#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 a 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 Dr. Disrespect, we're all the way at the tippy top of the mountain, but we're only halfway up. Okay, so a couple other announcements. We've been doing these brainstorms, me and Sam from the hustle. And uh they've been a lot of fun to do, plus I think seem to be the favorites uh from listeners, more so than the interviews even. So we actually are gonna do what you know most projects and startups 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 guests 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 sp 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 10 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 Brainstorms. Hope you guys like that. Okay, so those are two announcements. And then this episode is with Amanda Bradford from The League. The League is a dating app. She built 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 OKCupid or Match or Tinder or whatever. And before actually going to meet the person in real life She wanted to know, is this 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 want to kind of 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 um but cool company and and uh it was a fun conversation. So hope you enjoy this episode. This is probably gonna be the last one like this, or at least on a regular basis where it's Hey, it's all about our guests telling their story from sort of start to finish. And going forward, we're gonna be doing a lot more brainstorms with me and Sam. Hope you guys like that. Now 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 and just search My First Million, it's called like My First Million Startups, Investing, and Side Hustles. 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 uh I like it. I don't even I mean I'm in there as a participant. Some of the guests from the podcast are in there as participants, but it's just a cool community of listeners. Okay, that's it from me. Enjoy this episode. Thank you for getting to getting us to the one million mark. And uh yeah, we're only halfway up. So you're here, you we w I don't even know how we got connected. I think we got connected on Twitter.

Yeah, I'm not you're one of my few uh Twitter friends. You don't have that many Twitter friends? No, I was one of those people that started and Only followed a couple of different people that were in 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 Um once a month we'll just host a dinner just of people I only know through Twitter. I 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 a Twitter tea party. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, we call it the Twitter dinner, but maybe Twitter tea party's better. Um okay, so um Amanda, you're here. Uh you're the founder of the league.

So we're gonna go all over the place in this conversation, but let's start by giving people a sense of who you are, what you built, and uh what what makes it interesting. So so give us the rundown. So I created the League, which is a dating platform, now a community, really, because we we do actually work for single and non single people alike. Um at this point most of the users are single that use the league. Uh it's so first and foremost it is a dating app. Um 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 didn't really want to play a game of Angry Birds every time they wanted to go on a date. So it was for the people that game of angry birds was that we interesting it. Well, you know those dating apps were so gamified. And they're all there to d 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 to help 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 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 wireframing 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 out for one. So you started this back when Uh how many yeah. So now five years ago. So five years ago and fast forward till today, give us a sense of How's 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 so we can understand you started there and how far has it come? Well, yeah, for I mean for a sense of scale, we started in San Francisco with four hundred and nineteen users. So and that was November twenty fourteen. Um, and so fast forward at this point we're well over a hundred thousand daily active users and we're in Uh seventy cities. We just launched Singapore, Mexico City, uh Australia. So we're now officially global. So we've you know, but we went really slowly and carefully. Like we don't have a Snapchat uh like c 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 an advantage. There's an admissions component to it, right? Yeah. So we you know, the idea behind it was hey, if we all the users that that have these half baked profiles or are just window shopping or there to message you and catfish you or you know just kind of the the crap users that just happen 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's experience. So we basically have this like very curated community of of people that actually want to be there, that want to find a date that put a good profile together 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 not that well I mean 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?

Um so we we have an admissions model. So if you put together a really good profile and sort of the community that you're applying to need someone like you in the community, there you know, we do put let people in for free. We call it a guest guest access and then Um we'll also you can t pay to to kinda skip the line and get expedited review and then we'll help those people put together a good profile, give'em optimization. So it's kinda like Um, you know, you can pay to essentially ha you know, have more visibility, be seen by more people. And then dating it I would say it's more like if you are a 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 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. And you were just telling me right before we started that you got engaged. I did. So the question is was it I'm officially off the market. Was it through the app or was it, you know, real life serendipity. No, I it was actually through the league. Like ironically enough, I was we always joked that If it didn't happen through the league, I was gonna have, you know, hell of a time explaining it. Yeah, I was gonna say. Um no, I actually was gonna happen through the league or you were gonna lie and say it happened through the league. We were gonna have to come up with something. But uh 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. Um what was wrong with 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 I was I joked, I felt like I was you're standing on the edge of the pier seeing the boats come in because I had knew you know I'm I'm basically running this marketplace so I can actually see. And I was like or I could go to the market. And when you saw his profile, what did you see? What what caught your eye?

