This Week in Startups - Snack App’s Kim Kaplan PLUS 3 key metrics that matter for consumer, enterprise SaaS & marketplace startups | E1195

Episode Date: April 6, 2021

Check out Snack: https://www.thesnackapp.com FOLLOW Kim: https://twitter.com/Kimberly_Kap FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

Hey, everybody got a great interview today with a founder who created a new dating app. It's kind of like Tinder meets TikTok. Instead of building a profile and swiping left and right, you make videos. And if you love this podcast, of course, please share it with your friends. We're always trying to get the knowledge in this podcast from the guests into your brain and you can help by sharing it with your friends so that they get smarter and they do better in their lives. That's really why we're doing this podcast is to learn how to be entrepreneurial, to learn how to be great angel investors or venture capitalists.

And before we get started with our interview with Kim Kaplan, a couple of your questions. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Rippling. Rippling helps thousands of fast-growing startups automate their HR and IT, from their team's payroll and benefits to devices and apps. See how at rippling.com slash twist.

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Okay, here's our first question. Aside from PR Newswire or DIY, do it yourself, PR methods, how else can a company with over a million dollars in revenue let people in venture capital know about us?

We are too busy working on our Department of Defense and Air Force contracts, very impressive, and don't have proper time to do fundraising dog and pony shows with potential investors. Do It Yourself PR

has worked well for us during the pandemic and the name of our company is M.S., Okay, the first thing you want to do is find a podcast that is listened to by a ton of venture capitalists and then somehow figure out how to embed your promotion for your startup, MSB.AI, into like a user question or something like that. Oh, wait, you just did that. So check box there. Well played. Number two, one of the things that great companies do is celebrate their

wins. And you can see celebrating your wins in a lot of different ways. The easiest way is you write a blog post. We're thrilled to announce that we've hit a million dollars in ARR. Might seem crass, might seem a little bit show-offy. It's not. It's just taking a victory lap, taking a milestone, and saying, hey, we hit a million dollars in revenue. Another thing you can do is be active on social media. This takes time. So you don't get a free ride. I'm going to give you some things that are efficient, like a blog post, which takes you half an hour to write. You don't need to make it more in peace. We're talking about 500 words or less is the ideal blog post. three, four, five paragraphs.

You get to that fifth paragraph, you're done. That means you should start another blog post. So short, tight blog post that you celebrate your victories. Then you cross post those to LinkedIn. Now, if you want to get really fancy, I would look at your online activity on Twitter. And, you know, on LinkedIn, I think those are the two main social networks that work really well for you.

And then ask yourself, are we taking credit for all the great work we're doing on a regular basis? I'm trying to get my team to take credit for our work more often. And so we're doing something called pod notes, podcast notes basically. After the podcast, we write all the things you're going to learn in every episode, and we started sharing those. Why? Because we want to take credit for all that knowledge. The knowledge is all there in the podcast, but we didn't take credit for it.

Now we're cross-posting our pod notes on my personal blog, this week in startups.com, the podcast's website, LinkedIn, and Medium. So we're doing super posting, is what I call it internally, super distribution. So start thinking about a super distribution strategy. Now, here's where it gets interesting. You could start following venture capitalist and start following associates on your Twitter handle. When you follow somebody, you get the reciprocation effect.

Then you can start as the founders replying to other venture capitalists on Twitter. Twitter equals venture capital. That's kind of like the cafeteria for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, isn't it? So just go spend your time there. And then there's a new one, Clubhouse. So you as the founders could do a weekly talk or every two weeks a talk, on military contractors and military startups. Then you bring other people to your military startup's clubhouse or a podcast like this one,

and now you're starting to get the idea. This is under an umbrella called content marketing. In other words, make great content that talks about issues around your industry, but don't just slap people with ads because those don't work, right? So here I am. I'm an angel investor of venture capital as I run an accelerator. I do this podcast for 11 years. most of the people we wind up investing in tell us,

oh yeah, no, I've watched the podcast for five years, ten years. I started watching in high school. I watched it through college, through graduate school, and now I'm starting a company. And then I'm like, oh, boy, I feel old. I've been out this for a while. But great question. Content marketing is your friend.

Long story short, and interacting in the cafeteria, the cafeteria being Clubhouse and Twitter. There is one little tiny thing that I've seen people do. If you want to do this high-level, really complex stuff, you can figure out who all the venture capitalists are on Facebook or LinkedIn and Twitter and then start running ads against them. So when they do searches, you've kind of narrow targeted them. It's a little complex to do that.

You have to know their Facebook IDs. You have to know, they're interested in that topic. But you could do ads about your content, right? So when you have that content marketing post, how we hit a million dollars or how to sell into the Air Force, whatever blog post you're doing, you could put a little marketing spend behind those, but only against the audience of technologists, journalists, and venture capitalists. And then you're kind of priming the pump, aren't you? Oh, God, I thought of another one. Monthly updates to investors, you already send those. Hopefully, if you're doing a good job,

start monthly update to non-investors. And then every investor you meet with, you put them on your non-investor updates. Those updates could be a little more abridged. You don't have to give them everything, but just some top level. And you write a different salutation at the beginning, hey, investors who we've met with, but haven't yet invested in our company, here's our monthly update. If you don't want to get these anymore, feel free to let me know I'll unsubscribe or even better put the unsubscribe link at the bottom. Here's a great question from Jacob. Jacob asks me, as a new investor, what key metrics would you look at in these three different types of startups? Consumer subscriptions, marketplaces and B2B SaaS. Great, great question.

