TECH CRUNCH - Aug 20 - In this week's edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley features Amanda Bradford, founder/CEO of The League. Amanda talks about modern dating, its limitations, its flaws, why 'The League' will win. She talks about her days at Salesforce and how it influenced her decision to build a dating tech product that focused on data, and funnels. She goes in on all of the popular dating sites, including Bumble and others, providing her take on what's wrong with them.
81 posts categorized "TheLeague"
Amanda Bradford: Advice She Wished She'd Taken in Her 20s
FAST COMPANY - Feb 19 - We spoke to successful women about their own regrets in their 20s. Here's advice from Amanda Bradford, CEO of The League. "GO TRAVEL AND EXPERIENCE THE WORLD." In her 20s Amanda was busy. By the time she reached 29 in 2014, she was building her now uber-successful dating app to a 1.5M person waitlist across 60 cities. Now 34, Bradford is happy with her success but she wishes she would have taken the advice of her former boss at Google who urged her to go see the world. "For me, global work experience and travel are key contributors to business and personal fulfillment. I wish I had invested more in global exposure during my 20s," she says. Now it's just too hard. I'm devoted to The League as the app expands into international cities. It would be helpful to have firsthand knowledge of each market and a network of people on the ground.
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Q&A With League's Founder Amanda Bradford
THE VERGE - Jan 10 -
Q: What is The League?
A: The whole mission of The League was to create power couples. Sometimes I joke and say it's an app for workaholics, but at the end of the day, it’s people that are really serious about their career and really want to make some kind of impact on the world.
Q: So for you, is the career the most important characteristic when looking for a potential partner?
A: I don't want to say it's most important, but I wanted to play more than just hot or not. You can see a little more about the person and what career that they decided to dedicate their livelihood, too.
Q: How are you determining who gets to be let into the app?
A: We use both Facebook and LinkedIn. Then we put everyone into a waiting list. It's similar to a college admissions pool. Job and education is a very big factor in the application. We can see who's checking back in, who's referring friends, and figuring out how it all works, and we use all of that information to predict who's going to be a good user in the system. We don't reject anyone. We just keep them on the waiting list. We try to encourage them to make some changes. There's also sort of like a demand score for everybody, and if you're in high demand, you might get in faster than if you're in lower demand.
Q: Do you have an estimate of what percentage of people get waitlisted, and then make changes, and then later get in?
A: Our acceptance rate in general hovers around 20 to 30%. And then a lot of people don't come back and make changes. A lot of the people that we don’t accept were probably not the right fit anyway.
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The New Breed of Elite Dating Apps Designed for Wealthy Singletons
FINANCIAL TIMES - Nov 26 - Elite platforms are unashamedly catering to professionals, the wealthy, the highly educated and celebrities. The most controversial is Luxy, which described itself when it launched in 2014 as "Tinder, minus the poor people". Luxy declined to provide figures on its profits or revenues, but says it has been profitable since its first year of operation and now has ~2M users. New members must first pass a 24-hour approval process. Only 10-15% are accepted and the company claims that half of its active members earn ~$500K. The Inner Circle, which describes itself as an "exclusive community" was launched in 2012 in the Netherlands. It organises social gatherings for its members, such as polo tournaments, gallery openings or cabaret nights. Members are vetted according to profession, age and the quality of the pictures they submit. The company also declines to share the revenue figures, but says it is profitable, employs ~20 staff and has 1.3M approved members globally. The League, launched in the US in 2015, caters to professionals who are screened based on what industry they work in, their university education and how many LinkedIn connections they have. Toffee, a dating app exclusively aimed at the privately educated, launched in the UK this year. Lydia Davis, co-founder of the app, estimates Toffee will make $10M in revenues in 2019 if the app is as successful overseas as it has been initially in the UK.
by Madison Marriage
See full article at Financial Times
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Slow Dating Is The French-Invented Hack
COSMOPOLITAN - Nov 5 - Dating app Once launched in France and recently made its way stateside. Instead of passively swiping through profiles, Once introduce each user to only one person, per day. If the users both like each other, they start a conversation and see where it leads. If not, they have to wait until the next day to meet someone new. But what if all potential matches are bad? Jean Meyer, CEO of Once, says making good matches is a concern, obviously, but he's more focused on cutting down absentminded app time. "Even if your match of the day is crap, it's okay," Meyer says. "Maybe you're not going to talk to that person, but at least you're going to put the app away, and you may even put your phone away and do something else with your day. You can put 100% into another task that's not swiping on ten-thousand profiles." The League, which only serves users a few matches per day, operates on a similar premise as Once. And when Hinge redesigned to eliminate swiping and force people to slow down a bit, users grew by more than 400%.
by Hannah Smothers
See full article at Cosmopolitan
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The League Launches In Vancouver
VANCOUVER SUN - Oct 7 - Already live in 34 American cities and London, Paris and Toronto, The League is launching in Vancouver. The exclusive dating app bills itself as "a dating app catering to the intelligent, educated and ambitious". It was founded by Amanda Bradford in 2014, after the entrepreneur had an epiphany: Tinder can help you sidestep the unattractive, but it does nothing to protect you from the indigent, and under-employed. Already boasting a wait-list of 3K, The League plans to launch with 500 selected users. "We authenticate with LinkedIn," said the app's spokeswoman Meredith Davis.
