This Week in Startups
00:01:08 · Amanda Bradford
[00:01:08] S1: Hi, everyone. I'm Amanda Bradford. I built a dating app. Sold it to Match Group in 2022. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my story and how we launched because I think that's the most important part. Especially from what I understand, most of you guys are early stage founders. So feel free to talk to me afterwards if you want to talk more about the M and A and the scaling and all that stuff. But I'm going focus on the early stage story. Just quickly what I'll go into a little bit of who I am, what our pitch was, how I built it, and then end with some tactical advice. My story, I went to business school, which I joke is like going to college part two. And it's very social experience. And you meet a lot of people, I think our class of 300 had like 30 couples that started out of that, you know, very tight cohort of people. And so one of the reasons that I kind of thought to do this was when I was graduating, I was like, wait, this is crazy. I'm in this pool of amazing, very eligible people. And now I'm in the real world, and they all go away. And now you're back to Tinder. So I was like, why don't I just try to create the kind of the same sort of very close knit, very ambitious, very educated cohort with an app so that people don't have to go to business school to meet people. And my background was in I like to call myself technical enough that engineers don't like me, but not technical enough to do their job, at least in the former days. And so I did HTML, JavaScript, CSS, but I wasn't building API. So I was not like the last speaker who had a co founder. Was a solo founder. So shout out to anybody who's solo founding. Now is the day that you can actually do it a lot easier than in my day. The league, if anyone hasn't heard of it, we built our product on LinkedIn verification. We're the very first dating startup to use the LinkedIn API, and also to have an admissions based process where not everybody got in. And that was very controversial at the time. And I spoke about this a little bit, but I think the kind of lightning bolt for me was that it's so easy to meet people when you're in these college environments, you don't really need dating apps. Apps. That's why a lot of people pitch me on dating apps for college kids. I'm like, just go outside, like knock on someone's door on your dorm. It's really not that hard.
00:03:03 · Amanda Bradford
But when you're actually in the real world, all that stuff goes away. All the infrastructure goes away. You hope find people at a bar, no one's going to bars, you hope to find people at a gym, but no one wants to talk to anybody at the gym. So it's kind of a terrible environment for meeting people, especially when you compare it to what you just came from and where I had just been. So what I did is I created the same kind of thing. Was like, Okay, Stanford is very selective. They only accept 1% or two or 3% of people, depending on if you're legacy or not. But my goal was to just have a very vetted community of people that really wanted a serious relationship. So this was not for the one night stands. It wasn't hot or not. It was, you know, let me find serious people that are kind of seriously interested in dating. And so the way I designed it was happy hour, which in retrospect is actually a very difficult technical design challenge because we had the entire user base come at 5PM and we would give them three matches or five matches at five. So that was our tagline five at five. And so this was again, this with Tinder where you're just swiping for hours, and you're like, you have infinite homework was what I felt like on the other apps. I was like, I just want one that gives me some a day, I don't have to stay online. We weren't trying to get people to engage and be on the app for thirty minutes. We just wanted to give them very good matches. It was a little bit very, very different than what the current kind of dating app environment was, where it was sort of all you can swipe. And then what we also differentiated with was besides LinkedIn, we also had the admissions based application. So I review, I personally hand reviewed every single application, and I hired my best friend to do it. So we joked that she worked the door while I worked the product. And then we also had a one of our big features was that we wouldn't match you with people you worked with. So I had been doing an internship at Sequoia where I was the only woman. And the last thing I wanted was for all the people that I reported to to like, see me on a dating app. So we built it because we use LinkedIn, we could say, don't show me anyone else at Sequoia, or anything like that. So that was, you know, a feature guys didn't care about as much, but women really cared about.
00:04:59 · Amanda Bradford
So find your niche and find your power users. Women really gravitated towards the feature that if they'd managed a group of people and they were men, they don't want their direct reports seeing them on a dating app or vice versa, their boss. Then we also did a lot of events and parties, which I'll go into, but that was a big differentiator because we were kind of doing offline back when no one was doing offline. People really liked the fact that they could meet people in real life through the app. Here's some of the taglines. Really leaned into being like, we are for the ambitious, we're for the picky, it's better to be single than settle. We have a lot of brand, we worked really hard on making sure the brand was very much for people with high standards. And this is our demographic slide when we sold, we're much bigger now. But you know, we really focused on people, you know, come from an MBA program. So that was obviously my like founding wedge was MBAs, my one of my investors joked that like the first five weeks on the app, was like, you should just call this MBA date because it's all these MBA women. So go really deep and narrow at the beginning. So ours was sort of the advanced degree people. And then we got finance on it. We got marketing people on it. So we had a lot of tech lawyers, people with advanced degrees, and MBAs, of course. You know, people were like, it's for the Ivy League. It wasn't actually for the Ivy League. I mean, I went to Carnegie Mellon, that's not Ivy League. But because the way we named it, and the sort of the brand we built, people kind of associated with the Ivy League, which I actually thought was a good thing because we can associate your brand to something that people really understand readily. It helps them get the message across very quickly without having to be like, how is it different? How I built it. Was a hard slog when you're a solo founder, but I basically found an iOS engineer. Only built it in four months. And during those four months, I was basically QA ing the product finding bugs, shipping, sending it back to him to change things. And then I also pregamed our SF launch. So what I mean by pregame, if you... None of you guys have been to college, but that was one of the fun parts of other parties is everybody got together to pregame before the party.