Let's start with consumer subscriptions. This would be Netflix, Spotify,com.com, their competitor headspace, not sure if they're still in business. Steasy for dance, brilliant.org for math, and science, tone base for music, musician for musicians. You get the idea. These consumer subscription startups are incredibly powerful because when you have a subscription product, every year you start off with 50, 60, 70% of the number of subscribers you had last year. And in some cases like Netflix or Spotify, it might even be more. Those are great businesses. And as I alluded to, the churn rate is going to be higher on these businesses because they're not very expensive, right? Five bucks a month, 10 bucks a month. And people will try stuff. So they'll be

be sampling, but you really want to look at is of the top users, how many of them turn over? So of the people who use the product the most, the ideal customer profile, how many of those turn over? And having that dialogue with the founder. Okay, tell me about people who use comm every week. Okay. So of the people who've used it 40 times at a year, what's their resubscribe, unsubscribe like? Because now you found the true audience. That's what I like to look at. And of course, you could ask them about what is your customer acquisition cost, which channels are working, et cetera. And how much are you spending every month on marketing is a pretty good tell. The companies that are really surging are probably spending half of their monthly spend on

advertising and customer acquisition, maybe two thirds. In other words, the staffing costs might be one out of every $3 and the marketing might be two out of every $3, which kind of makes sense when you're thinking about it. Because if you can find customers for $50 for $100 a year product, you shouldn't stop spending. You should just keep spending, spending, until it stopped working, right? And if it doesn't stop working, keep spending because you have growth. So those are the ones I think about in consumer subscription. Now, if they have figured it out and they are spending a lot of money, it might be less of an investment opportunity. If they haven't figured out how to spend money to get customers, that means the valuation might be much lower

because you're taking on the risk as an investor of investing in them before they figure out growth. So you can you can probably invest in three companies that haven't figured out growth for the price of a company that has figured out growth, and the risk profile will be radically different. So you can have a blend of those in your portfolio, just like if you were betting on stocks, you might want the blue chip ones, you might want some speculative ones and maybe some in between, right? So you're diversified. For marketplaces, you really want to look at how often the transactions are occurring for something like Uber, Uber eats, DoorDash. Hopefully people are using those services multiple times a day, multiple times a week, because they're low cost per transaction,

you make up for it with the frequency, right? So people who order from Postmates or Uber eats or Dardash four nights a week, seven days a week because they order lunch sometimes and dinner sometimes. Those are really amazing things to look for. It's the frequency of those transactions. Then you look at the take rate. How much do they get out of it? What is the average dollar amount they get? Some marketplaces are going to have high ticket prices like Airbnb, right? You're going to get three nights on average at $400 a night, $300 a night, whatever it is. It's going to be $1,000. they get 5% on either side. So they're making a lot more than a lift line or an Uber pool, right?

It's a much bigger transaction. But you're not going into an Airbnb seven days a week. It's not possible, right? The most you could do it is seven days a week. So unless you're living in Airbnb's all the time, which would be a little bit weird and creepy, I'll be honest. You're probably not going to have that experience. But you might make up for it with the amount of money in the marketplace.

Just like a marketplace of homes, like Zillow or Redfin in those, or a marketplace of, let's see, What would be another interesting marketplace? Oh, travel, right? So if you have a marketplace of travel experiences or cars, used cars, those kind of marketplaces, the eBay's, you might not, with big ticket items, have as much frequency. So that's what I would look for there is the number of transactions per customer.

How often are they transacting? What's their take rate? Now, your final question is about software as a service, SaaS, you know, basically business-to-bus software. So things like Slack or Salesforce or Zendesk, all of all these great products out there, Asana, O-Doo, you know, pick the SaaS product. And what you're going to look for there is you're going to see a lower turn rate

because people generally are in business. They're a little more serious. They don't just try something as a flyer. Like you might try Netflix or Hulu as a flyer, but you're not trying Asana or Slack as a flyer because there's so much onboarding and time to get notion up and running or whatever product or service we're talking about here. So you're going to see lower churn rate.

But you want to see how many people land and expand. The term land and expand means you got the, the customer. Okay, we got five people on Notion. You got seven people on Slack. You got 10 people on Zendesk. Okay, what does that customer look like next year? Did they expand the number of seats? Because if you can sell more seats at the existing customer, boy, that's super efficient, and then it makes the product stickier, which then lowers the churn. Does that make sense? So think about it this way. You got an organization of 50 people. The marketing group decides, we want to use Notion. We're going to use it to put all our documents. We're going to stop using

Google Docs, as an example. And put it all on notion, have more of a wiki-like experience where everybody can see everybody's documents, everybody can see everybody's changes as opposed to them being hidden in individual silos. Then the marketing department's talking to sales, and says, you know what, we want to put three people from the sales department on here to track stuff. Oh, and then the legal department says, oh, you know what? We have to review your contracts. We want to use it too. So give us two more seats. That's what you're looking for in SaaS, right? It's expanding. It's expanding. They land and they expand. Okay, so what I just described, there's a fancy word for in the industry. It's called net dollar

