This Week in Startups
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.
00:14:29 · Amanda Bradford
It wasn't exponential growth. It was hard growth, but we kind of rose consistently through the daily active users and sign ups. Then eventually we launched in 155 cities. The big takeaways launching other cities. A lot of founders come to me and are like, Oh, we want to go to New York, we want to do this, we want to do this, we want to go international. And I'm like, No, no, no, you still have so much TAM in New York or San Francisco, wherever their first city is, I was like, need to get better penetration in your first city before expanding. And I think you can, in retrospect, we launched 155 cities. If I had to go back in time, I would have capped it at 20 because the revenue from the twenty first through the 150 city was negligible and added more complexity to operations. Hiring, I couldn't find a perfect co founder. If you can, that's amazing. If you can't, just go forward. Don't wait for Mr. Right. Fundraising, same concept with fundraising, show that you have skin in the game before asking for money. If you don't get a yes, say cool, this ship sailing whether you're in or not. And so I think my investors particularly liked that I was launching already, I was going to launch, I need it if they gave me money, that's great. But I wasn't like stuck if I didn't get fundraising. And in press, and I would put influencers on this now too, are your best friend if because they'll do it for free. It's earned media. None of our press costs us money. If you can get influencers to tweet about your things or post about your things for free, that's amazing. So try to do these targeted pitches to these people that have this distribution. And then monetizing, we didn't monetize the first year and a half, but what I did do is a smoke and mirrors thing where I said, Do you want to upgrade to heavy hitter? If so, click the button. And then I just said, We charged your card. Now you're a heavy hitter. And we gave him the features, but we didn't actually... My engineer didn't even know how to do billing or anything at that point. So it was a total fake out. But we could then see, okay, about 15% of people pushed the button, said they were willing to pay $15 So then when I went to go fundraise, could say we did a, you know, we did a test and we know that 15% of people, so maybe 13% in reality, would would be up for like a membership fee.
00:16:24 · Amanda Bradford
That that helps people or helps the investors feel okay with the fact that we could monetize even though we hadn't. Then rebuilding your MVP start earlier than you think. We had a lot of kind of scaling issues when we went to New York. And that was part of why we waited so long for LA. But it was definitely an MVP. So as soon as you know that you're getting traction, just realize that that's a project you'll probably need to take on.
00:16:45 · Jason Calacanis
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00:18:33 · Amanda Bradford
[00:18:33] S1: Well, Mark wrote the book on Dreamforce. I used to work at Salesforce, so that was a big part of his strategy, getting everyone together and they could talk to other people that also were admins of Salesforce. So he had the first developer meets sales conference together. For Replit, I think developers like to meet other developers, and it's similar to how NBA Singles wanted to meet other NBA Singles. You find a niche of the developers that maybe it's hard to find people that are specialized in this one thing, and you could create a meetup for them, or a startup hackathon or something that they get $100,000 Or if you're a startup, maybe it's $10,000 but you get some sort of award and a trophy. But I think, yes, finding that group of people, what their need is around who they're wanting to connect with that they can. Maybe it's investors and developers that want to meet those people. So then you bring in, you ask Jason to see if he can bring in some investors. They want to come to the event. So use your network, but find out what it is that they're not getting. And for our demographic, was they weren't getting curated mixers. You were going to a bar and everybody was either in a relationship or too old or too young. Was like the Goldilocks thing. If I could get everybody who's same age, same...