Well, he's a musician, so he playing a guitar. Um and yeah, he has kind of a a different vibe than than what I was I guess. Well I was wanting to well yeah, wanting to to try something I think a little bit different than me. Um so we're we are we are very different, uh like on our from Myers Briggs, I don't think we're very similar. So we definitely compliment each other. But I think that was part of you know, the pars 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 your childhood patterns are and what is like a healthy relationship. And so it 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 the funnel, if you will, of like, you know, how to optimize your profile and how to make sure your league score goes skyrockets like we all know at the at the league. We all know how to hack our own league profiles as if photo selection. Wha w what are the key things? Well, of course it's always 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. Um, 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 that we know? Alright, so um so Netflix is pushing us hard. So 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, and 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 uh each create a little profile. And so the first thing they do when they get to the room is they pick their profile photo and and some people choose to catfish. They're like, you know, uh it's a guy, but he's playing his he's playing his girlfriend and 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 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.

Uh every whatever couple days, you rank like rank all the other players and who you like, who you want to keep. The bottom player gets ranked, it gets kicked out. And so it's very interesting in this because some people were trying to choose like the model photo. Everybody list themselves as single because they're like, look, people will want to engage a little more if I if I list myself as single. Uh but it's a fun show, and I feel like It'll be Did they move around a lot through the weeks? Like were their first impressions. Yeah, so basically the first impression would be like um the yeah, 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 seen as too big of a threat. Like'cause if you're too beautiful or too likable, um some people would have a strong First impression, either for or against you, but you were almost too polarizing. Like you wouldn't make it all the way to the end of the show. And um so I thought it was interesting. I don't know, it's a bad show to be clear. It's a really bad TV show. But uh the psychology and as they're talking through like why I'm picking this photo, because I want to show this other side of me, right? My first photo was really professional. So my second photo I need with my dog. Something other than yourself. And what do you feel about like people who put a photo like let's say I uh you know, I'm a guy, I put a photo of myself and another girl, but it's a friend. Uh good move, bad move in a in a dating app. I mean if you if you really don't have any other photos, it's better than not you know not putting in if it's a good photo of you and it's better than a

a boto of another one, it's still fine, but I I would say it depends on how much you're trying to optimize. You know, I think I I think one of the things people like about the league is that you kinda cut your teeth or dip your toe in the water on the bumble or the tenders of the world and then you're kind of ready to join the league and like graduate to the league and so people are really there and they're like they have their shit together, they have their profile together, they want to meet someone, they want to go on like two dates, to four dates a month. And and s they're kinda there for Not for business, that sounds wrong, but yeah, 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 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. I mean it's not that hard, right? So just putting a little bit of effort goes a long way, I think. So what I like about what you're doing is um you know, there was always like this sort of serious platforms like a e Harmony or a Match. And then there was sort of the very casual platforms. And the problem with the serious platforms was that Um, they felt very old, outdated, and the seriousness was very much around marriage. Whereas uh 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 hitched right away. Totally. Is that kind of how you thought about it originally, or uh how did you sort of decide where to position yourself? I mean honestly I built 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 Cupid and I remember I was writing support tickets being like, You guys should really build this feature and then you know, I so I I kind of designed it based on my own issues and at the time I was twenty eight, twenty nine and were in business school or came out of business school? I was still in business school my last semester and I was like, you know, having to drive an hour into San Francisco to go on a date. So every date 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 ha looking at everyone on LinkedIn and trying to find their Twitter and being like, Okay, if I cross reference him and this, and if yeah, look at his Wikipedia page. So I was doing like you know, legit stalking these people before accepting dates to which is uh work, right? So that was like why can't the dating app just do that work for us? So but anyway, so that's really who it is designed for is like I wasn't necessarily ready to like go and get married, but I wanna start maybe dating more seriously, maybe dating with the eye to think about someone that could be a fit for marriage. Like you're not twenty three. But you don't wanna like be freaking everybody out by saying, Hey, I need to be married in a year.

All right, 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 are 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 costs zero dollars. See for yourself at A K A Dot MS slash the hustle.

Again, that's aka.ms slash the hustle to check out Teams brought to you by Microsoft. Love it. Microsoft that is a trillion dollar company. Right, we're talking about my first million. They they're on my first trillion, so that's goals for everybody. They got there because they

Build it. Epic products. Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, these are products that stand the test of time. And now they've come out with teams. Just help teams chat, communicate, um and work together. And I think it's awesome. All right, 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 not a dating app. Um, because you know, we also have like groups and events. Like you can be in the yoga group or the dog people with dogs and the surfers. And so it's you know, it not that that's like a giant um 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 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 video to get it. Tell people what it is. What's it 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 um kind of like chat roulette back in the day, but you know chat roulette was super random and you would just be paired with anyone in the world that of like any Any age or any other. Every third person was naked. Yeah, exactly. And I and I heard that that happened too. Um so basically we actually take your preferences into account. We know your your voting history, we know who you've liked, who 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 own.

