Sean Rad
speaker
161 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Sean Rad’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Tinder was a relatively complicated product to market because it is very much location specific and you're building network effects, right? So the strength of the network, you don't want random people just sort of downloading that app and never opening it again. So you need a sort of strong connection amongst the network.
So we kept thinking like, what are areas where groups of friends or similar people sort of gather and congregate? And one of those are parties. And an intern of ours was in college at the time. And his friend who was sort of like one of the most popular people at USC was having a big birthday party. I think it was like a thousand people were invited to this party.
So we told her, we're like, look, we'll pay for the party. We'll throw the party. But in exchange, under one condition, you have to do it at another location. So we shuttled all the students to another location where we had a bigger venue and we can invite more people. But the other condition was that no one gets into the door unless they have Tinder on their phone.
So we literally had bouncers at the door, you know, whether you were invited or not, anyone can come in, but you needed to have Tinder installed on your phone. Now, no one even knew what Tinder was, but the next day everyone woke up and saw the people that they saw at the party confirming this thesis. It's like, maybe there was that girl or guy that I didn't have the courage to walk up to.
Now I see them in the app and now I can swipe right and now we're matching. bringing people together and then empowering them through the app was a great marketing strategy. And that worked. Once we did that party at USC over the coming days, it went viral on campus. Everyone was talking about it and everyone was sharing it.
And we realized that was a great mechanism of when we introduce Tinder to the right groups of people, it takes a mind of its own. But I can't stress enough though, that none of that would have mattered if we didn't build a great product. Marketing is important. This is another thing people sort of miss. They think like, all right, I need to figure out how to get it out there.
But they don't spend enough time focusing on whether or not they have the right thing to promote.
First of all, you got to be very clear about the problem that you are solving. And I think you have to feel as a founder, a connection to that problem. Have to be the customer because I think products are incubated and grow in phases. And phase one is that you're using it and the team is using it and that you have product team fit.
And then I think once you cross that boundary, then I think you could go to like product friends fit. And then I think once you cross that boundary and it's working amongst your friends or network of close customers, Then I think you slowly start expanding it. But it's the idea of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks is a very soulless effort. I don't subscribe to that.
I think you have to have a clear vision test, iterate the vision, and don't put the cart before the horse. If it's not ready for a million people, you don't want to give it to a million people. You want to slowly start expanding your circle of reach and test in every step. So product market fit isn't one moment in time.
Product market fit is a constant iterative process because as the product grows, it sort of faces new challenges at scale. And just because it worked with a thousand people doesn't mean it'll work with a million people. The idea of MVP, one thing people really miss in MVP, you know, yes, you want to launch and get feedback, but if you launch a shitty product, what's the point?
So I think there is a bar of quality that you still have to hit before that product is ready for people to play with. And if you haven't achieved that, then whatever data you're getting is corrupted data to begin with. And another thing I'll say, we always believed in this, you know, Tinder, we always believe we have one shot. There isn't a second chance with users.
We have one shot to impress them. So we have to make that one shot count. And we would not take that shot until we're very ready. The sort of lean startup throw shit against the wall, I think lacks a little bit of soul.
It was 100% about connecting you with someone and you walking away with a meaningful experience.
And I worry... I think you want to be narrow with the problem you're solving. But maybe you do yourself a disservice if you're too narrow in the audience that you're serving. Because that problem that you're solving can speak to many audiences. So for us, the problem we were solving was to make a new connection. Everyone felt at that time, I think even more so now, a little isolated.
They wanted new connections. They wanted to meet someone for whatever reason, marriage, friendship, whatever. We actually had a rule. You were not allowed to say dating at Tinder. You were not allowed to call Tinder a dating app. You're not allowed to say marriage because we weren't about that. We were about an introduction. We were about connecting you with someone for any reason.
The sort of marketing message that we would always repeat is find out who likes you. Is that FOMO? Who likes me that I don't know about? So that was the hook. The reason you would come in is because I'm curious who likes me. The reason you would stay is because you made a new connection that was valuable, that was meaningful for whatever purpose, for whatever intent you have.
The thing that we really focused on is how many conversations we could drive. So, you know, there's swipe, match, talk. The ultimate value proposition is that you're in a dialogue. So the number of unique conversations we were driving was one of the metrics we would look at a lot. We did look at retention in the sense of what was DAO to MAO, MAO to, you know, WOW to MAO.
But over time, those metrics became less important. The metrics that became more important were conversations, matches, sort of us delivering value, the metrics that measure true value and revenue, which is your desire to compensate us for that value. Retention on its own, it is a problematic metric that could lead sometimes if you're not careful to a lot more harm than it can do. How so?
Because I think when you're focused on retention and you believe that retention equals value, you can sometimes delude yourself. Me spending hours doing something doesn't mean I extracted true value in it. I could spend hours getting high. Doesn't mean that's valuable in my life.
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