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The League Is Launching In Paris
LINKEDIN - Sep 19 - Dating app The League has just launched in Paris. This makes city number 37 for the selective dating app, dubbed the "tinder for elites," which is aimed at young, successful individuals.
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Inside The League's $3,500 Singles Boat Cruise In Paris
STANDARD.CO.UK - Aug 22 - Selective dating app The League, which is aimed at young, successful individuals, launched in London last summer. The San Francisco-based club is gearing up to open in Paris next month, and in the lead-up has just hosted 70 of its users on a week-long boat trip in France. They mingled over morning yoga, long brunches, and an all-day free bar while cruising down the Seine in Paris. The League screens applicants wishing to join the app on a number of different criteria, including job title, education and industry. To help vet prospective members, users must sign up using their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. And the selection process for the cruise was just as meticulous. "We had ~5K applicants for the trip," said The League's CEO and founder, Amanda Bradford. The majority of guests reserved private balconies and private studios, she said, which averaged at ~$3,500 each, plus flights. And according to club, three couples have already sprung from the trip.
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Elite Dating App The League Is Hosting A Luxurious Cruise In France
BUSINESS INSIDER - June 30 - This August, dating app The League is hosting a weeklong cruise in France, in conjunction with U by Uniworld. ~80 users will mix and mingle in the hopes of finding love; the itinerary includes touring Versailles and biking along Seine. So far, ~2,600 League users have applied. Depending on the type of accommodation, the price of a flight and a room is ~$3k.
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The League To Speak At The iDate Mobile Dating Conference In Los Angeles
WEBWIRE - June 7 - Meredith Davis, Head of Communications at The League, will present on the future of dating at the next iDate mobile dating conference that is taking place in June 12-13, 2018 at the Sportsmen's Lodge Events Center in Los Angeles, CA. Registration for the event can be made here.
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The League Dating App Admits Only Accomplished Singles
TODAY.COM - May 29 - Amanda Bradford created a dating app called The League in 2014. The site claims $1M people on its waiting list.
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The League: People Who Post Pictures With Their Moms Have A 7% Higher Match Rate
DAILYMAIL.CO.UK - May 11 - The League, a dating app for career and educated-minded adults looking for a relationship, has revealed that users who include a picture with their mothers have a higher match rate. Most of the users with photos of their moms are men (55%). In addition to showing that someone is family-oriented, it can indicate that a man treats his mother well - and is likely to treat women well in general. For a woman pictured with her mother, it can offer men a peak into what she might look like when she gets older.
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More Americans Are Seeking Spouses With Similar Levels Of Schooling
BLOOMBERG - Apr 17 - The League connects educated, affluent millennials. The app initially targeted Bay Area singles, and has now 300k active users and a 500k-person waitlist. The app has expanded into Pittsburgh, Tampa, and Orlando. The League has no shortage of competitors. Luxy bills itself as the No. 1 dating app for millionaires. Raya calls itself a "private, membership based community." Sparkology describes itself as a "curated dating experience for young professionals" and accepts members only by invitation or referral. More Americans are seeking spouses with similar levels of schooling, a pattern known as assortative mating. Couples in which both members had at least a four-year degree made up 14.7% of all married people in the U.S. in 2015, up from 1.9% in 1960, when far fewer women attended universities.
by Jeanna Smialek
See full article at Bloomberg Businessweek
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The League Dating App Debuts In Cleveland
THE PLAIN DEALER - Apr 10 - A handpicked group of 500 Cleveland-area singles, chosen from a wait list of 3,000, received full access to The League dating app and were able to receive their matches selected by the app's algorithm. Every day, members of The League receive the profiles of two or three potential dates on their phones. Send the most interesting person a "heart," and if one is returned, the app opens into a chat function so the two people can arrange a date. The League now has ~1M people on its wait list in 30 cities.
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The Latest Relationship Trend Is 'Slow Dating'
BUSINESS INSIDER - Mar 22 - Dating apps are starting to offer fewer, more curated matches. Dating app Once delivers users one match per day. Then, users have 24h to decide whether they are interested. Once has been available in Europe since 2015; it launched in the US in Feb 2018 and now has 200K US users. Coffee Meets Bagel, which launched in 2012, also presents women with one "bagel" (match) a day. (Men receive up to 21 matches every day and select the people they like, so the app chooses women's bagels from among the men who indicated they liked them.) The League, which launched in 2015, is a more selective dating app for ambitious professionals. Then there's Happn, which debuted in 2014 in Paris. Users who subscribe to Happn Essential get 10 chances to "Say Hi" to another user every day. It's possible that daters and app-developers alike have begun to observe the effects of what social scientists call "choice overload" or the "paradox of choice." The more options you have, research suggests, the less likely you are to make any decision at all.
by Shana Lebowitz
See full article at Business Insider
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