who has chosen to share their contact info. That’s exactly what a beta is for, and I want it right for the people inside it.
I’ll come back and update this with what the beta turned up, and again at thirty to sixty days with real members and real numbers.
Have a community that needs a real home?
Applications, approvals, payments and privacy, built around your people and handed over in your name.