retention. And basically what that's a measure of is how much revenue did you retain, did you keep from last year? And that takes into account people who upgraded, people who downgraded, we went to 10 seats from 5, or we went to 2 from 5, upgrade, and how many people left? We don't want our 5 seats. We found a better solution. We're going to do something else. That calculation of net dollar retention is how a lot of the sophisticated SaaS investors will look at it. They want to know, are you keeping these dollars? And here's the amazing thing. If you are in fact landing, expanding, you might never need to get another customer. If you, for some reason, got IBM and Disney, you know, and Microsoft as a customer for your product. And then they keep expanding

and expand. Those are giant companies, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees all over the world. If you just keep servicing them and they love your product, they'll just keep cutting you more and more checks for more and more money. Or if you launch another adjacent, product, let's say Slack were to add email or let's say, you know, Zendesk were to add sale. I think they did add some sell stuff. Actually, that's what's happening in the industry. Everybody's kind of adding software so that when they do have a company locked in, they can sell them the next product adjacent to it. And I think all SaaS software is kind of coming together. Odo, which is sponsored this program a number of times, kind of is doing that. That's kind of their

strategy. They have every piece of software, whether it's accounting or sales or help desk in one product so you can control your SaaS bills, not as a commercial for them, but just in general, that's a trend we're seeing in SaaS. Okay, let's move on to our interview. Let's face it, this new world of remote work is here to stay. We all know that, and so are all of the HR and IT headaches that come with it. Like, how do you register your startup with dozens of state tax agencies, right? You had some employees, they were living right near your office, and then they decided, you know what, Yolo, I'm going to move somewhere else during the pandemic. Well, you are going to need two, have your startup register with dozens of state tax agencies now,

or you have to comply with a gazillion different local labor laws. Well, Rippling, which I use for my fully remote team over at inside, can answer those questions for you. They make it super easy to manage all of your local and remote employees and contractors, whether they work from HQ or Timbuktu. When you hire people in new states, Rippling can automatically register your startup with each state tax agency and keep you compliant with all the different local labor laws.

You know, the stuff that no one likes to do. deal with, all that headache. They're there for you. Rippling also let you onboard your new hires in literally 90 seconds. You can instantly set up their payroll benefits and of course apps like Slack and GitHub. You can even ship them a work laptop with all the software and security they need all installed. We love Rippling because it takes a lot of complexity off our plate. So the team can focus on important stuff like creating great newsletters, which is what they do over there. And now, thanks to Rippling's new PEO option, your employees can likely access better Fortune 500. level benefits for less than other platforms. So if you're looking for an easier way to run your

startup remotely or just a better way to manage your HR and IT, visit rippling.com slash twist. That's rippling, r-i-p-l-I-N-G dot com slash twist. Next up on the program, Kimberly Kaplan is here. She is the CEO and co-founder of The Snack App, which you can go see at the snack app.com. And you may have heard of the company that she used to work at. It was called Plenty of Fish, an online dating platform, which existed for about a decade before Match.com bought it for a half a billion dollars in 2015. And she started as the VP of marketing and advertising, was the third person at the company before going on to become the VP of product management, revenue optimization, marketing, and the daily act of users there grew under her tenure

from a million to over four million. And the annual run rate in terms of revenue grew from 10 million to over 100 million as founders are apt to do. Or I should say lie lieutenants at companies are apt to do. They go on to become the generals of their own army. And welcome to the program, Kimberly. And maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you're doing with the snack app after your great success with plenty of fish. Thanks, Jason.

It's great to be here. You're right. Lieutenants do like to go and start something new and do their own thing. So I have started a new dating app. It's an industry that I have over a decade of experience in something that I know really well. And one day I was scrolling through TikTok and I saw this woman's video and she was pointing and it was saying, what's your name? What's your sign? What's your age?

Where are you from? And I had this aha moment and realized she's trying to use TikTok to date. And I clicked on that song and I saw that there was over 130,000 videos that have been created. to that song and most people were trying to use it to date. And then she had the hashtag single on her kind of description of the video. And when I looked at the hashtag single, there's over 13 billion views of that hashtag. And that's when I realized there's this opportunity for a video first dating app like TikTok and that that's when snack was born.

Got it. And so if we were to think about the product, instead of on Tinder, swiping left and right on photos, here somebody makes a creative video in the stories format, which I think the TikTok format is basically an extension of the stories format that instead of swiping left and right, you swipe up and down. But it's exclusively, the app is exclusively for dating, not for dance moves, not for funny videos, not for marketing like TikTok is. Well, you can dance if you want to.

That's showing yourself off in the way you want to show yourself off. But yes, it is meant for dating. So I'm always interested in the dynamic. of who courts who on these apps because you and I have spoken before. And this seems to be a very interesting turn of events. We had the dating apps were run by men, plenty of fish and everything else before it, were run by men.

But women were obviously, you know, 50% of the driving force in these apps. Or I don't even know, maybe more. I'm not sure what the dynamics are or if it's different by app. So what is the dynamic in your app versus other dating apps? Because it seems like some are led by the person who led, female led versus male led, double opt-in. Explain to us who are neophytes and didn't grow up in the online dating genre, which was before my time.

And my time, they had something called video dating. So you would go to a... Is that a VHS? Well, yeah, I mean, in the 80s and 90s, VHS tapes and digital tapes were kind of a big deal. and people would actually go. I mean, then it became chat rooms, but yeah, I remember when I was just

in the late 80s and early 90s going to college, video dating was a thing. I was too young for it, and I was in college, there's no need for it, but yeah, we'd go and they'd say, here are 20 tapes, and when you see a tape where they interview somebody,

pick the ones you like, and we'll set you up on a date. Yeah, so tell me about the dynamics in the app, who selects who, is it double opt-in? Like, you know, you see in Tinder. How does it work? It is double-opt-in like Tinder and Bumble, where both people have to like each other's videos before they're able to communicate. And once you do like each other's videos, your videos are going to show up in my feed now.