At nine PM. Everybody get on. It's a happy hour basically. 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, then you'll trigger the algorithm to go search for someone. If your s the match score is a certain amount, you'll you kinda will get matched up, but if the your score isn't You know, if you're not an acceptable match for each other, you'll keep looking. So it's like a it's kind of like taking what speed dating, those old speed dating um restaurants and bars would host'em and just have to do all this manual labor 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 um getting people in real life, offline, at the same place at the same time and just helping them sort of navigate their social nightlife purpose. 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 to the marina instead of going to Hayes Valley that night or

Whatever. Those are some of the like I think trends that will become. That's where I'm excited about, I guess. Uh it's unclear how like much monetization that stuff happens w 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. Uh I I believe in that. I I was I lived in Australia back in the day and there was a dating app there, or dating website, because this was sort of like, you know, smartphones weren't as big of a deal back then. And um they did this. And I've always wondered why nobody else did this. So basically the whole website was you were only master the people who are also online right now. And people would naturally just get online kind of after work in the evening, these prime times. Yeah. And so you would see, all right, there's whatever, forty two thousand people online right now.

And you would just see People there you see a single photo of theirs and you start chatting with them. And you knew you were getting a response back right away. So 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 uh so compared to OK Cupid or Matt, where you had to write Essentially write a letter and then wait. That was slow. Even the Tinders, 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 hap I'm gonna meet I'm gonna talk to a bunch of people right now. And so you'd start all these conversations. And then as the conversation was going good, they had this great feature where you would un the person could unlock more photos of themselves for you. And so it was kind of like, Hey, I'm liking this. Here's some more photos of me. I was like, Take your clothes off. Yeah. But it was more photos, right? So uh yeah, and the last photo, who knows what's in that last photo. But I always liked 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 can see if they're into it or not. 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 on. It's hard. I mean you have to have a E we you know, our user base is s small comparatively and it's hard for us. I can't imagine a a startup doing it with no users because it's You know, it's hard to get even even the people so we have the like the concept of an R S V P that that they're gonna go and then the concept of like who actually shows up at nine and huge flake rate. I was like bigger than you know, and I run events for for a living and I've seen flaky people in San Francisco for sure. And it was like a you know, fifty percent flake rate. So i I think it's hard to get Just you need density. Building a user behavior, right? And we'd have to start training our users. But they are starting to come in at nine And and I do think um, 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 uh MBA with a PowerPoint. Yeah, uh. Unlike 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 you bounce off of first? Oh everyone, tons of classmates, tons of uh my professors, yeah. The reaction you're getting is what? Run dating is too hard. Run away. Do CRM. Yeah. Just what what you're such a great girl. Why don't you just go B to B? Don't do consumer.'Cause you know, consumer's so difficult. So fickle, it's hard. You know there's not a playbook as much as there is in B to B. And so what made you do you remember the night or the day where you were like screw it.

I mean no, I started well, I decided that I was gonna build it anyway and um worst case it could just be a side project while I go get a regular job, and then I decided to Um one of my investors said he would give me twenty five K to put into it, so I decided that I wanted to launch it and if I could launch it and raise at least five hundred K in funding, then I would do it full time. And that was the decision I made. So it was less and'cause I knew I wanted to build it anyway, and so it was more like How do I evaluate if'cause it's not even just just when you build it, you don't know for sure if it's gonna be a business, but That has legs.

So I just wanted to so I felt like getting funding was at least a The the closest signal I could do, so you're not a programmer. Um, not I I would say I'm more of a a hacker. Okay. Did you build the first version yourself? Uh no, no no. We had a I had a engineer build it and uh it was all front end and objective C. I don't do I don't do IOS. And so uh this was somebody you hired full time, it was kind of a con a freelancer. How did you get it built? Yeah, freelancer, uh Stanford undergrad who was looking to Like learn.

So 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 know, in your shoes, they're in business school, they're thinking about starting something. And it's always these and I'm gonna ask 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. It's like Yeah how much does it cost to make something like this? And how'd you get your first hundred customers? So those are the questions I want to walk through. Yeah, no, they're good questions and and I think people have crazy assumptions 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 work how long to get the kind of game one ready. We la we started really working after I graduated in June and launched it by November and he rolled off'cause we you know who I just hired him to get the prototype out and then I was gonna Um that was sort of our our arrangement and so he rolled off in December. So six months ish. Yeah. And uh you said something about like four hundred users in San Francisco. Uh was that the launch essentially?

