Cliff Lerner's Blog: Explosive Growth Blog

I can feel his energy just by reading this — very inspirational and motivating!

Very worthwhile apps, thanks for sharing. I’d love to share my new cryptocurrency app BuySellHodl as well as get any feedback.

We publish real-time crypto ratings and price predictions, based on the user’s opinions as to their opinions and predictions for the coins, as well as a daily bitcoin game to win real money.

Frustrated Startup Founder (Photo photo created by Luis Molinero)

Why is it that some things just don’t seem to get any easier the second time around? For instance, you’d think that after going through the trials and tribulations of growing a business from startup dust to a thriving publicly traded company with over 100 million users, the next business would be infinitely easier to get off the ground.

Spoiler alert! It’s not.

For those of you who don’t know me, my first company — SNAP Interactive — went through so many ups and downs and featured such an abundance of invaluable lessons on its way to being valued at over $100 million, I wrote a book about the whole experience, called “Explosive Growth — A Few Things I Learned Growing To 100 Million Users & Losing $78 Million.”

My next venture is a cryptocurrency app called BuySellHODL and while I’ve been determined not to make the same mistakes I did with SNAP, I’m once again reminded that … startups are really fu*king hard!

Of course, this isn’t much of a revelation since it’s widely known that most startups fail. In fact, according to The Startup Genome Project, over 90 percent don’t make it. Still, none of us want to be included in that statistic, so one of my goals is to continue providing insight for others looking to traverse the rocky road of entrepreneurship.

Nobody knows what the future has in store for BuySellHODL, but I’m happy to share what I learn along the way. By following me (Twitter & LinkedIn), you’ll read about my strategies, plans, updates, and successes/failures in real time, as my second foray into the wild world of business leadership takes place.

The content that follows is part one of a series I plan to write about my experience in launching and operating my new cryptocurrency business. If my app is featured on Bloomberg News or CNBC, like SNAP Interactive was, surely at least some of it will be well worth the few minutes it takes to read.

Why Cryptocurrency?

Through my participation in Tony Robbins’s events, I’ve learned that our decisions are based largely on past experiences, which is undeniably true regarding my decision to become an early adopter of cryptocurrency.

The biggest advantage SNAP had, was that it was the first dating app built on Facebook’s Application Platform, so it effectively rode the coattails (along with many other apps like Buddy Media, Zynga, Badoo, Zoosk, and others) of a platform with massive growth to achieve substantial success. I see cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin, in particular, as an opportunity with similar potential, capable of providing other companies with an opportunity for substantial success.

Why do I feel that way? First of all, over two billion people, worldwide, need it to happen.

Sadly, there are over two billion people in the world that qualify as poverty-stricken. These people aren’t just poor; they’re unbanked because they live in countries with corrupt governments that block every chance they have to raise their standard of living. Crypto is simply their best opportunity to join, and even thrive in the new global economy. By giving them a digital wallet, they will have access to a totally secure and efficient financial alternative, which circumvents the traditional system that’s littered with interference from corrupt governments.

That presents a pretty compelling argument, because anytime the human spirit is given a glimmer of hope to improve itself, it generally goes to great lengths in leveraging its best asset to take full advantage of that opportunity.

You’re probably thinking, “Hey Cliff, that’s a great idea and a novel concept, but those two billion people living in poverty are going to have a hard time leveraging crypto for a better life, if they can’t connect to the internet from their hovel.” The simple answer to that is, all they need is a smartphone and most experts agree that up to 90 percent of the unbanked population will have smartphones within five years. They may not have sufficient food, adequate shelter, clothing, and clean water, but they will have smartphones … yeah, that sounds right. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs be damned — at least they’ll have unrestricted access to the latest version of Pokemon Go!

I believe strongly in the ability for cryptocurrency to help the impoverished population of the world. In fact, I’m passionate about it, which leads to another reason I chose the crypto industry for my next business.

Passion

Passion is an incredibly valuable asset in any business. You need it to survive the barrage of roadblocks and emotional challenges that will present themselves while trying to launch and operate your business. Without passion, it will be difficult — at best — to summon the drive and desire to push past the tough times.

Fortunately for me, I’m also passionate about travel. In fact, one of the biggest reasons I left Wall Street many years ago to start my first business was because I wanted to travel more. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out quite the way I planned. I soon learned that there was very little time for travel while managing a publicly-traded company with such rapid growth. There was always a brush fire to put out, and as the CEO, I just about always needed to be on-site with a metaphorical fire extinguisher at the ready.

