This Week in Startups
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.
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.