Yeah, that was our November twelfth launch. I think it was four hundred and nineteen logged in and then it grew from there and people. Who are those four hundred and nineteen? Where'd you get four hundred nineteen plea? Oh probably my Stanford friends. No, it was like it's basically like I pulled every single person I knew at Google, Salesforce, where I used to work, uh Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. And so there's a lot of that. I think one of my friends joked when he opened the app, he was like, You should just call this MBA date. Right. Because it was like all the oh I got the Harvard MBA's award and MBAs because I threw a mixer that summer with the sole purpose of like, you guys are gonna be my launch. Right. Uh kind of my launch my launch team essentially. So um it was a definitely a lot of like thirty year olds that were in the exact uh 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 harmony type experience. So four hundred and nineteen people uh who you kinda source through your network or the mixers that you threw pre launch, um, they open the app and now does it sort of start Doing anything or is it like kaput after the first one? Because many startups have to restart up, relaunch multiple times. We have I mean I could do a whole podcast on like mobile app nightmares. Uh we were using Facebook's Parse at the time, which has now been sunset, but it was like a giant

Giant uh disaster more or less because uh after we got to a certain amount of users, um the algorithm that we had built was actually on the front end of the code and essentially would take almost five minutes to load your batch of potentials. So that was that was a pretty bad situation where we actually couldn't put more users in for like a couple of months until we fixed that. Um 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 y so from that first kind of November twelfth launch at How long did it take for you to f feel like hey this actually might work? Um yeah, I'm not sure, but like I'm g 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. That was like one indicator. That's a good way to test. it at the ultimate at the end of the day it was like we had people they were interested in in meeting and that was that was what we did really well. We curated an awesome group of people. So I think that was a big one. When we started when people started referring friends, we had a pretty high thing it was like forty percent of people referring Um, 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 my engineer he wasn't a backend 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 a membership without me having to actually sell payments hand deal handle payments because we were not ready for that. That's smart. I like that. And then we didn't we actually started monetizing in two s twenty twenty sixteen with the new app. Um, 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 uh kind of the our customer success in Our concierge team. And so is the business profitable to as of As of our end of year two thousand nineteen financials, we are officially profitable. That's amazing. But thank goodness. Um yeah, but we yeah, we did. Don't worry, the IRS doesn't listen to my podcast. Um 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 want to grow at the expense of profitability. I just think in our space it 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 the same rate, but if you drop your marketing, your whole ship

drops and I I I've just seen so many horror stories. So I really wanted to to both grow profit and grow revenue and we were able to do both, which is exciting'cause it's easy to like grow revenue when you Right. Yeah. And if people don't know this, so I I looked I've I think we launched a dating app I I ran this idea lab for five years and I One of the things we launched was a 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 IAC owned apps like Match and whatnot. Their business model essentially was you uh free account but um

There was they would sort of get you to message somebody and then but if you wanted to reach out past a certain point, it was like you have to pay. Uh 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 profiles, twenty-nine of those would be people who don't use the service anymore, deactivated, inactive users, because they want to message that person and 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 to like re engage their users'cause they're trying to get them to come back, check their box and pay. And uh And that's what they got in trouble for doing with the scammers too. The scammers they they send the scammers to the people who hadn't paid for memberships, but they didn't send the scammers to the people who already paid, and that's what they're getting sued for. So they they how does that work? So they knowingly had scammers. So that's a big issue in our industry. There's all these people doing romance scams, and so that's You know hard part every day you're always trying to to d deal with that. But so what Match did, which was actually a a solution to the problem, a 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 a scammer. Right. And then so you get h hundreds of thousands of subscriptions sold through basically a sales force full of scammers that you're using to so I mean it's almost like genius in its evilness. Yeah, I was gonna say s that's somebody like me in the company who's like, Yeah, here's the idea, guys. Yeah. And then of course it comes around in the end.

Succession or something. I was like wow, this is like an evil I mean, I'm sure it probably wasn't you know, that nefarious, but it but it it is they're 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 Oh my gosh, he's like my role model, man. He's so take heavy money. Why is he your role model? What did he what did he do? Well, first of all, he he coded so I code a lot. So I mean part of how we were able to kinda keep costs down and be able to be super lean is that I I'm like super in the weeds on the product and I I'm handling I'm doing heavy lifting or 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. Um bootstrapped it to life strapped it. Some crazy scale kept the team pretty small and like just you know, w did a not like a lifestyle business. It was basically almost like the benefits of a lifestyle business with the

exit value of a Anderson back startup or something. They sold for hundreds of millions. Yeah, eight hundred million. Yeah. Jeez. And he owned the whole thing. That is insane. Yeah. Congrats. And also like if you ever use Plenty of Fish, it was kind of the worst product. Oh, it's crappy. But I mean he he made 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 Newsfeed before it got regulated. They used mobile uh 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 um 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 whole market for the month of their launch. And so you have to have enough money to do that, of course. But he was uh nobody was paying mobile ads at the time, so it was cheap. So you basically are finding arbitrage operations.