I know there’s a popular entrepreneurial mantra out there that a healthy work/life balance is critical to a founder’s success, but I’m calling BS on that. A work/life balance may be great for physical and mental health, but it’s not great for the long-term viability of a startup. Simple fact: the founder who works eighteen hours a day is just about always going to beat the one that works nine hours a day. Also, I’ve never heard a venture capitalist say something like, “Let’s put our money into Company A because their founder doesn’t work nearly as hard as the one from Company B.”

How does this passion for travel and my desire to not be relegated to an office building for 18 hours a day relate to my choice of cryptocurrency for my next business venture?

A crypto business allows me much more flexibility with my time and location than most other businesses. It’s an industry that affords me the ability to work as a digital nomad.

As a digital nomad, I can operate from anywhere in the world. So far, I’ve been able to build and run my crypto startup from Tokyo, Bali, and soon I’ll be headed off to Thailand. The biggest advantage of such an arrangement is that my quality of life has increased to far greater levels than ever before. Check out my last blog if you’re interested in knowing more about the various pros and cons of a digital nomad lifestyle.

Besides those reasons, let’s not forget that crypto is directly linked to blockchain technology, which offers several advantages to the global marketplace such as unprecedented speed, total efficiency, and ironclad security among others.

Considering all those strengths, I see explosive growth happening sooner, rather than later, for cryptocurrency. Therefore, I think it’s incredibly valuable to be an early adopter of the industry, and my vision is to convince the next 100 million people to join me.

The Amazing Race

Getting back to my original point — startups are really fu*king hard! Perhaps the most significant lesson I’ve learned at this point of round two in the startup world is the following:

“Launching a successful startup is a race to build sufficient traction before you run out of money.”

With that concept in mind, I’m altering Explosive Growth Tip #2 from my Best-Seller Business Book, which reads, “Once you’ve figured out how much start-up capital you need, double it.” While the basic sentiment of that advice is still spot-on, one very important detail needs to be adjusted. It should read,

“Once you’ve figured out how much start-up capital you need, quadruple your estimate.”

It seems as though the unheard-of will almost always occur (at least once) when starting a business. Whereas most apps are expected to take somewhere between two and seven days for approval to go live, mine took eight weeks for approval in the iOS store, which was absolutely infuriating.

That delay prevented me from doing a proper launch and caused the app builds for iOS and Android to become out of sync, which added to the development cycle. Alas, the product roadmap became an unreadable mess due to my inability to properly test features and understand what was working and what wasn’t.

In addition to that unfortunate delay, cost quickly spiraled out of control to the tune of around $10,000’s. Of course, there was an unpreventable encounter at Starbucks that contributed significantly to this cost increase.

There I was, minding my own business while working at a table in Starbucks, and enjoying a much-needed caffeine infusion to kickstart my process for creativity and innovation. All of a sudden, someone with a backpack large enough to provide shelter for some of those impoverished families I mentioned earlier, emerged from a crowd of people and inexplicably whirled around at the speed of light, which knocked over my coffee and soaked my computer. Cha-ching! That was $1,200 added to the startup costs for a brand-new laptop.

Perhaps this is a good opportunity to provide a new Explosive Growth Tip: Always spend the $50 or so on a protective cover for your laptop. Humans work well on caffeine; motherboards don’t.

Add in some other unexpected costs due to unfriendly APIs and slower development time, and my initial estimate to launch, which was already doubled, was doubled yet again. Let the Amazing Race (Entrepreneur’s Version) begin!

Early Results

In hindsight, building the product was the easy part in both of my startup experiences. The part that is really fu*king hard comes after, which is trying to grow the product fast enough.

The vast majority of startups don’t fail because of an inability to build and launch a product; most startups fail because they can’t get enough traction before the money runs out.

The BuySellHODL Cryptocurrency App finally went live in the iOS App Store about eight weeks after I submitted it for approval (also on Android). It’s still got a long way to go before we’ll be able to predict its fate, but there are already two noteworthy results to share:

1. Massive Marketing Fail Again: I recalled a massive marketing fail from my time at SNAP, when I spent $50,000 on a Spring Break marketing campaign that went completely bust. Determined not to make that same mistake again, I balked at the initial recommendation from a firm to spend $5,000 on helping me to build a vibrant crypto community on Telegram. Instead, I negotiated a far smaller test run of just $300. I wanted to see what sort of results I might expect.