And instead of that like button, there's actually going to be a DM box, which allows you to directly communicate with me and respond to me based on the content that I've uploaded. So if you and I've matched and you upload a video of your dog, I can now directly from the feed see that video and comment back to you. say, oh my God, that's such a cute dog. What type of dog is it? And you can do that through text, voice, or video. We provide all those options. Got it. And then how does it, is there any gender difference in how these services are working now in terms of who pays or premium memberships? Or is it all just equal footing? And maybe this next generation doesn't even think about gender and maybe the way our generation does. It's, to me, it's equal footing. And something that we are doing different around gender is when you do sign up, uh,

Most dating apps will say, what gender do you identify as? But when it comes to seeking, they'll say you're either seeking men, women, or other. And what we're doing is we're actually breaking out that other category. We think it's really important for a good experience for you to be able to say who you are interested in seeing and giving you more options than just the standard three that most dating apps provide. Yeah. And so that would be LGBTQT and everything in between, I guess. and how does that work in terms of people opting into those things and also people opting into like maybe even race or age?

And is that considered discriminatory or preference? I mean, gosh, I hate to go into like a hot topic here. But I am curious that if you were to say, I'm interested in dating this specific race or the specific age, does it make you racist or ageist in these apps? Well, we don't ask what your race is. That's something that we allow the people that are signing up to opt in to say that they are interested in whoever they might be interested in. Age, I think that really comes down to the preferences of the individual and how wide of an age bracket they're willing to date. And everyone is different and has their own preferences.

So who are we to judge? Right. So people can pick, they want to date somebody in whatever range. but the apps previously seemed to be organized, not just around age, but also race too. When did that change? Because obviously Jay Day was very, or Jay Swipe and Christian Mingle,

it seemed like they were demographic-based apps. And when did that change in the sort of, stepping back from your app, but looking at plenty of fish and all the apps? When did that change? Was that a conscious change? I think for me, we're building an app for Gen Z, and Gen Z is,

a lot more open and willing to date across genders or races or even locations compared to previous generations. So I definitely, I mean, race is a massive issue and it's something that is extremely prevalent in terms of people having preferences around races for good or bad. But Gen Z I think is a generation that is growing up and being more open about that. So I'm excited. for the fact that we can build an app for them where that isn't a concern. What about the other apps out there on the market? Do they still pivot around this? And does that make them like for Gen Xers and boomers by the fact that they say,

you know, you might have a preference based on this? I'm curious of the wider issue. I get that you're for Gen Z and you don't want to have any part of, you know, this sort of, I guess, slicing and dicing of demographics. Age is the only one, right? And also, I guess, what gender, your gender preferences are. yeah what is the industry doing because i mean wasn't there just so brouhaha like 10 years ago that somebody looked at all the swipes and certain groups were getting no attention certain

groups were getting more attention etc i remember that study or i remember that um article i honestly haven't looked at the apps recently to see what they're doing i i took a year and a half off after leaving plenty of fish and tried not to look at dating and then since doing snack i haven't looked as much at the incumbents and more looking at what social media is doing. So I'm not the best person to answer that. Hey, everybody, I thought I would bring Christina Casiopo. I pronounced it correct. I'm hoping. Christina. You got it. Yep. All right. You're the founder of Vanta. People have been hearing your ads on the pod for the last year. And I thought it'd be fun to have you on and you to explain why you created Vanta and what SOC2 is and why it's important people get it right.

So let's start with what is SOC2 for people who are just realizing they have to become SOC2 compliant? For sure. So SOC2 is at its high level. It's sort of a customer asking you to prove your security. Got it. And when you do a SOC2 report, how often do you have to update it? And what is that process like? Because my understanding is you don't just do this once in the life of your company.

You do it continually every year, every quarter. Right. So you actually do it annually. Yeah. So often, so the way these reports work is, they've got dates and time periods on them. And sort of like a pen test. It's something once you start doing, you'll just renew every year. All right.

Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming on and telling the audience why you should get your sock too, when you should get it, and how you should do it. And you've been very nice to our audience, giving them $1,000 off, which is a really significant and generous offer. Go to vanta.com slash twist, V-a-N-T-A-com slash twist to get $1,000 off your, talk too. Thanks, Christina. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Cheers now. What is the revenue model now for dating apps?

Because I also have no experience here, but is it just moved to a simple membership like Netflix where you pay 10 bucks a month? I remember there was like Superpoke, which was Zuckerberg's very weird take. Zuckerberg's such a weirdo that like his idea of dating a girl because he, you know,

heteronormative to the best of my knowledge, was to poke them, which is essentially like the fifth grade equivalent of how boys and girls interact, like pulling their ponytail or poking people. So you would super poke somebody, I guess. But that's gone away. Are there like, do people send each other virtual goods and roses? Do they pay per match? How does it work?

Every app has a different kind of payment mechanism. I'd say most now are freemium. so you can use the app for most kind of use cases, but then you can opt to pay for certain features. And those are kind of either the superpowers that allow you to have access to certain areas or to do a bit more or to kind of speed up the velocity in which you can date

or the amount of attention you can get. So those are, it's either through subscriptions or microtransactions. I think there's some, I know some people have tried real world gifting where you can send someone a rose or... In the real world.

