Win One City With 500 Obsessed Users Before You Expand

Amanda Bradford, the founder of the dating app The League, was telling early-stage founders how she launched. She found an iOS engineer and built the app in four months. During that time she was QAing the product, finding bugs and sending them back for fixes.

Before launch, she ran a series of small events and visited people one by one to build her waitlist.

Her rule, in her words, was to “go really deep and narrow at the beginning.” For The League, she said, that meant advanced degree holders, and then finance workers, marketers, and tech lawyers. One investor joked that for the first five weeks she should just call it MBA Date, because it was all MBA women.

On launch day, she said, she accepted only 500 people. The waitlist had 419 people. As she put it, “It’s really better to have 500 people that are obsessed with your app than trying to open it to 5,000 people and figure out what you’re doing wrong.”

Her pattern was to stay in one city until it worked, then add the next. The League stayed in its first market for half a year before adding New York, and then stayed in those two cities for a full year before adding Los Angeles. She said the company did not have monetization at the beginning. She did partnerships with Equinox and Soho House, and Equinox offered free space if she brought in nonmembers.

She said founders often tell her they want to expand into New York or go international, and she tells them no, they still have room to grow in the first city and need better penetration there before expanding.

Bradford described the growth as hard growth, not exponential growth. She said the app eventually launched in 155 cities, and she said she should have stopped at 20. As Bradford put it, “the revenue from the 21st through the 155th city was negligible and added more complexity to operations.”