opportunities which is why it's really hard to grow when you don't have one. What do the other dating apps do? So I remember with Tinder uh I 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, I think Whitney, in And she would go talk at a sorority or fraternity and be like, hey, everybody in the room, download this app right now. They would get the whole s sorority on, walk across the street to the fraternity. have them download it and be like, Hey look, all these matches are on and then they would throw a party that night and you have to show Tinder on your phone in order to get it. I don't know if this is exactly the model but I've read stories like this, which is really smart. Um but Difficult to do in a way. It's it doesn't sound that difficult, but most entrepreneurs don't like to get out of the room and go do this. Um so what 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 we I did that exact same thing, but with my MBA network or my Salesforce network Um 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, when you're the beginning stages, people don't associate well with a brand they only know online. They wanna know the person behind the brand. So I just felt like it was a good way to to build a 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's makes so much sense for a dating app 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 uh you're eventually running a 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 to kinda decide which one you want to do really well. So we chose to 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. Um'cause that's what we found. It was like even within ambassador programs there's still overhead and management and you're still having to have someone represent your brand. So when you guys go to a new city, you know, you go you want to go open up Moscow or wherever tomorrow

Always do a rooftop bar. That's what we're doing. So you have a playbook. Yeah, we have a playbook. Just pay for whatever the coolest rooftop bar is. That's interesting. What people love going to a rooftop bar. I love it. It's better to pay up and just not worry that your venue you picked a bad venue. So we we believe in uh rooftop bars have a very high success rate. And uh has there any bit has there been anyone who's really helped you uh from an advisor, mentor level? Uh can you tell us a story about, you know, somebody or a moment where they kinda help shift your direction? Oh my gosh, so many. Um I I lean on my business school network a lot. So I mean I feel like the league was incubated at Stanford. Uh I was in this venture studio is sort of like for the people that are getting ready to go into Stardex. We actually didn't get into Stardex. Um but there's the you know there's a ton of entrepreneurial programs at Stanford and actually four of my professors invested in the league as Angels. Nice. Um and So I basically took advantage of it. Do a lot of professors do that? Do a lot of professors do Angela Festing? I think they do. It's pretty cool perk for the job, right? You get first dibs on a lot of Stanford startups.

But yeah, so so one of the things I always go back and talk 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 league. That wasn't my background and um there's always these s situations that you would never dream up. Like you just couldn't make some of the stuff up where you're You know, you're dealing with human psychology and trying to understand how do you um keep someone motivated but need to hire above someone and how do you deal with talks about equity and things where people feel uh you know, you're almost like mediating really tough situations and so I actually had one of my professors um mediated between me and my first hire about the one who I who I'd contracted with about our equity split and Um actually helped us like come to a a good agreement on that. Yeah. For you f how many people are at the league 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 like managing the

How do I say this? Um I don't like managing for the sake of managing. Like I I like managing when it To get stuff done. Yeah, when I'm seeing something done. I love product management, for instance, um, 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 work charts or compensation plans or things like that. And so I think I I prefer smaller teams because there's a lot of less Less overhead. Yeah. Yeah, me and Sam talk 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. And so when I work when I work with Emmett and he's a CEO of this big company and it's you know owned by Amazon, all this stuff.

And I see his day to day and I literally had the thought I was like, wow, uh I would never want to do this. And it's not that he's unhappy. He you know, he enjoys it, but I realize through seeing it, I'm like, this is not what I want. I used to think that. I used to think man I want to b build this big huge company I used to be having to be Cheryl Sandberg. Yeah. And now I'm like, no, like And now I look at her job and I'm like, first of all, I'm not even good at any of those things now that I know. My trick I need to figure out a way to get demoted so I'm managing nobody. Yeah. Uh but get paid more. Creative director I decided that's what I want my title to be. Right. Yeah, like special projects. Nobody knows what the hell I'm doing. Yeah. Um Google X. Yeah, you said you you said you wanted to ask about that. What did you want to ask about? Oh just yeah how how that experience was going Going from small small company to big or wh which part? I guess well, I guess just the journey or the after after shock maybe. How how it feels how it felt then, how it feels now and so

When it happened I I had a whole bunch of assumptions. Joy, grief, like I don't know. Relief. First relief because uh like I gave a talk at HustleCon called How to Sell a Failing Company. Um 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 hypergrowth mode. Um and I, you know, I think you have to choose one of those, right? Yeah. And I told my investor, I was like, look I think we have something, but the road to get where we want to 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's gonna happen. So my opinion is we should try to sell this thing. And uh he was like, Okay, you know if we want that. You wanna do this? Yeah, I also needed a change. I've been doing it for like five, six years at the time of a couple of different pivots and But then none of the investors brought it up to you. You you brought it up to you. I brought it up. Wow. Uh and so he was like

