#41 - Dating app that has an admissions process like Harvard

what's up guys sean here i got a couple announcements for you so we'll start with little celebration we crossed the one million download mark which is amazing in just i don't know six months that we've been out so that's kind of incredible didn't think it would get this far obviously you got a long way to go in the words of doctor disrespect we're all the way at the tip top of the mountain but we're only halfway up okay so a couple other announcements we've been doing these brainstorm storms me and sam from the hustle and they've been a lot of fun to do plus i think it seemed to be the favorite from listeners more so than the interviews even so we actually are gonna do what you know most projects and start should do which is follow the demand so those episodes are the ones that get the best feedback they get the most listens and they're the most fun to do so we're gonna double down and do more episodes of that style so we'll still bring in awesome guess who can tell us about their company and how they did it but in fact we're gonna invite them in instead of saying hey tell me your life story we're gonna spend the time with them saying hey okay you know how did you do what you do and what else do you see out there brainstorm with us and it'll be more casual and i think it'll be interesting to see what really smart successful people who are you know they're operating their company sometimes for ten years but they see all kinds of other opportunities that they can't go chase and they have this list of ideas that you know they'll never get to and so i wanna see that list of ideas i want them to come share that on the podcast so going forward we'll be doing more episodes like the brainstorm storms i hope you guys like that okay so those are two two announcements and then this episode is with amanda bradford from the league the league is a dating app she she built this app because to solve a very simple problem that she was having she would match with somebody on a dating site like o or match or tinder or whatever and before actually going to meet the person in real life she wanted to know is a real person you know does this person is this person who they say they are do they have a job you know what i wanna kinda know about this person beforehand and she wished that the dating sites would sort of vet the people in the dating pool but they didn't they just wanted to grow at all costs so they didn't care you can make as many accounts as you want and so she created a dating app that would vet people it has an admissions process sort of like you're applying to harvard but a cool company and and it was a fun conversation so hope you enjoy this episode this is probably gonna be the ask one like this or at least on a regular basis where it's hey it's all about our guests telling their story from from sort of start to finish and going forward we're gonna be doing a lot more brainstorm with me and sam i hope you guys like that i one other thing the facebook group is popping off right now i think i just approved a hundred members to get in so if you go on facebook you just search my first million it's called like my first million startups investing and side hustle and it's basically just a community of people who are hustling to make you know get businesses off the ground and make their first million and i like it i don't even i mean i'm in there as a participants some of the guests from the podcast are in their as participants but it's just a cool community of listeners okay that's it for me enjoy this episode thank you for getting getting us to the one million mark and yeah we're only halfway up so you're here you we i don't even know how we got connect i think we got connected on twitter yeah i'm not you're one of my few twitter friends you don't have that any twitter friends i was one of those people that started and only followed a couple different people that were an industry leaders and so i don't have like regular friends i make all my friends on twitter in fact i told sam this i once a month we'll just host a dinner just to people only know through twitter i'd never met them in real life oh that's cool and those have become some of my like good friends now but that's like twitter tea party yeah that's a good one yeah call dinner but maybe twitter deep party better okay so amanda you're here you're the founder of the league so we're gonna go all over the place in this conversation but let's start but giving people a sense of who you are what you built and what what makes it interesting so so give us the run rundown so i create did the league which is a dating platform now a community really because we we do actually work for single and non single people like at this point most of the users are single that use the league it's so first and foremost it is a dating up and the concept behind it was really focused on designing it for career oriented ambitious people that didn't have a lot of time on their hands and we didn't really wanna play a game of angry birds every time they wanted to go on a date so it was for the people that kinda name of angry well you know those dating apps were so game and they're all there to drive engagement numbers through the roof and then you know a lot of them were doing advertising revenue models at that time so they were really incentivized almost not to help you find a date really i hope you just keep swiping so i just felt like it was so much time to even use these dating sites and most of them were really bad and the people i met it wasn't so much even that the people on the dating apps were bad it was just the the way it was designed was not designed for efficiency at all and so i felt like i could just redesign it and so i started thinking about it and why framing it and then i was graduating business school and i decided i might as well just try building it and at least it could work for me so so dating after for one so you started this back when what i so now in five years ago so five years ago and fast forward today give us a sense of how's is the business is it big is it small is it just getting started you know like what give us a sense of scale of the business that we can understand started there how far does it come well yeah for i mean for a a census of scale we started in san francisco with four hundred and nineteen users so and that was in november twenty fourteen and so fast forward at this point we're well over a hundred thousand daily active users and we're in seventy cities we just launched singapore mexico city australia so we're now officially global so we've you know but we went really slowly and carefully like we do don't have a snapchat like trajectory curve i mean we we really built each city almost by hand at the beginning and then automated what we had been doing manually i mean i remember in san francisco i was literally manually going through profiles and saying okay you put in a good profile you're in you're in you're in and like because there is like being the bounce there's an admissions component to right yeah so we you know the idea behind it was hey if we all the users that have these half baked profiles or are just window shopping or are there to message you and catfish or you know just kind of the the correct app users that just happened to to find themselves being drawn to dating sites everywhere i mean it's a problem in the whole industry if we just screen them out from the beginning then we don't have to worry about them affecting the user experience so we basically have this like very curated community of people that actually wanna be there that want to find a date that put a good profile together or that aren't lying so is it fair to say you guys curate not just people that are real but people that are also like professional and kinda have their shit together or it's well i it's definitely geared for for those people that are like look i will trade time for money and i do want a platform that will help me find my partner and what does it cost so we we'd have an admissions model so if you're put together really good profile and sort of the community that you're applying to need someone like you in the community they're you know we do put let people in for a free we call a guest guest access and then we'll also you can pay to to kinda skip the line and get expedited review and then we'll help those people put together a good profile i'll give them optimization so it's kinda like you know you can pay to essentially you know have more visibility it'd be seen by more people and then dating it ultimately university you pay a little bit your kid gets in well i would say it's more like if you mathematician and you recognize that okay only one out of three people that see you like you and you only like one out of three people then the more people that can see you the number of choices you have go up and so you know i think it's for a lot of we call them hedge fund harvey but we have a lot of these users that that do the