Pregaming your launch | Amanda Bradford

All right. So just before I get started, I wanna get a sense for what you guys are excited for me to talk about, 'cause I can kind of tailor this pitch a little bit, a couple different ways. I can talk a little bit more about the fundraising components, or I can focus more on the marketing and how we actually got the product off the ground, which wasn't easy. Exactly related to fundraising, I guess. So I don't know. You wanna give me a show of hands, I guess, like who's more interested in fundraising versus who's more interested in just kind of getting a product up and off the ground and marketing it? So I guess fundraising and then more about kind of product launch. Okay. I'll try to incorporate both, but I may focus more on the marketing side of stuff. Awesome. So I am up here today to give you a little bit of a history of just sort of how we took our mobile app, which was iOS only, only, from a really basic prototype, one that we built in less than 3 months, to now we have over 150,000 monthly actives on the platform. We've rebuilt it twice. You could even argue maybe 3 times a little bit if you think about some of the internal systems. So we've iterated a lot. But I wanted to hopefully leave you guys with an inspiring story of just how little we actually used at the beginning to get it off the ground, and how little funding we needed, and the scrappy hustler type of techniques you can use if you're not the one programming and you're not the one— and you're not fundraising necessarily. What can you do to kind of get traction and get the product off the ground so that you are kind of attractive from a fundraising perspective? All right. So the way I thought about it is when we were launching, the way I thought about the launch is I wanted to execute it just like I would execute a great party. So in university, I liked having a lot of parties. I had big birthday parties. I think one time I had like 6 party buses for my 25th birthday with 120 people in it because it was a bunch of other people's birthdays. So I just said, come along and I'll plan it all for everybody. So the way I think about it is I kind of use the same approach that I think about as making sure a party is really good. And behind every great party is a really epic pregame. If you host a lot of parties, you'll know that it's all about kind of getting people over early. and getting the momentum started before the product or the party actually launches. So quick background. I'll go a little bit of my background, The League, what we are, just so you kind of understand the product that is being marketed, how we define success for a product market launch, the benefits of pre-gaming and the art of pre-gaming, and kind of what we did with our user base prior to actually opening the product into kind of beta, the main launch itself, and then recap and Q&A. So hopefully we'll have 10 or 15 minutes, maybe even more, for you guys to ask questions. So if there's anything burning, feel free to raise your hand. But if not, I'll definitely leave some time at the end. All right. So quick background. What is the League? Whoever was up here spoke beautifully about it. You did a great job. You could have a great job in communications because that was a beautiful way to explain what our focus is. But it really is that. So it's designed for pretty career-oriented, passionate people trying to make an impact. The type of personalities that come to Draper, the type of personalities that want to do startups, that are kind of going to a lot of these entrepreneurial things. That's kind of our user base is these group of people that you could really kind of define as ambitious, driven, and motivated in wanting to make an impact. It's less about income. It's less about industry. It's less about what exactly you're doing. It's sort of like we want the kind of people that want to be the best in what they're doing and that what they do 9 to 5 actually really matters to kind of them and they want to do something they believe in. So who am I? I am the girl who wanted this app to be built for myself. So I like to say I was the career-focused executive. I didn't really wanna play the traditional girlfriend, doting girlfriend role. I wanted to meet interesting people that valued my ambition, valued my drive, thought that was something that was worth prioritizing in their selection process. If you think about it, it's one big matching dance, right? Dating. I wanted someone that valued that as much as I value that. And so why are we up here talking? So we did kind of an interesting launch strategy. So we only raised— I think I had a $25K check for most of the life of the company before we launched. And before I got that, I actually used my own funding to start development with an iOS developer. So it was me and him, just 2 of us. with kind of my own money. Then we got $25K, which I used on a couple of these parties that I'll talk about, as well as paying for the cost of development. But really, that's really all we used to launch our alpha in San Francisco. So you could say it was actually less than $20K. We didn't even spend the whole $25K. So I think we got— we basically launched the product for about that, which is pretty low in Silicon Valley terms when you have people kind of raising seed funds of $3 million and using that to launch. So we actually launched before we raised any funding. So we launched, and within 3 months of going live, we had almost 100,000 signups. So why did I start The League? So I tried to take a problem that I had a personal interest in and also in an industry that I thought was going up and to the right. The Tinder revolution was happening. I saw a lot of friends who had never used online dating sites actually take an interest in them and start to use them and to actually meet people offline, which I thought was a pretty big consumer behavior shift. And when you're thinking about what kind of industry or market you guys wanna do a startup in, you really wanna think about, is it growing? Is it actually— are you seeing a pretty huge shift in that industry? And that's really when you wanna jump on, because you kinda wanna be ahead of the wave. They always say— I did an internship at Sequoia, and the one advice was you always see the wave early and ride it. You can do no wrong if you're riding a really good wave. So you don't even have to have as good of a business if the wave's amazing, right? So you think about it that way. So why put your— why make it harder on yourself? Find a really good wave and put a really good product on top of it. So that was kind of the things that I was thinking about. I tried— I say I was a dating app bender. I tried OkCupid. I think I tried Hinge, Coffee Meets Bagel, a lot of our competitors. And I had a lot of the same issues with some of the lack of features. And just the overall kind of vibe and more or less like the brand that they were building. And I felt like there could be one that would really appeal towards young professionals that didn't feel kind of trashy and felt like somewhere where people were gonna be respectful to you. They were gonna say nice messages. People weren't gonna be mean. There was no anonymous trolling. So we really reduced a lot of the anonymity by requiring Facebook and requiring LinkedIn. aren't kind of free to just say whatever they wanna say because it is them. It's their social presence that they're putting out there. And because of that, people are on their best behavior in a sense because it's a reflection of them. So how did we actually get the product off the ground? I like to say we pre-gamed harder than we partied, which is actually true. We didn't even have a launch party in San Francisco. We just had a ton of what I call pre-games and little group meetings, meeting friends of friends. And it was a lot of, almost think about if you're campaigning for office. of meeting people, understanding the current needs in the market, understanding what people are complaining about, listening to them, trying to build it into the product roadmap. So I did a lot of in-person events where I was talking to users a ton. I pretty much have probably heard— everyone usually comes up to me after this and gives me pieces of feedback about the app, who've— they've used it, and I love when you guys do that, but I guarantee 99.9% of them I've heard because this is how we developed the product, right? So we intentionally didn't do things or did do things because of this pretty rigorous user testing, which also was— you could kind of look at it as pre-gaming at the same time. So we kind of killed two birds with one stone by starting to meet our users and getting product feedback at the same time in a fun environment.