In the real world. Yeah. That exists. Yeah, I'm trying to think if that would be creepy or not. I guess you would have to get opt-in from that because it would be sent to somebody's house. So I think you would...

Or your digital rows too, yeah. It can be digital. There's definitely a lot of digital gifts now. But every country and every... I think society has different ideas of what's normal now. So if you think about in Japan or in Asia, they have different acceptance levels

in terms of virtual gifting versus North America. So every app is very different depending upon where they're based and who their customers are. If they're Gen Z or Millennials versus Boomers, they also have different expectations

in terms of what an app would provide them. There is this 800-pound gorilla in the market called Match, which is public. And you help build this juggernaut by selling them plenty of fish. What is their dominance in the space? They have Tinder. Obviously they incubated that from the IAC accelerator.

They have Match.com. OKCupid hinge, pairs, plenty of fish, R-time. Meetik, is that another one that they own? So that's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight dating apps in one company. And if you look at the numbers, Tinder seven or eight million people, plenty of fish, four million, people match two million, okay, Cupid, you know, 1.7, 2 million,

Grindr, 1.6. You put it all together. Are they like 80% of the market right now? And how does that affect your ability for the ability for new entrants like yours to come into the market? They definitely have a stronghold on the market. I think Bumble is a great kind of addition to say, okay, there's an alternative in terms of a company that you'd want to potentially date through. But Match has done a phenomenal job at working with different companies, acquiring, different companies. Tinder's obviously a massive success. But they really are able, when you say there's 4 million people on one and 7 million the other, there is crossover. So they're not 4 million unique people on plenty of fish that are different to the 7 million that are Tinder. There is an

overlap that exists. Most people use 2 or 3 or 1 or 2. Between 2 and 3. Got it. And Bumble went public and became worth $7 billion. I'm not sure what their revenue is, but that has changed the game, correct? In what regard? Just in terms of the ability for you to then go start a company and people thinking matches dominance in this space does not mean the game is over because I know when I was looking at dating apps

over the last couple of years and we had one called Flutter that was going to be the Snapchat of dating. They were apparently way too early and it didn't work out but it was a very similar vision. It was pre-Tik-Tac so it didn't have that same device. but it was definitely a video first.

And then I looked at coffee meets bagel and a bunch of these different apps five or ten years ago. But at that time, all venture capital said, listen, it's a fool's errand to go after this space because of match as dominant. So I guess that's what I'm sort of getting towards is, has it been easier for you to raise money

because of Bumble being able to prove that another large competitor can exist in the match world? You know what's interesting is I raised my initial around in September. And it was really hard. And it was because there was a lot of resistance to dating. There's been a lot of, I think, funds and VCs and angels that have tried to invest in this space and haven't seen success. So I absolutely agree that it's a lot easier now, even six months later to raise capital post the Bumble IPO than it was six months ago. And I think they have made it clear that there's another player in the space and that match doesn't have to dominate forever.

And every eight to 10 years, there's a new dating app that kind of enters into the space. And Tinder's now nine years old. So it is that right time for that next dating app to come in and usurp them. And I fundamentally believe that that's what Snack is doing with a video first approach. And it's going to be really hard for the incumbents to take a Tinder or a Bumble. And yeah, they can add video in as a feature. but they can't fundamentally change the product to be video first. And if you give people the choice between video and image,

image is so much easier. So they're going to opt to do image. And if you look at the age demographics of Tinder and Bumble, they've aged up significantly over the last number of years. And that demographic just isn't as comfortable with video. So that's why I believe that there is going to be a new player that comes into the market. And it's a kind of crazy, heady question. but do you think these apps make it so easy to date or they take the they may take the friction

out of it's clear of the uberification of meeting people because it's on demand right anywhere you go in the world anytime you can pop open an app and find people who are like-minded do you think this is changing what people's expectations are in long-term relationships and i was at a dinner party with, you know, Gen Xers, as it were. And there seemed to be this thinking that we were the last generation that maybe would be part of this nuclear family marrying thing and that we were seeing less and less of the millennials before us and even Gen Z's, even having this interest in getting married and having a nuclear family. And I'm curious if you think it's cause correlation with these platforms in any way. I think Tinder and Bumble made it a lot easier to date.

because it was so easy to sign up. You linked your Facebook account and immediately you had a profile or you uploaded one image and immediately you had a profile. And all you had to do is swipe back and forth and you have someone that was interested in you. So I think in some ways there's almost a shift away from that now and that people don't like the ease in which it is to create a profile. And we're seeing that with what we're doing on snack is there's a slight more, there's a barrier to entry because you have to upload a video.

And a video is harder to create than just picking a random image that you might have on your phone. So you have to have a higher intent in order to come onto the platform because you're putting that extra effort in. And that weeds out all those like looky lose. It's very interesting because, yeah, I think Tinder and even plenty of fish, I think we're known for being very easy friction free, right? To just you could start meeting people. Plenty fish. There was like 80 questions to sign up on plenty of fish. Oh, really?

It was a long profile completion. It was a long profile. All right. I want to put a pin in why plenty of fish was so successful because I remember somebody, you know, my extended family was just addicted to plenty of fish and like everybody was using plenty of fish because I think because it was free and you got a lot of features when it was free and then it was very affordable. And it seemed to appeal to a nerd like more tech kind of focus group.