math in their head and are like yeah it's totally worth spending a lot of money for this because i'm saving myself so much time and i'm getting to see see my options basically hey you were just telling me right before we started that you got engaged did so the question is was it officially market was it through the app or was was it you know real life serendipity no i i it was actually through the league like ironically enough i was we always joked that if it didn't have through the league i was gonna have you know hell of a time explaining say no i actually either was gonna happen through the league because you're were gonna lie and say it happened through the week we were gonna have to come up with something but no it actually did i i met him in la so i joined the la league i decided to move my location having dated in san francisco and decided it was time for a little break the walls were all the san francisco market no it was good i just i've been here what ten ten years now at this point i knew the market really well and i felt like was i joked i felt like i was you're standing on the edge of the pure seeing the boats come in because i knew you know i'm i'm basically running this marketplace so i can actually see and i was like or i could to la where i haven't met anybody right and so it seems like a and when you saw his profile what'd you see what would cut dry well he's a musician so he playing a guitar and yeah yes kind of a a different vibe than than what i was i guess well i was wanting to well yeah i wanting to to try something i a little bit different than me so we're we are we are very different like on our from myers briggs i don't think we're very similar so definitely compliment each other but i think that was part of you know the part part of the what i love about the league and working and dating is that you're essentially like working in human psychology every day and so much of relationships is is kind of about understanding yourself and what you're looking for and what you're child childhood patterns are and what is like a healthy relationship and so i think i think the process of dating is actually quite therapeutic in some ways so do you almost feel like you know too much i think that well i know too much about the like the top of funnel if you will of like you know how to optimize your profile on how to make sure your league score goes skyrocket it's like we all know at the at the legal to that i think we all know how to hack our own profiles auto selection what what are the key things well of course it's photo selection i mean the higher res the better you know better looking profile you have the more model like the photo works honestly it's the the better your score is unfortunately did you see this i saw people like glamour shots exist for a reason guys they work did you see this show that came out on netflix called the circle of you alright so so netflix is pushing this heart if you open up netflix you're gonna see the circle up top it's basically their first game show but what's interesting about it what what you said reminded me of it is they put these eight people in a hotel so they're all locked in the room they can't go out can't meet each other but they each create a little profile and so the first thing they do when it gets get the room is they pick their profile photo and and some people choose to catfish they're like you know it's a guy but he's playing he's playing his girlfriend he's like she looks so sweet people here will like her and so it's a game like survivor except you're not out in the wild just locked in the a hotel room and all you do is you put up your profile with a couple photos and a little status or a little tagline and you message each other and then every whatever a couple days you rank like rank all the other players and who you like who you wanna keep the bottom player gets ranked that gets kicked out so it's very interesting in this because some people were trying to choose like the model photo everybody listed themselves a single because they're like look people will wanna i engage a little more if i list myself a single but it's a fun show and i feel like it'll be did they move around a lot for the weeks like were their first impressions yeah so basically the first impression would be like you know whoever was at the top would go down and actually the optimal strategy was sort of to flip by in the middle so you weren't seeing as too big of a threat like because if you're too beautiful or too likable some people would have a strong first impression either four against you but you were almost too polarizing like you wouldn't make it all the way to the end of the show and so thought that was interesting i know it's it's a bad show to be clear it's a really bad to tv show but the psychology as they're talking through like why i'm this photo because i wanna show this other side of right my first photo was really professional so my second photo i need with my i need to show always say yeah somebody else besides yourself in one of the photos that you care about something other than yourself and what do you feel about like people who put photo like let's say you know i'm a guy i put a photo of myself and another girl but it's a friend good move bad move in a in a dating up i mean if you if you really don't have any other photos it's better than not you know not putting it and if it's a good photo of you and it's better than a a bad photo of another one it's still fine but i i would say optimal not ideal right again it depends on how much you're trying to optimize you know i think i think one of the things people like about the league is that you kinda cut your teeth or dip your to toe in the water on the bum or the tenders of the world and then you're kinda ready to join the league and like graduate to league and so people are really there and they're like they have their shit together they their profile together they wanna meet someone month they wanna go on like two dates did four dates a month and and they're they're kind there for not for business that sounds wrong but you know they're they're there for a reason and so i think that's what we find works really well in the league is when you make a profile that that sort of shows that you're taking it seriously and you have the high resolution photos you've asked a friend with an iphone to take portrait mode and it's not that hard right so just putting a little bit effort goes a long way i think so what i like about what you're doing is you know there was always like this sort of serious platforms like a e harmon or a match and then there was sort of the very casual platforms and the problem with the serious platforms was that they felt very old outdated and the seriousness was very much around marriage whereas sometimes you're looking for a serious person but not necessarily like i'm ready to be married right away right and i think you guys found a sweet spot that's in the middle of the sort of ultra casual stuff and then the like i'm ready to get hitch right away totally is that kind of how you thought about it originally or how did you sort of decide where to position yourself i mean honestly it for myself right so i i don't know if i mentioned that but i you know i i was using like hinge and okay keep and i remember i was writing support tickets being like you guys should really build this feature and then you know so i i kind of designed it based on my own issues and at the time i was twenty eight twenty nine and in business came out of school i was still in business school with my last semester and i was like you know having to drive an hour into san francisco to go on a date so every day i had to you know the cost was two hours of commute time so these dates had to be good so that's why i was like looking at everyone on linkedin and trying to find their twitter and being like if i cry reference him in this and if yeah we at his a wikipedia page so i was doing like you know legit stocking these people before accepting dates which is work right so that was like why i can't the dating just do that work for us so but anyway so that's really who it is designed for us like i wasn't necessarily ready to like go and get married but i wanna start maybe dating more seriously so you may dating with the eye to think about someone that could be a fit for marriage like they're not twenty three candidate you don't wanna like be freaking never everybody out by saying hey i need to be wondering in a year alright it's twenty twenty new year it's gonna be a big year and you know we had to come in with some new awesome partners so for january we were partnering up with microsoft and my first million that's right this episode is brought to you by microsoft because whether you're just starting out or you're well on your way to your first million microsoft teams can help your team hit the ground running with must have features like real time chat editing and video calling all in one easy to use platform teams is a no brainer at a price you can afford