I I think his preference would have been to keep going, but uh you know, he was super understanding and was like, look, that 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 um so I went and started I basically took the meetings that you know, some people had been interested, other people had never even heard of us, and I started knocking on those doors and taking I'm replying to the people who already showed interest. So by the time we got ready to do it, it was just a relief that the deal closed, right? Because there's so much that goes into it. And that's what my talk at HustleCon 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 brand. Yeah, hire a banker and pick, you know, your offer. Um So anyhow, 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 sheet did you get more than one? Yeah, we got th we got Two and then by the time the third we were gonna get a third one, but we told them like they weren't close. So we were just like Yeah, they weren't gonna be close. And then Um then we ended up closing forty five days after that. So the whole th took ninety days, three months total. And from like You're a closer That's awesome. 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. Um But you know, whatever. Yeah. But that's they say that's how you're supposed to do it, run a really tight process and s time is the enemy of all deals. Right, and I I had these people that I I called uh my my deal doula's. And so like my wife just had a baby and that's when I learned what a doula does, and uh for the deal I had these five deal doo's and one of them he told me you know, he was When I showed him the term sheet, I told him, Hey, we got the term sheet. Um and we're gonna sign this one. I thought that was the end of the process and he's like, Oh, this is now you need to sprint the hardest. And I was like, What? Because I had in my mentally started to ease up. Yeah. He's like, No, no, 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 finish line. And uh really helpful. 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 execs on their side stay happy, my team stays together and doesn't start like, you know, getting itchy and you told your team? I told my team, which was an unpopular I told them From day one I said look I can't come in and look you in the face and say, Hey, go work your ass off on this feature when I know we're not going forward with that feature. So I told him I said look after you had it signed, I assume. 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. Um 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'll tell you if it's not gonna happen, and we'll wait we'll figure out a way forward either way. But um I need you to just chill and let me do my thing. And I said 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 want to learn something. Nobody took it nobody took me up on it. That's what I always think startups are like an MBA, much cheaper NBA. 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. Um but Nobody took me up on it. I don't know. I'll never understand why. But yeah, it was just relief. And then when I got there, I felt rejuvenated. Like I was like, Oh, here's a whole new situation, bunch of new people, new shit to learn. Um 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 experience I'm still there right now. And so let's go try this out and let's see if this is great or if this is horrible. We'll we'll find out. That's exciting, yeah. And so you know, that's that's what this life is corporate life. Yeah, I got you know, I get to do my podcast. I got to do all of it. I was like that's the that's the dream is if you get to a bigger you know, y you get the company bigger, then you can have a little more time. You always think, but then it's like that. The time doesn't come. I found th it only happened when the company had sold. And uh actually I started this during due diligence. 'Cause 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 Start getting itchy and I was like, Well, I can't start like a new business. That would be stupid. That would jeopardize the deal. Oh, 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 uh since then and

I think we're at about a million downloads in six months, which is like crazy. And so uh I didn't expect that, basically. So it happens you put a founder on a podcast, man. Well the the fun thing is, um you probably feel this too, which is You meet people and you hear these stories, you hear their story. I hear, you know, if if we had just met normally this would be over dinner or drinks or whatever, and you hear it and you're like, Holy shit, this is why people move to Silicon Valley is to be surrounded by these people. But I remember what 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 a fly on the wall for those conversations. And so that was the impetus is like, what if I just

Let's start with just 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 there, see what happens. Yeah. No, I've always wanted to eavesdrop on conversations, which is why I think podcasts are so Cool. Now you're the founder of a of a tech company. Uh you know spying in a tech company and not a dating app. Tech companies love I was actually gonna make a joke that tech companies love to spy on their their eavesdrop on their users, but um Oh I know. No, we're hey, see we're one of the few independents left, so we're we're trying to Combined forces so that we can be the beacons of of hope for the

Tech community. What goes through your mind when Facebook's like, Oh yeah, we're doing dating now. Is it W 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 course. I mean it's it's like one of the scary things that can happen to any industry. Um Yeah, it was it was crazy. We It came right after they had um started really cutting down the API access to so About six months before they released Facebook dating, 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. Tender had built around it, Bumble had built around it, Hinge used we've all did mutual friends. We all

So they basically just cut off that that data source and we luckily use 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 cut cut off and they now have no social graph. Which i was part of why these apps even made it because they were they synced with your identity and they 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 um back into the Wild West of like an everyone's anonymous now on the internet and so now the the problems that ha with an anonymous internet are happening worse. Right. So yeah, I guess a long long way uh 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

uh rural areas and are not high density because it's the biggest database wins in dating in general. Um, but I don't see them as a big competitor in like you know, New York City like elite or professional dating or anything like that. You just don't want LinkedIn dating to come out. No, I you know I pitched LinkedIn on letting me run uh their LinkedIn dating when I interviewed their after after before it I interviewed a business school and I said, All we need to do is add one button, single or not single. And we got a dating app on our hands and let me run this. And I was like uh You know crash MBA that I was asking to run my own division and they didn't give me an offer. You you stay out of here. It was a little too ambitious, so then that's why our tagline is an app for the overly ambitious because I was like, I'm just gonna do it myself. You have an API. Right. I like it. So But yeah, LinkedIn uh it now but they got bought by Microsoft. I mean it 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 uh it's kinda unclear what's what's gonna happen with all the privacy regulations and cookies are going away and like Yeah, the the data data stuff is is interesting. So one of the questions I like to ask everybody who comes in

is Uh, knowing what you know about your space now. Two questions. So the first one is Knowing what you know about 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 at a in a payments stripe for India. That should exist. Have you noticed any sort of like adjacent opportunities as you've been building your business? Uh either something that would help 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, right? Yeah. But I mean we are on the 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 know, around mobile attribution. So we're definitely kind of