But I'm going to put a pin in that for a second and go back to adding friction. Because usually we're talking about reducing friction. it almost reminds me in a way, and correct me if I'm wrong, that video apps require you to get good lighting. Like I've got lighting rigs here. I've been through free lighting rigs. I've been through two cameras for the podcast

and digital SLRs and we're just keep iterating and try to make up and all this stuff. Whereas Clubhouse, you know what? We won't put you on video. In fact, there is no way to accidentally turn your camera on. So feel free if you're in the hot tub or laying in bed to use Clubhouse. There is no way with this app you can make a mistake

and turn your camera. on like you can with Zoom. I assume many people are doing their staff meetings in Zoom and like while they're laying in bed with their camera off or on the floor curled up in a ball. So I don't know what your staff are doing, but my husband are doing that. Everybody's broken. No, it's kind of like there's this kind of like how it started, how it's going. And it shows like it's so funny.

It's like people like, you know, really properly in front of their rig and, you know, ready for their staff meeting and work meeting. And then the next one is just people like, laying on the floor by their fireplace, you know, sprawled out with a comforter and a mug of hot cocoa and in a onesie, you know, with their laptop on the floor. But there is something about removing stuff, but you're adding stuff to slow it down. So that means the only people who are going to be able to use the app are going to be people who have made a video. Yeah. Therefore, that takes a lot more work. You got to be camera ready. I think how we view camera ready,

and how Gen Z views camera ready is different. Part of TikTok is you actually get to see a more authentic and real version of people and who they are and like unapologetically, like take it or leave it. And I think that... Wait, TikTok's unpolished? I thought it was like the ultimate policy. I guess it depends on the pretty ridiculous.

It depends where the algorithms put you. So you might be seeing polished people, but I'm seeing a mixture. I guess I do see a mixture. Yeah, you're right. And I think it's, there's something that lends itself really well to date. and saying like this is who I am and being authentic and real and not catfishing people, which is also harder with video. Oh, right. Yeah.

Video is an anecdote to catfishing. Is catfishing a big thing? On plenty of fish. So what is the psychology of this catfishing? Like who are the people catfishing people and what is their motivation to just humiliate them or to F with them and screw with them? I mean, it seems so deranged to catfish people. There's lighthearted catfishing.

Like I joke that like my bio picture that I share around is from seven years ago. And I haven't had an updated bio picture. So yeah, I am presenting myself as being someone who's younger. And that in and of itself could be considered catfishing. So it's people presenting themselves in a way that might be an older image. Oh, I thought catfishing was a whole different persona. But if I was born in 1950 and I was using my 26 year old, 1976 photo in 2021, I would be catfishing people.

You're luring someone in with a false pretense, essentially. Thus the catfishing. I now get it. But with video, it's harder to catfish. But also, it's, you can kind of show off your more real, authentic version of who you are. And I think that's really valuable for dating. Because if you meet and you catfish someone, they're going to eventually find out. Whereas with video, when you show up who you are, great, like they can take it or leave it

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The R Crowd account is free. Just go to OUR-C-O-W-D.com slash Twist. That's right, our crowd.com slash twist. Tell me about what were the main lessons at plenty of fish and which one of those, which of those lessons became valid so far in your new journey with snack and which ones you said, you know what, those are actually outdated. Because you must be figuring this out in real time. What worked 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, and today, and what will work in five or 10 years are going to be radically different things. So tell us what feels like timeless advice or timeless lessons learned versus. the more effeminal ones or ones that you've retired? One thing I learned as a result of the match group acquisition is I got an opportunity to really dive into the different organizations across match groups. So spent time with Tinder, spent time with OKCupid, spent time with METIC. And I got to see what drives those businesses versus what drove plenty of fish.

And if you think about Match.com, they're a very marketing-driven organization and they do marketing so well. And then you look at Tinder. and they're design-driven organization. And they do design really well. Whereas at plenty of fish in OKCupid, we are more data-driven. And it's been really interesting

in building snack now and taking a bit more of a design-first approach and taking what I learned from marketing at Match and then knowing that underlying data to me, which is integral to who I am and what I kind of grew up learning, putting those three things together and saying, okay, combined,

because they're going to make for a much better organization, versus plenty of fish, which we were very much not a design-driven company. I think that became very clear over the year. That was, I mean, I say, I always kind of put plenty of fish in the category of ugly websites, like ugly and high-function websites. Craigslist. Craigslist, eBay, plenty of fish. And I guess increasingly Amazon, which is once you lock into a format that people understand,

like a U.X experience, the ability. to change Amazon to change the cart concept and checking out with your cart. Like imagine if Amazon said, like, we're going to get rid of the concept of a cart and checking out. You're just going to, as you click on stuff, it's just going to get added to your, you know, purchase queue one click. Like, it just doesn't work, right? It's, I think, Amazon, I think, will shift too and they'll move, but it's all incremental

shifts at a certain point when you become a large organization versus when you're younger and kind of in the beginning phases, you can make bigger shifts and do bigger things. So, I don't know. I think Amazon will. change a little bit, but the UX side of things and design side of things is something that I really learned from Tinder. And I'm excited to apply that to what we're doing at Snack and how do we take a more design-first approach.

And what is Facebook's role in all this? They seem to have banned. Facebook seems like the worst possible partner to get involved with in any way because they seem to allow the baby dating sites to get the graph or get involved. study their data and then compete with them or not let them advertise. I remember when Flutter was trying to grow, they were not allowed to advertise on Facebook or Instagram, but other dating sites were.