yep there is a free version of teams as in it cost zero dollars see for yourself at a k a dot ms slash the hustle again that's a aka a dot s slash the hustle to check out teams brought to you by microsoft i love it microsoft that is a trillion dollar company right we're talking about my first million they're they're on my first trillion so that's goals for everybody they got there because they build epic products microsoft word excel powerpoint point these are products that stand the test of time and now they've come out with teams to help teams chat communicate at work together and i think it's awesome alright great let's get back to this episode so yeah i wanted to kinda make it in more of a community that's why we always say we're a community on a dating app because you know we also have like groups and events like you can be in the yoga group or the dog people of dogs and the surfers and so it's you know not that that's like a giant use case that's necessarily taking off but i think the point is we want to be more like a local kind of social network that is very very social people which happen to be often single people right but but offering more of that kinda of in real life and that's what i love about what we're doing with this video chat is that we're actually putting people on live of video what it is what's a called also a feature called so we're we're doing two different things that are kind of both designed to get people closer in real life so one is through video and it's basically kind of like chat back in the day but you know chat was super random and you would just be yeah paired with anyone in the world that of like any any age or every third person was naked yeah yeah exactly and i i heard that that happened too so basically we actually take your preferences into account we know your your voting history we know who you've liked to you've matched with and we essentially put you into the same pool and and match you in real time with someone that we think is gonna meet most of your are online right now and open been at nine pm right everybody get on it's a happy hour basic so it's kind of like serendipity in a in an app in a way because it's like it depends on exactly what time you go that the you know the then it'll you'll trigger the algorithm to go search for someone if you're the match score is a certain amount you'll you kinda will get up but if that your score isn't you know if you're not an acceptable match for each other you'll keep looking so it's like it's kind of like taking what speed dating those old speed dating restaurants and bars would host them and just have to do the all this manual able to like move people around and now you can just do it with you know pushing a button so i think that's gonna be a huge trend and then the other trend that we think is super interesting is getting people in real life offline at the same place at the same time and just helping them sort of navigate there's social nightlife compass so we call that like party scout but it's basically if everyone's going to the marina on thursday night who's twenty eight and single and you know in my city maybe i should go the marina instead of going to hay valley that night or right one ever and so those are some of the like i think trends that will be coming that's where that's where the puck going that's what i'm excited about i guess i it's unclear how like much monetization that stuff happens you know comes with but i think i think that's where it makes sense technology makes sense as an application to solve a problem right yeah i i believe in that i i was i lived in australia back in the day and there was a dating up there or dating website because this was sort like you know smartphones weren't as big of a deal back then and they did this and i've always wondered why nobody else did so basically the whole website was you were only master people who were also online right now and people would naturally just get online kinda after work in the evening these prime times yeah and so you would see art there's whatever forty two thousand people online right now and and you would just see people there you'd see a single photo of theirs and you start chatting with them and you knew you were get a response back right away so it's like aol back in the day exactly but you knew they're all trying to date so you're not a creep for reaching out like we're all here because we're saying we're trying to date and so compared to o cupid or match where had to write essentially write a letter and then wait that was slow right even the tenders you still sort of wait for matches and then kinda come back later this was like it was exciting you would get online and you'd be like oh it's gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna talk to a bunch of people right now and so you'd start all these conversations and then as a conversation was going good they had this great feature where you would the person could unlock more photos of themselves for you and so it was kind of like hey i'm like in this here's some more photos of me i was like take your clothes yeah but it was more photos right so yeah and the last photo who knows what's in that last photo but i always like that because it was like these little indicators of interest that you usually don't get online with video chat you sort of can see their face you could see if they're into a they can swipe away and leave if not but i love this idea that's kind of my long winded way of saying this i've always wondered why more people don't try this like synchronous it's hard i mean you have to have a e you our user base is small comparatively and it's hard for us i can't imagine a a start of doing it with users because it's you know it's hard to get even even the people so we have the like the concept of that that they're gonna go and then the concept of like who actually shows up at night thirty flake rate i was like bigger than you know and i run events for a living and i've seen flake people in san francisco for sure and was like you know fifty percent flake rate so i think it's hard to get just you need density building a user behavior right right we'd have to start training our users but they are starting to come in at nine and and i do think you know it is we are growing slowly the future but it is scary for people i think to be like so exposed for two full minutes so let me ask you you come up with this idea in business school like many people do and an nba with a powerpoint yeah our global slides now yeah like most people you decided to do it so let's go slow through the steps so despite every single scene person that i respect telling me not to go into the dating space right so first tell me this you have this idea who do you bounce it off of friends mentors who who do bounce it off of for everyone tons of classmates tons of my professors yeah the reaction you're getting is what run dating is too hard run away do crm yeah because i i worked at salesforce really like just what what you're such a great girl why don't you just go b don't do consumer because you know consumer so so f it's hard you know there's not a playbook as much as they're and b to b and so what made jude do you remember the night or the day where you were like screw i'm gonna do it anyways i mean no i started well i decided that i was gonna build it anyway and worst case it could just be a aside project while go and get a regular job and then i decided to one of my investors said you give me twenty five k to put into so i decided that i wanted to launch it and if i could launch it and raise at least five hundred k and funding then i would do it full time and that was the decision i made so it was and because i you wanna build it anyway and so it was more like how do i evaluate if because it's not even just just when you build it you don't know for sure if it's gonna be a business that that has legs so i just wanted to i felt like getting funding was at least this the closest signal i could do so you're not a programmer not i i would say i more of a a hacker okay did you build the first version yourself no no no we had had an engineer build and is all front end and objective c i don't do i don't do ios and so this was somebody you hired time it was kind of a like a freelancer how did you get it built yeah freelancer stanford undergrad great he was looking to like learn learn do you remember how much you paid for that first prototype first v one because a lot of our audience is people who are you in your shoes they're in business school yeah they're thinking about starting something and it's always these and i'm gonna a bunch of questions about the early phase because this is where most people really wanna know and it's sort of like black box like yeah so how much does a custom make something like this and how'd do you get your first hundred customers so those are the questions i wanna walk through yeah no they're good questions and and i think people have a crazy assumption sometimes but i think i paid him four thousand