Deep in the uh add tech space and seeing all the changes happen. Um I guess for me though It's less about um Wha what we've wanted to always build is sort of this global blacklist, I guess you could think of it, where there's bad actors and all of us are the non Facebook and the non Google people. We like don't have huge databases and machine learning teams and giant infrastructure to prevent Like thieves from getting 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 talked we're all solving the same problems. Tons of different w 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 um without necessarily having to work with Google and Apple. And obviously you have to work with the hardware, but but can we can we at least say, Well we checked with all the end other independent people and we all know that this person is a sexual predator. So we are all gonna not let him be on Coffee Meach Bagel or Hinge or the League or Bumble. And like like how do we like use put the user safety first. Right. And and I think no business models are really incentivized to do that, to share that data and'cause it doesn't so if there's a way to I almost call it like the WW three C of like Online safety and trust and safety and data privacy and creating sort of a I don't know, an alliance. Totally. You know, we um I had heard so a couple stories related to this. I had heard that back in the day when Facebook was growing like create like a kind of earlier tech. Um I talked to some of the guys who did like security ops or um like the scaling issues. And they were all trying to solve the same things, like oh my God, we're growing like crazy. How do we scale? No company's ever scaled this much before, or security issues, they're getting DDoSed and you 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 it. Just share information. That was one. The second is there's a company called Sif Science, you heard of them? Yeah. And so they they were basically a Facebook fraud team, I think, or the Facebook sort of like um trust and safety team that spun out. And then tried to say, Hey, we're gonna build Facebook level tools and make it available. We use them and we had A lot of success when we had a

We built an app that was growing. It got to like four million users. But um Martin Shrley was one of them. Do you know who this guy is? Mm mm. If you Google most hated man in America, he comes up. Uh, 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 it was the only drug on the market for 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. Uh 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 stashed it and like didn't let it wa you know, like he would just do things that would piss off different communities. And uh so he was on our network And 4chan was like, uh, F this guy. They didn't like him. Or these different little hacking groups on the internet. And so they started attacking us'cause he was on our platform. And so we had to deal with all this crap because of uh because of him, essentially. And so uh you know, we eventually used if science and it ended up helping us, but Such a hard place once. But 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's gonna be able to do it. For all their customers. Than our data. And I'm like, but wait, we're gonna be all of our users that we spent all this time acquiring. And you're gonna just tell us if they're bad or not. And I'm like, no, I want it 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 data that's why this space is all Fed up anyway,'cause we're we have tons of brokers in the middle selling people's data and everyone's pointing to them. Everyone's pointing to Facebook and Google. Right. And it's really the

the middle people that are kind of the real nefarious ones. Gotcha. I think I mean I I like that that's actually a a really good answering opportunity at Twitch we talk trust and safety is like one of the main focuses. And it's just like we're s trying solve the problem from scratch. And you're right, it's uh there should be a little more collaboration. So another question I ask is let's say you're Twenty one years old. Let's rewind. You're twenty one years old again. Um you can't do what you're currently doing. So You can't go into this space again.

What space would be interesting to you? Where would you go if you were gonna start a new business? Um F you know, from scratch and you and you had you had the time, but you can't go into your existing space. Cannabis a hundred percent. Okay, well we did.'Cause 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. movement to the fact that people are doing jewel pens to the fact that people have edibles now. I I just think that we're sort of reinventing what socializing looks like and we're at the we're at the point where you can kind of design it how you want it to be. The entrepreneurs get to design this next one. Well obviously you can obviously nightclubs with drinking and smoking. And I'm surprised that hasn't really happened yet.

you know, of course a day o an owner of a dating app thinking about the events you would have, but you know, I think um I just think that A from a socialising 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 and the micro dosing movement is something that is sort of burgeoning too. So there's so many different like flavors of approaching what's happening with the fact that a huge regulation has just been changed. And you could have like a hundred different flavors of startups to to serve each niche. Right. From your morning coffee you know, the new Starbucks brand of of cannabis. With and and I think a lot of people are trying to do it. So that's you know, I'm I'm sort of watching from afar, but I'm very much intrigued and I like I like building brands, so I just think it'd be fun to build like a A very uh I don't know

