I get this question a lot from people on the waitlist, especially from those outside DE/NL: why are you starting in those two countries?
The honest answer is several things at once.
The lifestyle infrastructure is already there
Germany has had the most developed lifestyle infrastructure in Europe for at least 30 years. FKK culture, legalized prostitution, normalized sauna nudity, dedicated lifestyle clubs in every city. The community exists. It's organized. It just hasn't had a modern dating app built specifically for it.
The Netherlands is smaller in absolute terms but punches above its weight. Open-mindedness about sex and relationships is a cultural default rather than a counterculture. Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam each have established lifestyle venues. Dutch lifestyle users tend to be cross-border travelers — they go to Germany, Belgium, sometimes France, easily.
These two countries together cover ~100M people in the lifestyle's natural geographic home.
A two-country launch is operationally similar to a one-country launch
If we'd chosen just Germany, we'd need to build German-only features, German payment flows, German legal compliance, German user research. Adding the Netherlands at launch costs almost nothing extra technically — both run on the same Supabase backend, the same payment infrastructure (we use Google Play Billing, which handles VAT for both), the same support workflows.
Languages: German and Dutch. We translated the entire app and marketing site at the same time.
User behavior: similar enough that a single app design works for both, different enough that we'll learn from the comparison.
We don't want to be in 30 countries on day one
Most consumer apps make a strategic mistake at launch by trying to be everywhere. We've watched dating apps go from 0 to 50 countries in a year and then collapse because their match quality is bad in every market.
Match quality in a dating app is essentially a function of how many active, real, local users you have. Spreading thin = low local density = bad matches = users leave = your app dies in 30 places at once.
We'd rather be the best lifestyle app in 2 countries than a mediocre one in 30.
The order: a soft order, but DE leads
Within DE+NL, German signups will likely outnumber Dutch signups 3-to-1, because the German lifestyle community is much larger in absolute terms. That's fine. It doesn't mean DE comes first; both open at the same time. It just means we'll have proportionally more activity in DE for the first few months.
Why a waitlist and not just open access
A few reasons:
- Quality control. We're hand-verifying every founding member. That's 50–100 verifications per week per city, manually. It doesn't scale to "open the floodgates."
- Couples first. We want the founding-couple count to grow ahead of the founding-singles count. The waitlist + invitation system lets us pace which signups we activate first.
- Trust signal. A "first 1,000 founding members get a lifetime badge" mechanic creates the right kind of early-adopter pull. The right people self-select.
- Honest feedback loop. When you only have 200 users in a city, every single one of them is a feedback source. You can hand-tune the experience based on what you hear. That gets impossible at 10,000.
What's coming after DE+NL
We're not going to commit to a sequence publicly because we want to be honest: it depends on where the waitlist demand actually concentrates.
That said, the candidate list of "next 1–2 countries" includes:
- Austria + Switzerland. Natural German-speaking extension. Smaller, but easy to add.
- Belgium. Already on the radar; some Belgian users will use the DE/NL version cross-border.
- France. Larger market, but more cultural localization needed. Cap d'Agde alone is a real anchor.
- UK + Ireland. English-language, large addressable market, but the community is more dispersed and harder to reach in any one city.
- Sweden + Denmark. Small but high-quality lifestyle scenes.
Whichever country generates the most genuine waitlist demand wins the third slot. That's not a marketing trick — it's the most efficient signal we have about where to deploy our limited capacity.
If you're outside DE+NL
You can sign up to the waitlist anyway, and you'll get a country-tagged spot. You'll see updates from us. When we open in your country, you'll be at the front of the line.
If you really want to accelerate your country's opening, the most useful thing you can do is share Lustimacy with one or two friends in your country and have them sign up. Country-level waitlist density is the single biggest factor in where we go next.
A note on the niche
I'll close with something that I think gets undersold in this conversation:
The European lifestyle community is one of the most underserved communities of size that I'm aware of. It's adult (so most ad platforms refuse to serve it), it's specific (so generic dating apps don't fit it), it's geographically clustered (so platform networks-effects-by-country matter a lot), and it's been served for 20+ years by tools that haven't really been rebuilt for mobile.
Building for an underserved niche is a really fun engineering problem. It's also a deeply human one — every founding couple we onboard manually teaches us something about what the community actually wants. We're going to listen, build, learn, and ship — and try not to fuck it up.
Thanks for being here this early. It matters.
Written by Albert A., founder of Lustimacy. DE + NL launching first in 2026. Waitlist is open.