dollars a month right and but i had with that came him sitting next to me working as an engineer and i was the product manager and we worked side by side in a how long to get the kind team one ready lot we started really working after i graduated in june and launched it by november and he rolled off because we you know i just hired him to get the prototype out right then i was gonna that sort of our our arrangement and so he off in december so so six months ish yeah and you said something about like four hundred users in san francisco was that the launch essentially yeah that was our november twelve launch i think it was four hundred and nineteen logged in and then it grew from there and who who are those four hundred nineteen did you get four hundred nineteen please probably my stanford friends no was like it's was basically like i pulled every single person i knew at google salesforce where i used to work stanford and carnegie mel and so there's a lot of that i think one of my friends joked when you opened the app he was like you should just call this nba date right because it was like all the oh i got the harvard mba award and mba because i threw a mixer that summer with the sole purpose of like you guys are gonna be my launch right kind of my launch my launch team essentially so it was a definitely a lot of like thirty year olds that were in the exact demo of what i was designing it for right you know looking to start seriously dating but you know not necessarily ready for like any harm any type of experience so four hundred nineteen people who you kinda source through your network or the mixer that you through pre launch they open the app and now does it sort of start doing anything or is it like put after the first one you have to because many startups have to restart up relaunch oh yeah multiple tons we i mean i could do a whole podcast on like mobile app nightmares hey you know we were using facebook's parts at the time which has now been sunset but it was like a giant giant had disaster more or less because after we got to a certain amount of users the algorithm that we had built was actually on the front end of the code and and essentially would take almost five minutes to load your batch potential so that was that was a pretty bad situation where we actually couldn't put more users in for like a couple months until we fix that but now you know we we did so we ended up rebuilding that out from scratch but but because of that it's like nice and new and you know it was a year of like terrible construction but then we now we can be an international and we've kinda got all the scaling stuff done with and so so from that first kinda november twelfth launch how long does it take for you to feel like this actually might work yeah i'm not sure but like i'm i'm seeing something that's telling me that this is working well i think when people kept logging in despite having to wait five minutes but that was like one indicator that's a good way to tell like wow we gave them a really crappy experience and they still came back because i think it was at the ultimate at the of the day it was like we had people are interested in in meeting and that was that was what we did really well we created an awesome group of people so i think that was a big one and when we start when people started referring friends we had a pretty high i think it was like forty percent of people referring which is quite higher than the average and then i think what what we also did which i always tell people to to do is so by engineer he wasn't a back engineer so he didn't know how to do any of the billing or payment stuff but i wanted to know like how many people would pay or what percentage of people would pay so we ended up building a feature and just saying upgrade and then we just told the user that we would charge their card their card on a file with apple and they just push okay and so we ended up finding that we had like a fifteen percent conversion rate on you know right membership without me having to actually sell can't deal handle payments because we're were not ready for that that smart i that and then we didn't we actually started monetizing in two twenty twenty sixteen with the new app and then that's when you start having paying customers which was another milestone which i was a little unprepared for and that's when you really need a good customer support team so that's when we started building out kind of their our customer success in our concierge team and so is the business profitable to yeah we just as of as of our end of year two thousand nineteen financials we are officially profitable that's amazing not not taxable profit but thinking goodness yeah but yeah we don't worry the irs i of my podcast so we're all good i know i'm like i'm not giving it to california but yeah so that was exciting because that was something that was important to me was to be able i wanted us to grow but i didn't wanna grow at the expensive profitability i just think in our space you don't have to people are willing to pay in our space and it's also just it's a huge risk to the business you can kind of be in this unsustainable position where you're spending money to to keep your revenue at this same rate but if you drop your marketing in your whole right hip drops and i i've just seen so many horror stories so i really i wanted to to both grow profit and grow revenue and we were able to do both which is exciting because it's easy to like grow revenue and you grow marketing right yeah and if people don't know this so i i looked i i think we launched a dating app i i ran this ideal lab for five years and i think one of the things we launched was is dating app and i looked into it and there's this crazy thing i don't know how true this was but something i read at the time was all the let's call it you know sort of generation one of dating apps that got big all the sort of ia owned apps like match and whatnot their business model essentially was you free account but there was they would sort of get you message somebody and then but if you wanted to reach out past a certain point it was like you have to pay or no to receive your messages or to like read your messages you had to pay and so what they were doing was they were showing you matches of people who don't use the service anymore and so like let's say you see thirty profile else twenty nine of those would be people who don't use the service anymore deactivated inactive users because they wanna message that person that say hey there's a message waiting for you come back and check it and for you you're basically talking to a dead end and you don't realize it because they make it look active right and so they're using you till i re engage their users because they're trying to get them to come back yeah check their big inbox and pay and and that's what they got in trouble for doing with model scammers they they've sent the scammers to the people who hadn't paid for memberships but they didn't send the scammers to the people who are already paid and that's what they're getting sued for what so they they how does that work so they knowing had scammers so what that's a big good issue in our industry there's all these people doing romance scams and so that's you know a hard part every day you're always trying to to deal with that but so what matched it which was actually a a solution to the problem and very unethical one but they just said well let me send the scammers to the people who have not yet converted to membership and tell them they have a message waiting from a very good looking profile because they're scammer right and then so you get hundreds of thousands of subscriptions sold through basically a salesforce full of scammers right that you're using i mean it's almost like genius and its evil ness yeah i was gonna say that's somebody like me and the company who's like yeah here's the idea guys yeah and there's of course it comes around in the end succession or something i like wow this is like i mean i'm sure it probably wasn't you know that nefarious but but it is was their mom our industry is known for doing a lot of like shady stuff like that and you have all these different apps that have these different models some raise tons of money others like plenty of fish like kind of famous it's like my role model man he it's money why is he your role model what did what did he do well first of all he he coded so i code a lot so i been part of how we were able to kinda keep costs down be able to be super lean is that i i'm like super in the weeds on the product and i'm handling i'm doing heavy lifting where i was at that time and he's the same way like he really you know he built all the algorithms he would go and ship code at night and he was able to basically not have to raise any funding right bootstrap it a alive dropped it i'm crazy scale the team pretty small and like just you know did a not like a lifestyle business was basically almost like the benefits of a lifestyle business with the exit value of a how much will