What is Facebook's role in all of this? And, you know, is Instagram, Facebook, does Facebook even have dating as a concept built into their platform? They have dating now, yeah. Where is it in the platform? I've never, I guess because I'm married. Somewhere in the app. Somewhere in the app, it's buried in there.

But what is their relationship to all the other, dating platforms. Do they let them use the social graph anymore? I don't think the social graph is available. I think that's more of a data sharing. I'm sure after Cambridge Analytica, I think they shut a lot of that off regardless. But they play a massive role in terms of user acquisition for dating companies. And I think it's because they are a massive social network. And they have the reach that a lot of other companies don't have. So you kind of need to use them and lean on them in terms of getting your awareness of your company out there. And do they let you advertise or no?

Yep, they do. Yeah. That's really fascinating. And they haven't turned people off as dating apps yet. No. The company that actually stops new dating apps is Apple. Really? Yeah, it's really hard to get dating apps approved.

We got declined when we first submitted to the App Store because we were a dating app. Wait, Apple doesn't love dating apps? Nope. I actually got an email yesterday from Texas. stars because there's a group that they're working with at, I think it was a new NYU. And they got their app that they've been working on as a school project got declined from the App Store because it was dating as well. That is so weird.

I had to pull many strings to get snack approved from Apple. What is their thinking? They're just concerned about user safety and childhood safety or something? I think there's an abundance of dating apps on the app store. And so they're wanting to make sure that there's something unique about them or different. than all the other ones that currently exist. So I understand why they're doing it, but it is a hard block in terms of if you're dating,

you don't get approved. That's really interesting. Because people can clone a dating app so easily. Yes. And so they steal all these apps and they make a thousand different ones. They flood the store. They charge people.

They put fake profiles. And of the dating profiles out there, how many of them are fake do you think? When you look on the major platforms. Was that a major issue? at plenty of fish? How did you deal with safety and security? What's the state of the art today in that regard? I don't know at plenty of fish anymore. I mean, I haven't been there for over two years. But with snack, what we're doing is two-factor authentication for exactly that reason that

you either have to sign up with your phone number or your Apple ID. And it's that we can ensure that each person is assigned to a particular device or a particular phone number because that's really important not only for safety and security, but ensuring that you don't have fake profiles, that you don't have account takeovers as well, which is a big issue, and that someone gets your password from whatever account that you may have forgotten about. And all of a sudden, they have access to your dating profile. So it's something that I'm, I think more and more platforms are moving towards that direction. So we just started there. Fascinating. All right, listen, continued success. Congratulations on going from a lieutenant now to the general.

running your own ship. You're the captain now. So it all begins and ends. I'll get my hat ready. Yeah. You know, you've seen the Tom Hanks movie where he's the captain of a big oil tank or a shipping container and then the guy comes on board and the Somali Pirates taken and he says, I'm the captain now.

What's the biggest difference between being the lieutenant and being the captain? Any adjustment you've had to make? To be honest, not a lot because as soon as we got acquired by match, Marcus left the next day. So there really was this period of time where, I don't know, I felt like Plenty Fish was always my baby. So I always kind of treated as if it was my own startup. And so the way I felt and the way I acted, I don't think is that much different from

the way that I'm doing things today other than I have a lot more experience. And I've been through the stage before and I love it. I love building again. I was talking with Marcus recently just said, like, I remember the old days when you used to just sit around in an office and drink wine out of blue glasses in the middle of the day because we could because there's only six of us. And I feel like I'm back in those moments and it was so exciting and so much fun. And I really want to make sure I relish this time because I know it doesn't last forever. Yeah. The product market fit building product moment. We have under 30 employees is just so

special. And when you get past 30 employees now, of a sudden, like your whole life is managing people who work at your company who you didn't hire, well, maybe you wouldn't have hired or it's just hard to maintain a standard or a culture, you know, past, I don't know what the exact number is, but for me it was always 30.

30 is exactly the same at plenty. It was 30, 60, and then we reached 100. And those, I think, were different milestones that there was a shift in the organization. Yeah, you just, you don't know everybody in the organization. Somebody comes up to you in the elevator. It's like, hey, I work for you.

And you're like, oh, what do you do? And they're like, I did this new feature. You didn't know? I sent you five emails in your link. And it's just layers of management and different processes you have to introduce to help create efficiencies. So I think it's just the growth. And how quickly you grow.

If you go from 10 to 30 in a couple of months, that's very different than if you do kind of a slow incremental gains in terms of employees and people in the company. All right. Listen, continued success. Thanks, Jason. We'll be watching. Everybody should go to their app store. and search for snack app.

I guess that's the best way to look for it, Snack App. Yeah, Snack App. Is there something behind the name? I actually reached. I reached out to Gen Z, a group of Gen Z individuals to help me come up with a name. And I didn't realize it at the time either, which makes me feel really old, even though I'm not.

That snack is like, oh, like he's a snack or she's a snack. Oh, tasty, cute, yeah. Yeah, like, oh, isn't he cute? and she cute. And as soon as it, yeah, and as soon as it kind of came to us, it was like, wow, like that's really smart and interesting. And then same thing with our logo. We reached out and we kind of crowdsourced our logo. We now have this heart pretzel logo that we got from another, from again, a Gen Z individual. So we're trying to include Gen Z as much as possible in how we're building the app and what we're doing because I feel like they understand this space and who they are

way better than I ever will. I know, I know dating. But they know their demographic better than I do. As we wrap here, number one, I just love that. I love the pretzel logo. It's so cute. I know. A little salty. I love those pretzels with a little mustard on them, warm, Madison Square Garden. Oh, man, so good.