I figured that even if I only got a few users, I would at least know that I could expect an appropriately higher number of users from spending an appropriately higher dollar amount the next time. The good news is that my $300 yielded 1,000 sign-ups on Telegram. … hooray! The bad news is that those 1,000 Telegram users resulted in zero downloads for the actual app. Let’s do the quick math on that: zero times anything is still zero!

2. Explosive Growth Again! (Never mind): Within seconds of the app (finally) going live, ten users downloaded it, which made me think, “Holy crap, we did it again! This time, when Maria Bartiromo calls me looking for information about the hottest stock on NASDAQ, I’ll be better prepared. I can even talk to her directly from a beach in Thailand.”

Upon further inspection, however, I discovered that it was really only one user who created 10 fake accounts just to get 10 extra lives in our Bitcoin game, which improves your chances of winning the cash prize. D’oh! This was also a case where I learned from a previous mistake. I was only able to uncover this mirage of instant success because I had robust data from multiple sources working for me.

Standard analytics did not show the fallacy of the 10 users. Because I remembered the importance of abundant data from my time at SNAP, however, I made sure I had in-depth analytics to track. My data-centric approach paid off, because only the most granular analytics revealed the fake accounts. Maybe some aspects of a startup are a little easier the second time around …

Be sure to look for my next post, which will go into details about how I plan to grow BuySellHODL. The article will include information about some features I plan to leverage for viral growth tactics, strategies for content marketing, ideas for a purple cow, and more. If you’re already a crypto-enthusiast, you can learn more about it in our App Launch and Cryptocurrency Ratings Launch press releases.

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I’m glad you enjoyed it Ken Berger ✈. Almost everybody gets Bali-Belly. It’s a brutal 24–48 hours, but once it’s over it’s over. Part of the experience!

Potato Head Beach Club - BaliBuilding a Cryptocurrency App from Bali: The Top Five Pros and Cons of My New Life as a Digital Nomad

In 2016, I sold my company SNAP Interactive. My nearly ten-year experience there as Co-Founder and CEO was a wild ride; one that saw about twelve of us become paper millionaires almost overnight; one where I was honored to ring the opening bell at NASDAQ; and one where I made some mistakes and ultimately learned some incredibly valuable lessons to move forward with. That experience also inspired me to write a book, “Explosive Growth — A Few Things I Learned Growing To 100 Million Users,” available on Amazon. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Maybe not.

Whether or not you’re familiar with the trials and tribulations I’ve written about to this point doesn’t really matter, because it’s time for the next chapter anyway — my life as a digital nomad. That’s the story I’m now looking to share with you. Will it be filled with as much turbulence as my previous story? Will it change my life — for good or bad — in just as many unexpected ways? Those things remain to be seen, but I must say, it’s off to a pretty terrific start.

I originally embarked on my journey to become a digital nomad about four-to-five months ago, when I decided to not renew the lease on my apartment and put all my personal belongings in storage. I’ve learned that fully committing to a change as big as this one is essential to making it work.

Shibuya Crossing In Tokyo — The World’s Busiest Intersection

My first stop was Tokyo and now I find myself basking in the tropical climate of Bali. It’s a long way from home (New York City), but it might be exactly what I needed to make the most of my new lifestyle. It’s only been a couple weeks since I landed here, but I’m incredibly impressed with the initial outcome.

Unfortunately, much of what I’ve learned about life as a digital nomad, I had to learn first-hand. I wish I had someone — a mentor perhaps — who could have prepared me for some of the high and low points I would encounter. As such, that’s my inspiration for writing this blog.

If becoming a digital nomad is anything you’re considering, I want you to know what that might look and feel like. Take a look at the following top five pros and cons I’ve discovered about my experience in Bali. Hopefully, after that you’ll have a good idea of what to expect … enjoy!

Pros

Digital Nomad Programs: If you were wondering how I got here in the first place, an exciting and innovative startup called Hackers Paradise is the answer. Their mission is to foster the digital nomad lifestyle. More specifically, they assist entrepreneurs in optimizing their productivity from exotic locations all over the world. They take care of all the logistics involved with working remotely, so you can focus intently on bringing your most creative and game-changing ideas to fruition.

Hacker’s Paradise At Our Weekly Lunch

They’ve only been doing this since 2014, but it seems like much longer because my experience so far has been phenomenal. I enrolled in a program that runs from October 21 through December 15 and has a crypto/entrepreneurship theme. If Bali and crypto aren’t your cup of tea, Hackers Paradise runs various programs as do other similar other companies, that feature different themes and thrive in various international locations throughout the year. You can follow Hacker’s Paradise on Instagram.