they recent send back start or they sold for hundreds of million yeah eight hundred million yeah geez and he own the whole thing it's that insane that is insane yeah congrats and also like if you ever used plenty of fish it was cut oh it's crappy but i mean he he so with the thing in our industry is all the people that got big all hacked an acquisition channel that was new and they used facebook news feed before it got regulated they used mobile google mobile ads before they got anyone knew what they were doing marcus new facebook ads inside and out and when they launched countries he would just from what i heard i tried to read all these people's secrets but what i heard is they would just basically stuff the channels where you spend so much money no one else can compete and then so when you're in brazil and you type anything in dating it's all plenty of fish everywhere right and they almost like sponsor the the whole market yeah for the month of their launch and so you and you have to have enough money to do that of course but he was the nobody was paying google mobile ads at the time so it was cheap so you basically are finding arbitrage opportunities which is why really hard to grow what would you have one what are the other dating apps too so i remember with tinder looking into it and they have some story i don't know how important this was but the story was they launched on college campuses and they would send somebody and i think whitney in and she would go talk a so or f eternity and be like hey everybody in the room download this app right now they would get the whole so on walk across the streets of the f fertility have them download it and be like hey look all these are on and then they would throw a party that night and you have to show tinder on your phone in order to get i don't know if this is exactly the model they did yeah i've read stories like this which is really smart but difficult to do in a way it's not difficult but most entrepreneurs don't like to get out of the room and go do this so what did you look at that you were like oh i can do here's my here's my way to grow well i did that i mean i did i did the exact same thing but with my mba notes for my salesforce network but i did you know i did a ton of events in san francisco because a i feel like that's how you build your brand you know you know the beginning stages people don't associate well with a brand they only know online and they wanna know the person behind the brand so i just felt like it was a good way to to build brand and also the main thing we're selling is people meeting each other which is a physical product actually so it's like why not give them the product they're looking for which is to meet people so it it's makes so much sense for dating out to to market with events i think the hard part is we've done this it's just you can maybe break even on events but it just becomes you're eventually running an event marketing arm right which is opposite of running a software company where you're like focused on so you and when you're small you have kinda decide which one you wanna do really well so we chose to just should to be more of a product and a software company but i still think like we're partnering with event right now to to try to to still be offering to still be able to offer events without having to kind of put them on ourselves right because that's what we found it was like even with an or programs are still overhead and manage it in for sure you're still having if someone represent your brand so when you guys go to a new city you know you you wanna go open up moscow or where tomorrow always do a rooftop bar that's absolutely so you have a playbook you basically have i could just pay for whatever the coolest rooftop bars that's interesting you don't care about the venue come lot people love going to rooftop bar i love better to pay up and just not worry that your venue you picked a bad venue so we we believe in a rooftop have a very high success rate and has there any has there been anyone who's really helped you from an adviser mentor level can you tell us a store about you know somebody or a moment where they kinda help shift your direction oh my gosh so many i i lean on my business school network a lot so i mean i feel like the league was inc incubator at stanford i was in this venture studio is sort of like for the people that are getting ready to go into start we actually didn't get into start but there's you know a ton of entrepreneurial programs at stanford and actually four of my professors invested in the league as angels nice and so i basically took advantage of professors do that professors do angel investing day and i think they do a lot it's pretty cool perk of the job right you get first d on a lot of stanford startups but yeah so so one of the things i always go back and talked to a lot is about people management stuff just because that's something i i didn't come into doing a lot of that when i started the lead that wasn't my background and there's always these situations that you would never dream up like you just couldn't make some of this stuff up where you're you know you're dealing with human psychology and trying to understand how do you keep someone motivated but i need to hire above someone and how do you deal with talks about equity and the things where people feel you know you're almost like media really tough situations and so i actually had one of my professors mediated between me and my first hire about the one who who had contracted with about our equity split and actually help just like come to a a good agreement on that yeah and for for how many people are at the week now how many people are on the team so we're about thirty thirty okay great and do you like managing i like building first and then i like and i'd like managing this how do i say this i don't like managing for sake of managing like i like managing when it to get sucked done yeah when i'm seeing something done i love product management for instance because you're you know you're managing sort of that you're you're building this thing and you're managing the team that is is creating it i think just sort of day to day people management isn't my strength like i don't love you know doing performance reviews or i don't love thinking about a work charts or compensation plans or right things like that and so i think i i prefer smaller teams because there's a lot of less less less of that overhead yeah yeah me and sam talking about this all the time it's like now that we've gotten a couple of exposures to you know different businesses and and how how they grew and some are small now we got acquired so i'm at twitch where there's like two thousand people yeah and so when i i wanna hear about that i work with emmett and know he's a ceo of this big company and it's you know owned by amazon all the stuff and i see his day to today and i literally had the thought i was like wow i would never wanna do this and it's not that he's unhappy he you know he enjoys it but i realized through seeing it i'm like this is not what i want used to think that i used to think man i wanna big build this big huge company i sheryl sand yeah and now i'm like no like and now i'd look at her job and i'm like first of i'm not even good at any of those things right now that i know my trick i need to figure out a way to get demoted so i'm managing nobody yeah but get paid creative of director i decided that's what i want entitled to be right yeah like special projects nobody knows what the hell i'm doing yeah google x yeah you said you're you said you wanted to ask about that what did you wanna ask about oh just yeah i have how that experience was going going from small small company to big or where we part i guess well i guess just the journey or the after after shock maybe how how feel how it felt there and how it feels now and so when it happened i i had a whole bunch of assumptions july grief like relief first relief because like i gave a talk at hu con called how to sell a failing company because we weren't taking off like a rocket ship when we sold it wasn't instagram getting bought by facebook right we were like hey you built something interesting you have an interesting user user base but this isn't like super profitable it's not in hyper growth mode and i you know i i didn't choose one of those right yeah i hate to be super profitable or and i told my investor i was like look i think we have something but the road to get where we wanna go is long a and b we also have way more information now that tells us this is not gonna be one of those mega companies you know the reason we got together and decided to do this i don't believe out outcome gonna happen so my opinion is we should try to sell this thing and he was like okay you that do you wanna do this yeah i also needed a change i've been doing it for like five six years at the time of couple different pivot and then none of the investors brought it up to you you you brought i brought wow and so he was like i i think his preference