This Week in Startups
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.
00:12:33 · Amanda Bradford
But you can see at least that, you know, you're kind of telling your story to the people, and trying to get as many people to write about it when you launch. We did, got TechCrunch, we got, I think that one on the right is Business Insider. But you can see they, you know, everyone seemed to like the angle of, you know, the very elite, elitist dating app, which, you know, in a way, was a double edged sword, because then some people felt like they weren't eligible for it if they didn't go to a fancy school. But most of the time, sign up anyway, because who doesn't want to be in an exclusive group of smart, educated people that want a relationship? It did better. It was more good than bad. But that's definitely press will take your pitch and make it their own. That's for sure. So on launch day, we opened our gates, I only accepted 500 people. Keep that in mind. In context, we started on four nineteen people. So similar to the guy who was just before me, he only had to get 10 users. It's it's really better to have 500 people that are obsessed with your app than trying to open it to 5,000 people and figure out what you're doing wrong. Small is better. Then we just rinse and repeat. We did these all over. We were in San Francisco for six months, then we launched New York six months into San Francisco. And then we were in New York and San Francisco for a full year before we launched LA and that we didn't even have monetization at the beginning. So we added monetization in that period of time between New York and Los Angeles. But we did, you know, parties at the best rooftop bars, we would work with Soho House. We did partners with partnerships with the Equinox because they have a place in every city we went to and they would let us have parties there for free as long as we brought people that weren't Equinox members. So again, the partnerships are a really big, big help, especially if you're trying to do things on the cheap at the beginning. And these eventually once we did stuff with Equinox and we did stuff with Soho House, all these all these people came in inbound to us. They were like, HBO wanted us to do a party for one of their shows. We did a Netflix party for one of their movies that they launched, and we helped launch things. So this was a again, once people see other good brands next to you, they'll come to you. Then we grew.