The Ledger
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Bradford tested monetization on The League using a fake $15 upgrade button
“But what I did is I created an HTML fake page where I said, Hey, you want to upgrade for 15 dollars? If so, click this button. And then we just said, great, you're upgraded. And we gave them the advanced features without charging their card. And so that gave m…”
Bradford priced The League's seed round herself without a lead VC
“I actually priced my own round and then got negotiated down a little bit, but ended up Kind of closing the rounds pretty much led by Amanda, I like to say.”
Bradford: Small check investors provide equal support as large lead VCs
“When I do need help from my investors, I think they helped me just like they would if they had put in two million dollars or five million dollars, even if they've only put in 25 K. So I haven't noticed a difference based on their responsiveness or their willin…”
Bradford: Solo founders eliminate co-founder conflict, a top startup failure cause
“So, you know, I think the two things they say startups fail is, one, you know, co-founder issues, and two, is running out of money, and so those are the two things I was like, I'm going to make sure those two things don't happen, and you can eliminate one of t…”
Bradford: Solo founders should hire A-player contractors over B-player employees
“And so I think you have to be, I like to say, it's like, you can't really get the A players. So then you have a couple of different options. You can hire B players or you can contract out A players and pay a hefty price tag. And so I chose the latter and reall…”
Bradford: Startups cannot convert contractor engineers into full-time employees
“But yeah, I think in general, the contractor mentality, you can't convert contractors to employees. You just can't. It's their DNA. It's fundamental.”
Bradford: The League maintains a strict 50/50 male-to-female gender ratio
“And I would say on the league, it's actually quite hard in the sense that we keep the ratio of 50 50.”
Bradford raised The League's $1M seed via a party round
“What I ended up doing is, is more or less a kind of a party round strategy where I had some awesome VCs in that kind of gave me the credibility and some great angels in that gave me credibility. And so I said, I think I can get A bunch of hundred K, 50 K check…”
Bradford: Average dating app user bases are 70% male, 30% female
“And usually on average dating apps are about like 70% active users are men, 30% women.”
Bradford: The League will focus on sending users offline to meet
“A couple of things I'm excited about are merging online and offline officially in the sense that when you want to go out, to a bar in New York City. And let's say you're fresh off a breakup yourself. Which bar do you want to go to? And where are the people tha…”
Bradford: The League paid over $350 per hour for contract engineers
“Depending on what the resume is or whatever they need, there's some people we paid over 350 dollars an hour when I was pretty desperate just because they had a specialty or something that we needed and couldn't find,”
The League achieved an 83.8% opening-day yield in San Francisco
“On, you know, on our first launch in San Francisco, 419 out of the 500 people we selected showed up, and that was well above kind of the 70% yield we wanted to get.”
Half of early League users invited friends to join the app
“50% of the users actually invited friends after they used the app, and that was a huge number when you're really small.”
Bradford raised a $200K-$300K insider bridge round before launching monetization
“I also de-risked the fact that monetization might be a complete disaster by taking a small bridge round from my insiders. I think it was Two or 300 K just to kind of have as rainy day funds in case all hell broke loose.”