would have been to keep going but you know he was super understanding and was like look bet that makes sense so i said here's what we're gonna do let's take the next thirty sixty days and let's see if we can get an offer and so i went and started i basically took the meetings that know some people had been interested right other people had never even heard of us and i started knocking on those doors and taking of replying the people already showed interest so by the time we got ready to do it it was just a relief that the deal closed right because so much that goes into it and that's what my talking hustle was for is like nobody teaches you how to do this and now that i went through it i'm like oh i should write this down because there's nothing on the internet about how to sell a company that's not in totally you know there's a lot of things about how to sell when you're big and successful right and the answer there is pretty much just like hire a hire banker going yeah yeah hire a banker and picky you know your offer so any anyhow help by the time it was done it was relief how long did it take we went really fast so we got our term sheet in forty five days after we decided to start the process and your first term did you get more than one yeah we got we got two with them by the time the third were gonna get a third one but we told them like they weren't close so we weren't yeah they weren't gonna be close and then then we ended up closing forty five days after that so the whole thing took took ninety days three months total and from like you're closer conversation that's awesome well that's what i told my team fundraiser is like a million dollar seed that fast well i told my team i was like unfortunately the best thing i did as your leader was this last ninety days i wish i had been i had run the company as well as i sold the company right that's great but you know whatever you know that they say that's how you're supposed to do it run a really tight process since time is the enemy of all deals right and i i had these people that i i called my my deal do list and so like my wife just had a baby and that's what i learned what a abdul does and for the deal i had these five deal dealers in one of them he told me you know he when i showed him the term sheet i told him hey we got the term sheet and we're gonna sign this one i thought that was the end of the process and he's like oh this need to do now you need to sprint the hardest and i was like what because i and my i mentally started to ease up yeah he's like no no like you need to like now you need to sprint to the finish through the finish line because this is not the finish line this just tells you there is a line and so it really helpful like data request yeah we had to do our data room get through due diligence make sure that like nobody like the deal doesn't fall through the the met execs on their side stay happy my team stays together and it doesn't start like you know getting itchy and told your team i told my team which was an unpopular i told him from day one i said look i can't come in and look you in the face and say hey go work ass off on this feature when i know we're not going forward with that feature so i told him i myself after you had signed i assumed before oh yeah which was that's the part that was like unconventional i said i'm gonna run a process next next thirty days and i'm gonna know what type of appetite there is you've been working hard for like four years straight like really really hard i need you to relax i need you to trust me and i need you to not talk to anybody i will give you i will tell you what's going on and i'll tell you if it's gonna happen i tell if it's not gonna happen it we'll wait we're gonna wait forward either way but i need you to just chill and let me do my thing and i if anybody wants to learn about how this process works to sell this thing i'm gonna have to figure it out myself there's an opportunity if you wanna learn something nobody can nobody took me up on it that's what i always startups are like an nba much cheaper i was like i was like where are these guys don't they wanna know like it was the most fascinating process to me to figure this out but nobody took me up on it i don't i'll never understand why but yeah it was just relief and then when i got there i felt rejuvenate it like i was like oh here's the whole new situation bunch of new people new shit to learn you know let's see what this is like i've never worked at a huge tech company okay let's go let's go try that so still there right now okay and so let let's go try this out and let's see if this is great or if this is horrible we'll find out that's exciting no and so you know that's corporate life yeah i got you know i get to do my podcast i got podcast i was like that's the that's the dream is if we get to a bigger you know you get the company bigger than you can have a little more time you always think but then it's like yeah i don't think that every time the time doesn't come i found out it only happened when the company had sold and then actually i started this during due diligence because there's nothing for me to do at that point i was just kept asking the lawyers what's going on and they're like hey we're waiting for you know amazon's lawyers to get back to us nothing we could do yeah and so i was like okay started getting itchy and i was like i can't start like a new business that would stupid that would jeopardize the deal i'll start a podcast i've always wanted to do that let's see what happens and then now fast forward like six months since then and i think we're at about a million downloads in six months which is like crazy and so didn't expect that basically so what happens you put a founder out podcast podcasts van well the the fun thing is you probably filled this too which is you meet people and you hear these stores you hear their story i hear you know if we had just met normally this be over dinner or drinks or whatever and you hear it and you're like holy shit this is why people moved to silicon valley space surrounded by these people but i realized it was like to not be in silicon valley i was in australia before i moved here literally the other side of the earth and so i remember wanting to be fly on the wall for those conversations and so that was the impetus like what if i just let's start with this ten people who i've already heard their stories and they're amazing but this time i'll push record and now other people can listen to it and like let's see let's take it from see what happens yeah no i've always wanted to use strap conversations which is why i think podcast podcasts are so cool feels like you're what you're doing now you're the founder of a of a tech company you know thank companies calling in a tech company and not dating app tech companies love i was actually gonna make a tech nobody's love to buy on their their you drop on their users but oh i know now we're hey hey we're one of the few independents left so we're we're trying to and we're combined forces so that we can be the beacon of of hope for the tech community what through your mind when facebook like oh yeah we're doing dating now is it what happens in the company that day you hear that news is it does it even is it even a blip on the radar do you address it do you think about it of of course i mean it's is there one of the scariest facebook can happen to any industry yeah i was it was crazy we it came right after they had started really cutting down the api access to so about six months before they released facebook dating and they basically stopped letting anyone look at profession and education in your hometown and your age and your mutual friends which most of us had built our whole apps around tinder had built around it bum had built around it hinge you we've all done mutual friends we all so they basically just cut off that that data source and we luckily linkedin as our primary data source and facebook is more of a like nice to have so we were actually one of the few that were left sort of okay i mean we're still bleeding but the other people were totally like cut off and they now have no social graph which was part of why these apps even made it because they were they synced with your identity and the facebook is better at scam detection than matches right so people forget that like facebook gave us a lot of they did a lot of work and a lot of data and then now they're taking it away and so it's yeah it's almost like we're going backwards back into the wild west of like an everyone's anonymous now on the internet and so now the the problems that with an anonymous internet are happening worse right so yeah i guess a long long way long winded way to say that i i don't think they're putting a lot of money or horsepower behind it but and i actually think it's good for demographics that live in rural areas are not high density because it's the biggest database wins in dating in general but i don't see them as a big competitor and like what you new york city like elite