00:06:53 · Amanda Bradford
And then we always joked that the pregames were more fun than the party. And so that's sort of what I did for the SF launch. I didn't have a big, expensive party. I didn't think that we had to have the like, you know, people coming out of a cake or whatever people do at these crazy launch parties. We do... I just actually had a lot of series of small events beforehand and kind of went door to door to collect people on my wait list. And then we, by doing that and by getting the word out beforehand, we even got some press before we launched, which was great because then I could even choose from, you know, the kind of the best of the best that had applied for the founding cohort. So you want to build your waitlist before you launch, especially if you're doing a double sided marketplace. Like I know that I'm a consumer person, I'm sure a lot of you guys are doing B2B, but all these things hold for any double sided marketplace, whether you're in B2B or consumer. Again, you never want to have the empty room problem. And so that was like, I really focused on those five months to make sure we did not have the empty room problem in San Francisco, which is where we launched. So you can see here, this is my very first prototype that I handed to a developer, ended up being a different developer because I tried going out, I outsourced it at first, and then outsourcing doesn't work, at least in my experience. So then I hired someone to sit next to me and actually be kind of like a rented co founder. He had an equity stake and everything like that, but he was really just there to build the app and give me a proof of concept. And then that was sort of our contract was when he gets me into the app store, his equity vest. So it was, you know, I kind of joked that, yeah, I rented a co founder for those five months. But we went really fast. So you can see, you know, we only spent five months building the app. And now, you know, in today's day, that's probably like two months, if not even, maybe even shorter. We spent a lot of time on the onboarding before the user gets in. When they were, when we were still collecting waitlist, you can see I had the countdown, how many women, how many men we needed. People were inviting their friends so they could get the spot. So we showed how selective we were being.
00:08:46 · Amanda Bradford
And it created a sense of urgency when people saw that screen that they should say, Oh, wow, I need, there's only 50 slots left, I should tell my friends to get in it. And so building your founding user base, this is the hard part, most important part, especially again, for a double sided marketplace. But I did the VIP approach. That was where most of my time went, where I was going to tons of events. You basically become a socialite. If you're not one already, become one or find a co founder who's going to be a socialite. And you're just going out, you're asking people to get feedback on your onboarding. That was my most common way I went up to people. Said, I just wanted to see like, what do you think about this onboarding? Would you do this? What do you like about the current app? What do you don't like about the current apps? And they feel really special because they're, you know, you're asking them for their feedback. They're almost being like a design partner to you. And so I called all those users founding members. And they were, I was like, I'll give you founding member credit and you'll get first dibs at the when we launch, you'll be in the first cohort. So the like door to door, that's kind of I call that door to door sales. Then I had a bunch of parties. So I wasn't always saying, hey, download my app and just give me feedback. Was like, oh, hey, I'm having a MBA mixer, I'm having a Fleet Week boat party, you guys should come. And to do that, you need to have the app on your phone to do that. But I didn't tell them that until you're at the door and then you have to hire someone very good at the door that isn't that's going to hold hold that line and say, you know, you need to have the app on your phone to get in. So I can go and do a little bit of what I did see here, you can see some of all the different events I did. Did girls feedback and wine night. I did a shopping event after hours. All these things were free. The local business owners were like, sure, we'll open this store an hour later if you're going to commit to like $300 in sales. Of course, know, we had like 60 girls there. Spent way over $300 Barry's Boot Camp did the same thing. A time slot that nobody was booking. So they gave it to me for free. Then I booked it out. Blue Angels boat party, it's really hard to get on a boat during Blue Angels.
00:10:41 · Amanda Bradford
I rented out like three, four months in advance and then got actually charged people $300 for that event. So we didn't we actually made a couple grand on that event. So I didn't really spend that much money on these marketing events like open bar, I'd say, Okay, I'll buy everybody the first drink free, and then it goes on your card. So it's, know, you can do these kind of on the on the cheap. And we actually did all this and then I closed 2,000,000 after we launched. So again, it's in consumer, especially it's very hard to close funding without traction before you launch. If you can do it, you're a rock star and, you know, good for you. But for the most part, people need to see that users are using it and they like it and they're sticking around. And so that was a big, big How we closed in January was showing that people in San Francisco were actually liking it. Here's some of the events I did. I can scroll through these really fast because I'm getting low on time, but these are all the different events I did. Again, this is all before the app goes live. Just remember that we're building the waitlist, building your word-of-mouth, building your kind of founding design partners, whatever you want to call them founding members. And then we did a lot of press and partnerships. Today, in today's land, that would be influencers also. And here you can see some of the emails I sent to get the word out. So this is my friend who went to Wharton, I didn't go to Wharton, so I had no one to contact there. So I asked him to forward that to his Wharton group of three fifty people. So he did that. And then I got another, you know, I got all the Wharton people using it. And then these are the press outreach that I did before we launched. This is Bold Italic. I don't even know if they're around anymore. But, know, things like Refinery29, TechCrunch, Business Insider. So we, you know, I had friends that had worked in PR and they told me, you you need to, here's how you pitch, here's the people you need to pitch. And there's people that write about dating, and you should contact those. So I probably wrote about 30 of these emails, and this is very much too long. But it is my first one, I was early days, so I would have shortened it down to like, probably a paragraph now.