Hello Cameron
The project sounds interesting, but the range of ideas that could be put into it is fairly wide. It could range from a simple-minded matching algorithm to more advanced machine learning techniques. Your budget suggests that you might want to start with a minimal viable project ("MVP") rather than go all out. In that case, I have some website and database experience that you could use.
Peter Lyons
Hi Cameron
We are a web design agency in Launceston who specialise in web design and development. Your project is intriguing to us, I have always wanted to explore algorithms for matching people together.
The first step would be for us to walk through who the site is designed to serve, the needs it is fulfilling and how it will fulfil them; we use the business model canvas for this step. After establishing the who, what and how, we will work with you to design the site brand. We next design the frontend site experience for users and when it fits with the branding and the earlier analysis we build it.
We build sites with a seperate front and backend (JAMstack), this enables us to get a very fast and personalised experience for site users while enabling further extensions (such as an accompanying app or integration into 3rd party services).
Once the site is built and ready, we also have the capability to create social media video campaigns to target the audience we identified at the start of the process and get the word out.
We would love to connect with you further to develop your idea.
Cheers
Sam Thiele sam@think.org.au https://teamthink.co/