or professional dating or anything like that you just don't want linkedin dating to come out i you i pitched linkedin on letting me run their linkedin dating when i interviewed there at four or after it's before it i interviewed a business and i said all we need do is add one button single or not hard yeah and we got a dating out on our hands and let me run this and i was like a you know when nba that i was asking to run my own division and they didn't give me an offer like not only are we not gonna do this we don't like you can do out of attitude you you stay out of here it's a little too ambitious so then that's why our tagline it's an app for the overly ambitious because i was like i'm gonna do it myself you have an api right i like you so but yeah linkedin it now but they got up by microsoft i mean the world changed in the five years i've been doing this it was like a totally different place in twenty fourteen than it is now and now it's a it's kinda unclear what's what's gonna happen with all the privacy regulations and cookies are going away and right yeah the the data data stuff is is interesting so one of the questions i like to ask everybody comes in is knowing what you know about your space now two questions so the first one is knowing what you know your space oftentimes when you're operating a business you see adjacent opportunities it's like we're trying to build this thing and man it was so hard for us to take payments in india it should be a in a payments stripe for india that should exist have you noticed any sort of like adjacent opportunities you've been building your business either something that would helped your company run better or help dating apps grow or you know like is there anything you've observed that you guys aren't gonna go do but you you've seen you've noticed yeah it's a good it's a good question question i know yeah but i mean we are on a ground floor like building tools and we're you know we were one of the first the first adopters of branch metrics they're actually were classmates of mine but you around mobile attribution so we're definitely kind of deep the ad ad tech space and seen all the changes happen i guess for me though it's less about what what we've bought to always build is sort of this global blacklist i guess you could think of it where there's lot bad actors and all of us are the non phase book and then on google people we like don't have huge databases and machine learning teams and right giant infrastructure to prevent like thieves from hitting on the apps and stuff like that and we're all literally solving the same problems every dating app founder and every social messaging app i talk we're all solving the same problems repeating different ways different approaches no one's learning from each other so it's like a way to to actually sort of solve off an identity without necessarily having to work with google an apple and obviously you have to work with the hardware but but can we can we at least say well we checked with all of the other independent people and we all know that this person is a sexual predator so we are all gonna not let him right on me bagel or hinge or the week or bum and like like how do we like use put the user safety first right and and i think no business models early incentivized to do that to share that data and because it doesn't so if there's a way to i almost like the w three of like online safety and trust in safety and data privacy and creating sort of a i don't known alliance totally you know we i'd had heard so a couple stories related to this heard that back in the day when facebook was growing like like kinda earlier tech i talked to some of the guys who did like security ops or like the scaling issues and they're were all trying to sell solve the same things like oh my god growing like crazy how do we scale no companies ever scaled this much before or security issues pete they're getting ddos and they know threats like that and these guys would have this underground brunch they didn't even tell the employer it's just like the guy who's stressing out about this at every company and they would do this brunch and at that brunch they would be like here's how we're trying to attack just share your information that was one the second is there's a company called sift science you heard of them yeah and so they they were basically a facebook fraud team i think or facebook sort of like trust and safety team that's spun out and then tried to say hey we're gonna build hey we looked facebook level tools and make it available we used them and we had a lot of success when we had a we built an app that was growing got like four million users but martin sc was one of them do you know who this guy is m if you google most hated man in america okay he comes up he's now in jail just to give you a sense he was the guy you probably heard about it he bought this like drug and then jacked up the price it was like a drug for like you know a pretty niche disease and is the only drug in the market it and then he like forty x the price and so people were just like this guy's an asshole and so and he used to do all kinds of trolley type of stuff like he bought the wu tang wu tang came out with their one last album or whatever and he bought it for two million dollars and then just like stash it and like didn't let it you know like he would just do things i would piss off different communities and so he was on our network and four chan was like if this guy they didn't like them or these different little hacking groups on the internet and so they started attacking us because he was on our platform and so we had to deal with all this crap because because of him essentially and so you know we eventually use sip science and and ended up helping us but well yeah we department those ones but it it's like they're not they're all kind of they're giving you the tools but there's not like a shared database of like well they're trying to keep the database for themselves right everybody all their customers base for all their customers if they want us to give them our data and i'm like wait we're gonna be of our users that we spent all this time acquiring and you're gonna just tell us if they're bad or not i'm like no i want to be part of that like i want it to be like quid pro quo right like the people who own the data should be talking to each other not all these brokers trying to sell i mean that's why the date that's why this space is all f up anyway because we have tons of brokers in the middle selling people's data and one's pointing to them everyone's pointing to facebook and google right and it's really the the middle people that are kind of they're real the nefarious ones gotcha i think i mean i like that that's actually a really good answer answering opportunity at twitch which we talk trust and say if she's like one of the main focuses and it's just like we're just trying to solve the problem from scratch and you're right it's there should be a little more collaboration so another question i ask is let's say you're twenty one years old is rewind you're twenty one years old again you can't do what you're currently doing so you can't go into the space again what space would be interesting to tea where would you go for if you we're gonna start a new business you know from scratch and you and you have you have a time but you can't go into your existing space cannabis a hundred percent okay well we looked into going into at business school too because the laws were starting to change it just i figured that software with like no regulations would be easier than a bunch of heavily regulated industries where it may or may not be legal but i just think that there's a huge opportunity to really redefine the experience of like everything from what's happening with the kids aren't drinking anymore to the white claw right movement to the fact that people are doing jewel pens to the fact that people have edible now i just think that we're sort of reinventing what socializing looks like and and we're at the we're at the point where you can kind of design how you want it to be the entrepreneurs get to design this snow look like for you well obviously you can obviously nightclubs clubs with drinking and smoking right and i'm surprised that hasn't really happened yet yeah as fast as it it would have in denver or something like that but i i mean i'm thinking of it kind of from a you know of course a date an owner of a dating app i'm thinking about the events you would have but you know i think i just think that a from a socializing perspective that's one sort of way to brand it and then also there's you know is it really good for you and maybe the micro dosing industry in the micro dosing movement is something that is sort of burg too so there's so many different like flavors of approaching right what's happening with the fact that a huge regulation has just been changed and right you could have a hundred different flavors of startups to to serve each niche right from your morning coffee you know the