Caroline Ghosn built Levo to 9 million members in three years by starting with college students and letting them invite friends. She raised $10 million, including $1.25 million from Sheryl Sandberg, and focuses on K-factor—how many people each member recruits—over expensive ads.
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Okay, so let me give you an overview. So Levo's 3 years old. We are the largest and fastest growing network for millennials. So we're the largest and fastest growing network for people under the age of 35. We have 9 million members from zero in the last 3 years. And we have a ground army of about 40,000 people in local groups who come together to self-organize learning and networking workshops around the globe. So what we've done is we've built a network that's focused on authenticity and that's focused on daily engagement from the ground up. versus coming at it from the pure networking and hunting effects from the top down. And we believe that's important. Yeah, go ahead.
So how did you get your initial group of people? Because obviously as soon as you've got like a million of this, it's gonna take off. But how did you get that first kind of group of people so people start talking about it and the product?
Yeah, so our user base has multiplied consistently at a consistent rate, but the base has obviously been different as we've grown. So when we started, we started with people we knew. So I basically harassed everybody I knew to try this beta product. We got 1,000 college students signed up at first, and then 10,000 college students signed up. And then we raised money against that. We raised $1.25 million in angel funds from angels like Sheryl Sandberg, who had never invested in any startup before and haven't since. We'll get there. We can talk about fundraising separately. And then from there, we started to build acquisition and referral methods for our users who are passionate about us to invite other users like them. And so the key of all of this is to unlock invitations. You just can't grow a network unless your users care about what you're doing and they invite people like them. It's too expensive and too inefficient to go the other way around and say, hey, we're going to get 10 million uniques to our site every month, and we're going to convert 1% of them, and that's how we're going to grow. That's way harder than building a product that people like and saying, hey, if you like this, can you invite people like you? So the answer is bottoms up. The K-factor, which is the indication of how many people you've invited, is the most important metric. And the way that you affect that change is through product tweaks and product marketing tweaks. So that's where we are. We've raised about $10 million so far. We raised $1.25 in our angel round, and then we raised an incremental in our next, still angel round. So it's been all private investors or people who are partners at venture firms. And we've been really, really focused on user growth and on refining our product. And then on May 18th, we're actually going to relaunch everything based on what we've learned in the last 3 years. We need to make our entrance experience easier. This homepage will disappear. We've decided that it's too much time to waste on users to show them what they could be getting behind a gate to show them what they're going to get. And put a modal over it and make them give you their email in order to get past it, which is more of like the Pinterest-style landing page versus like the book cover landing page, which this is, which is pretty, but you still have to get past that barrier, so it reduces your conversion rate.