Or a street vendor, you know, around the garden as you get out. Prenzles are just good all around. It doesn't matter where you get them from. I know. There's this really great German beer haul that makes fresh pretzels. And they have maple butter and cheese they put on the side of them in addition to the six types of mustard they have. Well, now you're coming up to the Canadian and me with the maple.

The maple butter? Oh, so good. Yeah, there's a little, I found a little donut shop when I was in Toronto. It's called Tim Hortons or something. Yeah, just a little one. This little one is the boutique water. They had these great maple donuts. Seems like everything's got maple in it.

They're like, would you like some maple with your eggs or in your coffee? As we wrap here, is there something about the, is there some discovery about how millennials date that you can educate us on? Or how Gen Z dates? I'm sorry, Gen Z, yes. Forget about millennials. Who cares about them? They're several. Okay, boomers.

It's basically if you're a millennial or above, you're just okay, boomer now. Unfortunately. Yeah, just people are like, okay, boomer. I'm like, I'm Jet X. They're like, you're over 30. It's all the same now. But Gen Z, tell me about Gen Z.

What I really learned about how they're dating is they're currently using Tinder and Bumble because they feel like there's no better option. But as soon as they match, they jump off and move to Snap or Instagram. And the reason they're doing that is that like covert flirtation and that they can comment on someone's videos or post something that they hope will result on them engaging in return. And that really is what led us to build Snack the way we built it, where your content once we match continues to show up for me. So it's not that static dating profile.

that you upload your five images and you write your paragraph about yourself and you never touch it again. Snack is meant to be more dynamic where you're continually updating it with what's going on in your life and giving your match as an opportunity to comment in return so that that dog video that you're posting, I can respond directly and be like, oh my God, that's a cute dog. I don't have to jump off to another app to have that kind of slower kind of flirtation that is more natural. Right.

Because it's very explicit at a dating app where he's, here to date. We're here to date. Now you've added a level of pressure, which is why people will move it over to a social app where they can be like, oh, yeah, you do yoga? Oh, very cool. I do yoga. I just, this is direct correlation with my friends when they get divorced. Their Instagram game goes through the roof. I'm like, I'm like, bruh, you do yoga? And you have a six pack? What happened? Like, you used to be a fat and like eat burgers at me. And now you're exactly the insight we got is that people are using these platforms to date because it just feels more natural to show themselves off in a way that's not like you match on tinder and tinder did a phenomenal

job of creating that celebration and excitement behind a match but then you're thrown off into a different screen and different ux and be like okay go figure out how to what to say to each other yeah go chat now and like awkward yeah it's like your two friends invite you to dinner and they're just like okay you are the two single people here talk to each other and the eight other people like and you're kind of like, well, do you want to grab a glass of wine? Do you want to go for coffee? And that's why people are moving over to Snap and Instagram. So we figure like, you shouldn't have to date across two platforms. How can we build something that kind of pulls the two, the best of the two together? And that is why we kind of built snack the way we did. All right. Listen, we're going into like the

dynamics of gender and dating and generation. So I might as well just ask us, what's this? What's the deal with young guys not knowing how to talk to women? Like in cells and these weird dudes who kind of seem to be super awkward asking girls on dates. And it just seems really weird to me. I don't know who you're hanging out with or where you're getting this. I just read it. Like, you know, sometimes I'll see like Jordan Peterson videos on like Tim Ferrars or something.

And they're talking about masculinity and how men just don't know how to interact with women anymore in terms of dating and asking them on a date. Is that actually a thing? Or like, is there training that these apps do to, like, explain to these people like how to be normal? I don't know if there is a normal. I think dating is just hard. And nobody knows how to act when it comes to dating or nobody knows what to do,

regardless of what your gender is. And I think that's why dating apps have been so successful is it helps kind of broach that first part of things in terms of, okay, now it's a match. Now like talk to each other. And that's the first step. And the next step, like dating is tough. And the next step is how do you make it really easy?

for people to talk to one another and to communicate. And that's where I think things like showing new content about somebody and being able to engage with that content just alleviates that pressure associated with dating in general. And like, how do you make it more fun and more light and less heavy that some of those things on dating apps are today? Yeah. I mean, I brought this up because I don't know if you saw the trending chart from the Washington Post of like young male virginity on the rise.

And everybody was commenting on it. I'm just like, I don't understand any of this. I blame COVID for that more than anything else. I mean, it's pretty crazy. 2008, it was like 8% of men over 30, report zero female sex partners since they turned 18. And in 2018, 10 years later, it was 27%. Wow. Yeah, that was kind of like dramatic.

I don't think there's, but that's not right or wrong. It's just if that's, if people decide they don't want to, then that's good for them. They don't want to. I think they were, yeah. And I wonder if this is like, there. It just seemed to me there might be some, um, it seemed to me there might be something wrong with this survey or something.

I don't know. It just seemed too odd to have the chart go from like, you know, eight to 15% year over year and, you know, in a, you know, whatever somewhat tight range, all of a sudden going four X or something or three X. It doesn't make any sense.

Um, you can always, you can always skew data a certain way. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right, listen, continued success. Congratulations. on getting the product launched.

Thank you, Jason. We'll see you next time on this week of startups. Bye-bye.