new nick starbucks brand of of cannabis right with and i think a lot of people are trying to do it so that's you know i'm i'm sort why from a afar but i'm very much intrigued and i'm like i like building brands brand so i just think it'd be fun to build like a a very i don't know cool cool league like brand for for cannabis right i look i mean the look on your face you're gonna do this this is fantastic well it's like the cold rush and it's like that there's nothing that made laws of changed why i've been around and able to be like an entrepreneur to go out base advantages and that's what i mean when i working in sick that was like their number one rule was like when things change in the industry when you know consumer behavior shifts or like huge regulation shift or or technology changes turn a corner that's when that's when you all need to start running and that's you know that's why the gold rest is called gold but you know i think so i think that that's exciting and that's like the only one i see you know self driving cars is cool but i just don't see the regulations able to support that anytime soon gotcha that's cool and so like near term near term things and is there anything else you wanna share for the people who are listening you know stuff that that you're interested in or new stuff that's come that you guys are doing this is your chance to sort shout that out also where do people find you how do they connect to you are you gonna you want twitter followers you can get twitter famous off this no i like being sort of a discreet on twitter a little bit a wall flower right no my part part i can do self promotion yeah oh great so i'm more of a i guess twitter and instagram i don't know i'm just amanda bradford boring and then one of the models for this league live i know been talking about it a lot but the video chat the chat sort of feature that we have i think there's a lot of really interesting applications because essentially we're we're essentially setting up a an appointment right you're getting three appointments every day at nine pm and so obviously the use case we're solving first and foremost is let me help you find a a person to date and then great and then but once you've solved that there's a lot of other things you need to search for that you need to set appointments for it like for instance let's say you wanted to find a realtor to buy a house let's say you wanted to interview with nanny to take care of your kid let's say you wanted to talk to a therapist and interview three so i think you know and then jeremy and i actually we're going to they recommend before you get married you go to a couple couple of counseling sessions so we've been between that which has been really interesting and my wheels have been spinning being like well we can what do do there i didn't do this oh you didn't do that didn't do this now what first what did i miss first you go about your bat your past in your background in your family and just kinda get to know each other's history and you know you should have probably done that by now but i was gonna say is that it's nice to just sort of the way they they'll lead the questions and you'll talk about talk the personalities of your family and in like a very just passion way so it's just an interesting kind of experience to hear them hear everybody be sort of it described from from their perspective so you do that and then and then you go through kind of how you know any any conflicts that you've had you sort of you analyzed them and you put them under a microscope and you talk about what you know why that made you mad and why you didn't expect that to make me mad but it did and why oh that's because you really value people showing up at the same time at the right time right and maybe i don't value being on time that much and so you start to get into like a value system so it's it's actually quite interesting in it she's recommend i think it's i i think it's crazy to think that you might like it if family with without start without kind of understanding where your differences are and and if they're you know and just sort of respecting each other and it doesn't mean you have to change but it just sort of knowing right i like knowing i guess before for that so i kinda like to think of it it's kind of like reading each other's you know little novel and and it's this kind of fun shared experience so yeah you go to a couple and they they say it's supposed to be better and then my parents send their last one they wrote a letter to themselves to read it their twentieth anniversary wow so let's kinda and would you i was saying that could be something when we were going i was like we should totally this gonna be the next step on the league is once you've met each other and you're dating then you could go and meet do if you had to do a couples of counseling talked to a therapist or find a a minister to marry you whatever it is yeah i i sort of feel like so that's what goes in line with the therapy movement right now yeah i was gonna rage somebody tweeted this out they said it was trying to stupid tweet honestly but it was like you know five five years ago the trend was x i don't remember what they said twenty twenty you know twenty twenty was you know about meditation what's twenty twenty five and my answer was therapy yeah because and i don't even go to therapy i saw that that was brian nor right that's right brent yeah brent said that out and something and so i think that's gonna happen and i think i i think i i retweeted that oh there we go you're one of my re tweets fantastic i believe it and i think that i've noticed for for all the areas that matter in your life fitness your career your relationship it's only like five things matter right your parenting side of side of life there's a handful of things and having a an outlet or be a coach or trainer of some kind or a counselor of some kind i've never seen it hurt and but it they're all you know they're sort of getting des each one's getting des where you know before if you were doing something it's like oh it's not working is it not working is it broken it's sort of this admission of failure which is kinda silly when it really should just be saying this matters to me and i wanna make it better yeah you know i don't go to the gym because i'm injured i go to the gym because i'm trying to make something more fit more strong whatever and that's what it could be for relations what it could be for you the shouldn't even be called therapy like relationship coaching where implies that it's says something you do just to keep it in good health thanks fitness yeah i like that so i think that's gonna continue to become less stigma my friends of the guys who started calm and i remember oh yeah early on it was just like crushing it yeah but at but early was not and it was just like yeah this thing i believe in this i've been doing this for a long time but it was fringe and when even when started to take off shit change so i was asking him i was like look i remember when you guys were doing you know like a hundred thousand in revenue yeah annually and you you know you couldn't raise money and it was tough and like then all of a sudden it was like yeah we did six million dollars last year twenty million this year eighty million and it went because now there a hundred million plus a year revenue and i asked him what changed what was the tipping point and i thought it would be a product feature i thought it'd be some tweak they made and there obviously they did improve it over time but he was like honestly the the wind just started blowing behind her back right like people started to care about this people started to care about their mental health people felt really anxious they were looking for a solution and all of a sudden you know apple featured them as app of the year because it was one of the few apps that a made money which apple likes and b was not like social media where there was all this like sort of toxicity behind it this was like pure good like yeah apple featured is app of the year that was big they got like doctor but doctor au or something like that but basically people started to care about meditation just started search for it and they were already there they had done four years at work yeah to be like sitting there with a good product ready to go ready for when everyone well that's what we're saying for this league live feature because not everyone's ready for video dating yet we're like we're just gonna at least be there be poised i got about this be dating domains right so it's like when people are ready to to really do video dating we're we're there because i i just think we're early right yeah and it's hard to when you don't have the wind right well good luck good luck to you good luck to the league i'm a fan of the concept i had i had note about it but i didn't know the story till you came so i appreciate you sharing that and yeah everybody should follow you and reach out to you but thank you so much for coming well thanks for inviting me i