Cool, cool league like brand for for cannabis. I mean the look on your face, it seems like you're gonna do this. This is fantastic. Well it's like the gold rush and it's like there's there's not that many laws that have changed while I've been around and able to be like an entrepreneur to go after these advantages, and that's what I remember when I worked in Sequoia, that was like their number one rule was like when things change in the industry when you you know, consumer behavior shifts or like huge regulation shift or or technology changes um turn a corner, that's when that's when you all need to start running. Um and that's you know, that's why the gold rush is called the gold rush. 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 any time soon. So

Uh and is there anything else you want to share uh 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. Uh this is your chance to sort of shout that out also. Uh where do people find you? How do they connect with you? Are you gonna you want Twitter followers, you can get Twitter famous off this. Uh No, I like being sort of discreet on Twitter a little bit. A wallflower. Right. Um this is my part this part where I get to do self promotion. Yeah. Oh great. Um uh So I'm more of a I guess I'm Twitter and Instagram. I don't know, I'm just Amanda Bradford uh boring. And then one of the models for this League Live, I know I've been talking about it a lot, but uh the video chat, the chat roulette 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. Uh you're getting three appointments every day at nine PM and so uh 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. Like for instance, let's say you wanted to find a realtor to buy a house. Let's say you wanted to interview a nanny to take care of your kid. Let's say you wanted to um talk to your therapist and interview three. So Um, I think you know, and then m Jeremy and I actually were going to uh They recommend before you get married you go to a couple couple of premarital counseling sessions. So we've been doing that, which has been really interesting and my wheels have been spinning, being like, Well we can use the thing. So what did they do there? I didn't do this. Oh you didn't do this. I didn't do this. No, we're first what did I miss? First you both talk about your bat your past and your background and your family and just kinda get to know each other's history and you know you should

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 the personalities of your family and in like a very dispassioned way. So it's just an interesting kind of experience to hear them hear everybody be sort of i described from from their perspective. Um 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 analyze 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 my 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 your value system. So it's it's actually quite interesting and it So you'd recommend it. I think it's I I think it's crazy to think that you might like create a family with without star without kind of understanding where your differences are and and if they're

You know, and just sort of respecting each other's 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 as kind of like reading each other's, you know, little novel and and it's in 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 and their last one they wrote a letter to themselves to read it, their twentieth anniversary. Wow. So it's kinda cool. And would you continue to but I was saying that could be something when we were going on, I was like, We should totally this could 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 couple counseling or talk 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 that's gonna say uh somebody tweeted this out, they said uh It was kind of a stupid tweet, honestly, but it was like you know, five years ago the trend was X, I don't remember what they said. Twenty tw you know, twenty twenty was, you know, about meditation. What's twenty twenty twive? And my answer was therapy. Yeah. Because and I I don't even go to therapy. I saw that. That was um Brian Norgaard, right? That's right, Brian yeah, Brian said that out. Yeah, he's awesome. And so um

I think that's gonna happen. And I think I I think I s I retweeted that. Oh, there we go. You're one of my retweets. Fantastic. I believe it. And I think that I've noticed for for all the areas that matter in your life, fitness, um, your career. Your relationship, it's only like five things that matter, right? Your parenting s side of side of life. Um There's a handful of things and having A an outlet or B a coach or trainer of some kind or counselor of some kind, um I've never seen it hurt.

And but it they're all the you know, they're sort of getting destigmatized. Each one's getting destigmatized where you know, before if you were doing something, it's like oh 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. 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. Uh and that's what it could be for relationships, what it could be for your career. It's like shouldn't even be called therapy, it's just like relationship coaching, which implies that it's a something you do just to keep it in good health. Yeah, I like that. So I think that's gonna continue to become less stigmatized. My friends are the guys who started Calm and I remember oh yeah early on it was just like Cashing it, yeah. But I but early it 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 it started to take off. So I was asking him, I was like, look, I remember when you guys were doing, you know, like a hundred thousand in revenue and 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 last year, twenty million this year, eighty million and it went like and now they're in a hundred million plus a year revenue. And I asked them 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's like honestly The the wind just started blowing behind our back, right? Like people started to care about this. Uh 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

uh was not like social media where there was all this like sort of toxicity behind it. This was like pure good. Yeah, Apple featured it as app of the year. That was big. They got on like Doctor Dr Oz or something like that. Uh but basically people started to care about meditation, just started to search for it and they were already there. They had done four years of work to be like sitting there with a good product ready to go. 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 bought up all the speed dating domains. So it's like when people are ready to to really do video dating, we're we're there.'Cause 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. Uh I'm a fan of the concept. I had uh I had known about it, but I didn't know the story till you came into it. So I appreciate you sharing that. And uh yeah, uh everybody should follow you and reach out to you, but thank you so much for coming. Well, thanks for inviting me.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 3 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.