Q&A Part 1 | Amanda Bradford

All right.

So the main event is the launch, right? So I always say, now you gotta make sure your pre-gamers go to the party. And so you gotta make sure they show up, they're on time, they're high energy, they're outgoing, they're committed, and they're trying to get other people to come, right? So that's your ideal pre-gamer crew. And your product still needs to do the rest, right? So you can have a crappy product and do all this stuff, but at the end of the day, you put the product live, that's ultimately gonna be your salesperson. So the product does need to— to be high quality and people— it needs to work for people, right? So, but you also can do a lot. You can see how much you can do to kind of put your product in like the best— give it the best odds possible of kind of opening strong, right? So you can see we only had 500 people on the first day. So if you're ever feeling bad about your user numbers, just look here. We started with 419 on day 1. But you can see how many of the 500 showed up. So you can see 72% messaged. Everybody stayed the whole week. And half the people invited friends. So it was like a really good solid foundation group. And we didn't even do a launch party. We just kept telling them, hey, November 12th, November 12th is when we're gonna launch. And so we really, like I said, we kinda used our pregame crew to kinda launch the app for us in a way. So we did this for every— we've done this for every city launch. So you can see in New York we have a pre-party. This is sort of 30 or 40 people upstairs. This was 300 downstairs. We kind of took these people and herded them down. We did this again in London. We've just now launched a bunch of other cities like Atlanta, Miami, Philadelphia. And we still do invite press and early people in early so that we do have that kind of pregame, pre-party feeling so that it's never sort of totally empty right when the party starts. That's kind of the worst. And when the party's good, you can kind of tell when a party's good, obviously, right? But you can also tell when a product launch is good. I mean, the same metrics apply. So you know what to look for. You know what's gonna be measured. So now you can kind of reverse engineer each of those metrics and figure out what you can work on with your pre-gamers to make sure those metrics are all being hit. Awesome. So that was sort of my story of just how we got the league off the ground. I know I didn't talk much about fundraising or anything else like that. So I'm happy at this point to take questions on anything. I don't know how much time I have. I have a question. How am I doing on time?

30 minutes.

30 minutes? Oh, nice. Okay, I'm getting faster at that one. All right, so we have plenty of time. Yeah?

Is there any way that we can get the slides?

Yeah, they're actually online. So if you just— so you can see here, I did it. HustleCon is this conference for non-technical founders. And so I did a presentation. I did this presentation there, and I think it's on YouTube. And I think it's on SlideShare, but I can have them send it out.

Yeah?

So in July you put the app on the market and on a waitlist?

How did that work? No, we probably submitted to the App Store around end of July, August, and then we didn't open it till November. So we kept it because we wanted to— we do regional launches.

So you were already there and all you did was sign up and put your profile in? Yeah.

Yeah, it was just sort of the sign-up flow and then people had to wait. Yeah? How did you control who was coming to your parties to make sure that it was the correct demographic you wanted and not just anyone who wanted something free besides that? Well, we didn't make them pub— well, we did make that party public at the end because there was 300 and we were getting desperate at the end. We were like, we need 10 more people. For the most part, they weren't really public. They were friends of friends that I had my friends forward and other people forward. So they all came kind of in this sort of VIP feeling thing, even though it was an email that we were saying, come to this. And I had— we would use people who are sort of the center of a network to create the event and not necessarily— they weren't all created by me. So the one when I did a girls in tech night, I had my friend at Salesforce invite 5 of her Salesforce friends.

That's great.

So we did kind of like a women in tech. They gave me feedback on the app there. So yeah, so I kind of worked with different networks and tried to keep them all feeling very friends and family. Yeah.

So how do these apps change by city? Because if you compare San Francisco to Miami, the demographics are quite different in terms of professions and what people do for fun. Or what they're even looking for in relationships. How do you translate the model? This model seems perfect for a San Francisco setting, you know, like very tech professionals, very achieving, a lot of CEOs.

You'd be surprised. Like, I would say Miami is an example of one of the most entrepreneurial cities in the US if you actually look at the number of small business owners. So there's actually a lot. Like, I would say 30% of our Miamis are self-employed or starting, own some, whether it's restaurants or variety of small businesses. A lot of people own— it's like a different type of entrepreneurship there, but it's still entrepreneurship, right? So we think of it like that. It's like just because the industry portfolio is different and there's not as much hedge funds and there's not as much VC and tech startups, there's more entrepreneurship. There's more food and beverage. There's more hotels. And so making sure that every time we go to a new city, we're We're investigating the local economy and then making sure— You also code, right? I have not. I coded that first algorithm, but it's no longer in use, so no, I don't code anymore. I know, sad, but we've built a lot so that you can be pretty— as long as you're somewhat technical, you can still make quite a bit of changes to the app. So yeah, we've done a good job of modularizing it so that the business people can make changes without having to go into the code base every city we launch. Cool. Any other?

Yeah. What were some of the tools you used to target people that had the demographics you wanted?

It's a good question. I would say— what did we use? We used— honestly, it was a lot of friends. I leveraged my networks really hard. So I would say save them up and don't overuse them because That was super critical. I emailed Salesforce alumni and then they forwarded it out. I worked at Google and emailed the Google alums and they forwarded it out to people. Same with Stanford. So I really worked to kind of build a pretty good network here and leverage that. So I didn't do any ads and I didn't do— we didn't have the money. Ads are really expensive. It's about $5 to $10 a user to sign up on mobile. So unless you get really good, but that would have quickly exhausted our budget. So yeah, we did it all pretty much like by hand, I would say, brute force.

What's made it difficult to fundraise because you're not— how did you get the stigma when there are so many dating apps? How did you differentiate yourself to investors?

Well, we were pretty differentiated. Like if you actually look, if you spend 5 or 10 minutes Googling, like there's really not another— we have some copycats now, but for the most part, we're really— we're the only one that used LinkedIn as our data source. required double authentication, and had a human review team vetting for appropriateness, and ambition, and career ambition. And so we were really, I would say, we're really the only one out there that was targeting young professionals that were pretty career-focused, and that vibe. I would say the yuppie vibe, maybe, is a way that you could classify it. But so yeah, we worked really hard at kind of knowing who our user was coming out of the gates. And I think a lot of— that's a big mistake I see a lot of people. They'll launch these sort of apps that are for everybody and they don't resonate with anyone, right? So.