00:00 I was 29 when I started the league and I had just ended a five and a half year relationship
00:04 and I was looking for someone that wanted to be with an ambitious woman and wasn't scared of the
00:10 fact that I was very career driven. I worked a lot, I had big goals for myself and I wanted
00:15 someone that would support that, encourage that, embrace that about me. Hi I'm Amanda Bradford,
00:20 I'm founder and CEO of the league and this is how I made my first million. I grew up in Silicon
00:24 Valley, Austin, Texas and North Carolina so I moved around a lot as a kid. My dad worked for IBM,
00:30 also known as I've been moved, so we moved around a lot. I was exposed to technology at a very young
00:34 age. My first job after college was working for salesforce.com which was in the era of the cloud
00:40 where everything was going to the cloud and salesforce was the pioneer there selling software
00:45 that worked through the browser. So I got front row seats to kind of the whole software as a
00:50 service industry. Mark Benioff was an amazing CEO, I learned a lot just watching how he operates his
00:56 business and from there decided that I wanted to stay in technology and keep growing as an
01:03 entrepreneur. I got my first big paycheck when I was a top performer at salesforce and I qualified
01:08 to go to a sales club and I exceeded my quota by a lot and that meant you got a really big bonus
01:13 check for me at the time. It was really big and that was when I first realized you could make a
01:18 lot of money in sales and also if you exceed your quota and start hitting accelerators there's a
01:23 reason why people stay in sales and that was when I realized how profitable it can be to be good at
01:30 sales and to know how to sell technology. I decided I wanted to start the league when I was in business
01:36 school and I was single and I saw that the dating apps were taking off. A lot of people were starting
01:41 to use them, Tinder revolution had happened and people were starting to adopt dating apps. Before
01:47 that there was a stigma where you know you're only on dating sites if you can't get a date in real
01:51 life and so there was this whole shift that happened and I was in the shift. I was single
01:56 so I dipped my toe in the water of dating sites and I found myself frustrated with the fact that
02:01 it was essentially a game of hot or not and I felt like I wanted to know a lot more about a person
02:06 than what they looked like. I mean obviously we care about what people look like but you want to
02:09 also see other aspects of that person and so I found myself trying to find them on other sites.
02:15 I would go to LinkedIn, I would go to Twitter, I would go to Facebook, trying to kind of social
02:20 media stalk I guess these people before you meet them in person and so that was really the
02:25 inspiration for the league was you shouldn't have to do all this stuff, let's just make people apply
02:29 to join the community where it's an intentional community, people there are there for the right
02:33 reasons, they're there for relationship. You put in your LinkedIn profile as a means of admission
02:39 so you're going to get to see what someone does in their career, their education background, what
02:43 they studied in college, all of this stuff I thought was very interesting. When you're evaluating
02:48 prospective life partner and I wanted this information to be really contextualized within
02:54 the app instead of having to dig for it after the fact so that was that was the inspiration was
02:58 really being a user and a frustrated user and then building a product that I wanted to use so I you
03:02 know I built the league for myself to essentially find my life partner. The league's algorithm works
03:08 by matching you with people that fit your preferences and where you fit their preferences
03:12 and then within that there's all sorts of sorting and filtering that we look at your past voting
03:16 behavior, what you've recently liked in the past and who you're messaging and we'll try to take
03:22 that into account. We let the users tell us where they want us to match them so if you want to just
03:27 date in New York you can do that, if you want to date in multiple cities at once you can tell us
03:31 that and we'll show you prospects from multiple cities so that's a big feature on the app you can
03:35 say if you're willing to relocate for love where you might be willing to relocate to and then we
03:39 can show you people from anywhere in the world that's also willing to go there. I think I first
03:44 started realizing that I could make a lot of money on this business when we started monetizing and I
03:49 started out at $20 a month because that's what everyone in Silicon Valley was doing at the time
03:53 that was kind of the standard model and then I quickly did the math and realized that we would
03:58 need a much bigger user base for me to actually make a big business off you know off users paying
04:05 and $20 a month wasn't going to cut it and so I changed the business model to start selling yearly
04:10 memberships I think $179 a year and at that point we started to see that the conversion rate actually
04:17 didn't drop people were okay paying that amount of money for dating then once we launched in New
04:22 York and in Los Angeles we had three cities live we saw growth growth in all of those cities and
04:28 I started realizing that I don't actually need to fundraise anymore I'm making enough money to cover
04:32 the cost of the business so quickly we became profitable and at that point I was a majority
04:37 owner of the business and I realized that you know this profit that we were getting I could
04:42 put this profit anywhere I could invest it back in the business I could start paying my employees
04:46 more I could start paying myself more at the time I wasn't even paying myself and so that's when I
04:50 realized that this business has legs there's actually a you know a real unit economics that
04:55 work that makes sense here people will pay for dating and let's go launch in more cities and
05:00 make it even more profitable and help more people find love than just in San Francisco, New York,
05:06 and LA. I made my first million dollars selling my company The League to Match Group. I decided to
05:11 sell to Match Group because I wanted The League to be bigger than I could take it myself. I had
05:16 worked really hard for nine years building it as big as I could but I realized we needed
05:20 significant financial investment if we wanted to compete with the big guys and go international
05:25 and for me finding a partner like Match Group who's done this before who's launched brands
05:30 internationally and has taken a dating site from you know tens of millions of revenue to hundreds
05:36 of millions of revenue that was the partner I wanted and that was the aspirations I had for
05:40 The League was to be a global premium brand. Prior to that I had been able to pay myself well but I
05:46 had never had millions of dollars in my bank account and the profit we were making from the
05:50 company even though we were making millions of dollars at the company I was investing that back
05:54 into the company so it wasn't until I sold that I actually had the million dollars in my bank
05:59 account. I splurged on a cool car which was a 1974 fully restored Bronco and it came straight
06:05 from Michigan lovingly restored by people who worked at the Ford factory and its name is Bucky.
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