Dating application hinge: Self-Help stories at the last minute

Editor's note: Justin McLeod is the founder and CEO of the dating application hinge. He told the story of how he used the last money to hold a product launch to save the start-up. Justin McLeod, 30 years old, is the founder of app Hinge, Hinge is a dating app that can connect Facebook friends. The Tinder's rival, founded in Washington, D.C., has expanded to 20 cities across the United States, with 8 million of users having been successfully paired up with a total of 8.6 million dollars in Venture capital from startups and great Oaks. After graduating from a business college in 2011, McLeod rejected a job offer from McKinsey to create his own company. But before applying hinge to attract a large number of users, he was nearly bankrupt. Last year, McLeod decided it was time to take the risk of restarting desktop apps into mobile apps, and it was time to spend the company's last cash on the conference. This unusual action brought about unexpected success. In the press conference, application hinge attracted the largest number of users in the company's history, and investors provided enough money to support the company's move to the next round of financing. What you do not know, however, is that Hinge's life has been a long time before this: The conference is about to begin, and the previous night the app waited until the Apple Store approved! Below, McLeod personally narrated the entrepreneurial story of Hinge. I studied at Harvard Business School in February 2011 and planned to work for McKinsey consulting firm after graduation. I knew eventually I would do something about entrepreneurship, and I had a software development background in high school and college. Harvard has a tradition of holding the final Dance "party" on the eve of graduation, where graduates can make a confession to the person they like and seize the last chance before graduation. I've developed a Facebook app for the class where you can mark someone you secretly like, and if you're successful, you'll get a notification. The app is a concern, especially for people who don't want to go to OkCupid or Match.com. I think it seems to be a new way of socializing in real life-getting to know people through friends. I think that the process can be simplified by meeting friends of a friend. I started working and decided to give up McKinsey's job, and although everyone thought I was crazy about it, I started writing hinge code. The final dance "didn't take shape at the end, but we've developed a desktop app on Facebook, you can browse your friends, click and submit to someone you like." If you and everyone else have marked each other out, you will receive a notification from the system. I continue to develop this app and add the idea of search discovery so you can find people who have never met. WhileI also decided to devote myself to this matter after graduation. That summer, I raised some money from friends and family, made a prototype of the process and started my entrepreneurial career in Washington, D.C. Our company is located in the business incubator fortify in Washington, D.C., and they provide us with the initial funding. Plus the investment we got from some angel investors, we raised a total of 1 million dollars. In January 2012, I hired my first employee, but it was still a matter of friends and family. In May of that year, I hired a second employee, launched a new version of the app at Harvard and Washington, D.C., but ended in failure. There are few people using this application, and they don't have the effect we expected, and the company doesn't know where it's going. On Thanksgiving in 2012, I went back to my parents in Colorado to spend the holidays with my family. The next day, I realized that all the work was a waste of effort, and I panicked. Our product is really improving a little bit, but I still don't know how to go next until the money is running out. I thought about what went wrong with the application and asked myself what I would do if I did it all over again: I would make it into a mobile app, and I'd let it get much simpler. And I will be more concerned about the actual needs of people, such as basic information, your contact with others, and the user's attractiveness level and so on. I called my partner and said we need to use the last 32,000 dollars for redevelopment. After Thanksgiving, we canceled everything, and my two engineers left Washington for a few weeks, rented an apartment in Florida, redesigned everything in the application, and developed the new program before Christmas. We stayed in the apartment almost all the time and worked till 2 o'clock in the morning every day. Redesigned the entire application from start to finish, and decided to hold a grand product launch. We are in southern Florida, and our Marketing director is planning a product launch in Washington, D.C., to liaise with suppliers. At this point I have stopped getting paid and others have lowered their salaries. At that time we were very unstable, one of the engineers just left a stable job to join us. When the app was developed in January, it was online at the Apple App Store, and then we went back to Washington, D.C. The first edition was rejected by Apple's App store because of a tiny flaw. We had to move away from fortify to the 1776 incubator and work in a small windowless office. After we fix the software, we re-submit it to the App Store. I know that if we want to succeed, we need a large number of influential core groups that are connected to each other on Facebook. I have a lot of friends in Washington, D.C., and started spreading the news of the February 7, 2013 Hinge will hold a conference. We invited the famous DJ Viceroy, arranged the open bar, and borrowed the venue with the incubator, which was aIt is located on the top floor of an office building and has basically only open space for floors and walls. In the meantime, we still haven't heard from Apple App Store, but the day of the conference is coming. We're going to have such a big conference right now, but we don't even have an application to publish. February 6, just the day before the launch, our apps were still not online at the App Store. Since there is no news, we are working on the Hinge mobile Web version to make sure something is available for promotion at the launch. However, that night 8 o'clock, hinge on-line, life hangs a gleam! The conference was a great success, at least 3000 people were present that night. The whole meeting was really full of people. There was an art director at the conference, my photographer friend helped to take pictures, and a lot of other friends came to help. We hired 20 bartender, set up a development bar, hired security and cleaning staff, all of which cost 25000 dollars. The next day, the number of hinge pairs succeeded even more than ever. Before the announcement, our users were woefully low, about 100, and the number of active users was around 50 a day, but the announcement was an explosion. At that time, the idea of making friends online and mobile clients was not popular. Although the Conference has helped us attract a large number of users, no one wants to tell their friends that they are using online dating services. So let those celebrities use the app and let people see that they're checking in at different places and that's what we need to do. It's a big gamble-creating an online dating site among friends and friends, making it easy for users to use the service and introducing them to friends. The key to the reduction in embarrassment is the simplicity of the application's ease of use. Because as a user, if you need this kind of dating service, on another platform, you might have to pay a little, create an account, and answer all the questions about the system--it keeps reminding you that your love life in the real world isn't going well. But Hinge and similar apps give you a little bit of a button and you can enjoy your dating service. The idea is that, without spending money, without any pain, why not take this opportunity to meet some interesting people? Our company nearly closed down before the press conference. We have no ability to show investors the progress, but only two days after the launch, the number of registered users reached the highest, investors gave us life. The easing of funding gives us the incentive to go to New York to talk to investors and introduce our projects. Eventually, all of this brought us a round of financing. But this round is user-driven. As more and more people start using hinge, these users are also constantly introducing themselves to friends around them. Soon our users started sending us emails asking how they could join the investment. An influential user contacted us about the investment, and he persuaded all his friends to come and invest. Other investors are also in the userIntroduction, we finally raised 4 million dollars in Money. Looking back on the 2012-year Thanksgiving, we realized that the money was about to be spent, and that time was pretty scary. We could have been down, that could have been the end of the company. The worst thing for an entrepreneur is not knowing where the future is going. Most of the time, I have a plan for the next step on the road to entrepreneurship. Things might not have been going very well in the past, but on that Thanksgiving Day, I was really in a phase where I didn't know what to do next. Fortunately, we are heading for a major turning point. As an entrepreneur running a start-up, you are a risk manager. You can't risk crazy, stupid. I don't want people to take the risk of putting money into something that seems impossible. In retrospect, it was almost impossible to do something like hail Mary pass, but in reality we actually had a reason to hold a product launch, which was considered action. We know how many users the application will get after inviting 3000 people, how many users will register, how much we expect to match, and how much money we have left to use. Although our timing is quite opportune, the moral of our story is not to risk madness, but to deliberate and control the risk. We worked very hard, the conference was a success, and that's what we needed. Whether this will make us successful was a bold guess, but it worked in the end.