Vibrant Entrepreneurial and Crypto Community: This has been perhaps the most pleasant surprise of my trip to date. Much of this is likely attributed to Hackers Paradise and similar programs, but Bali itself also seems to be an island paradise for digital nomads with a very quality entrepreneurial ecosystem.

I’ve already met several extremely talented and knowledgeable people who have inspired me in various ways. One of them is a software engineer who created a crypto wallet for a top coin from scratch. Another individual founded a Crypto Investment Fund and an over-the-counter (OTC) exchange. More than just crypto contacts, my group consists of experts in digital marketing, branding, freelance design (Jess and Emily), and talented entrepreneurs including Nic, a lawyer who runs freelance lawyer, and Matt, a front-end angular engineer. My group also includes Rebecca Main, a Romance Author, who’s working on her fifth romance novel.

Omnia Day Club Bali

The HP community is as diverse as it is innovative and brilliant in every way with interesting people joining weekly — including the newest addition to the group, Xavier Damman, the founder of OpenCollective.com and Storify.com. I was fortunate enough to share a ride with Xavier to the stunning Omnia day-club. Throughout the scenic ride, we discussed our startup and shared several compelling ideas on how to grow them.

Outpost Coworking In Canggu, Bali@the_milan_amin Teaching Us How To Grow Our Social Media Following

Bali also has plenty of coworking spaces that support like-minded professionals in developing and refining their best ideas. Three of these locations — Outpost, Dojo, and Hubud: Ubud Coworking & Community Space — host incredible talks most nights with super successful entrepreneurs from a wide variety of industries. In addition to the nightly talks, there are also frequent meet-and-greets, breakfasts, lunches, and even the occasional TEDx conference. Last week, Hubud: Ubud Coworking & Community Space hosted Startup Weekend, powered by Techstars. It’s an entire weekend geared toward helping digital nomads launch their startups.

Bali has Kriptoland!

There’s also a crypto presence in Bali, which makes it the ideal destination for the launch of my new app coming soon. (More on that in the next blog perhaps.) In fact, there’s even a crypto conference coming soon called BlockBali.

Fewer Distractions: If you’re considering the digital nomad lifestyle, this should weigh heavily into your decision making. By working distraction-free for five-to-six hours per day, I’ve doubled my productivity. Getting away from the constant distractions of daily life in Manhattan has been amazingly beneficial to reinvigorating my spirit and creativity. I’m not the only one who thinks this way either. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have both been known to seek escape for long periods of time. They say it clears their heads and allows them to execute at a much higher level. I couldn’t agree more.

Morning Workout At Roar Fitness

The time difference is a key factor in eliminating distractions. It’s about a 12-hour difference from Bali to NYC City, so you’re much less likely to be interrupted by a phone call. For instance, if I’m working on something at 2:00pm, I’m not likely to be interrupted by a phone call because it’s 2:00am back home. All of this extra time has helped me finally commit to a morning workout (the views don’t hurt).

Cost of Living: Okay, so when we first got the bill of 610,000 Indonesian Rupiah for a delicious group dinner for four of us with drinks, I was a little alarmed. When I calculated the exchange rate, however, of over 15,000 Indonesian Rupiah for every U.S. dollar, I realized the price wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was actually pretty damned cheap (only $10 per person), especially considering that the bill included a 7% service charge and a 10% tax rate.

The cost of living is a such a pro in Bali, I can fund my business and live a much higher quality of life than I could ever dream of in the U.S. For example, massages have become a daily routine for me because they cost just a little over $5 USD here.

A Delicious $4 USD Pineapple Chicken Dish

Food: It’s actually somewhat difficult to spend more than ten dollars on a great meal in Bali. You would really need to pile on the drinks and extras. Don’t let the low cost fool you, however, because the food is incredible. Most of it is conducive to a healthy lifestyle, featuring a wide assortment of fruit juices and fresh vegetables. If there’s only so much guava and coconuts you can take — like myself — you can still find a great place to escape for a guilty pleasure like a not-so-healthy, but extremely satisfying burger and fries.

Cons

Bali Belly: The first few days of the trip, about three-quarters of my group fell violently ill to something not-so-affectionately referred to as Bali Belly. Somehow, I’ve avoided this scourge to the human digestive system, but it seems almost inevitable that it’s going to happen at some point.

Don’t let something this trivial dissuade you from enjoying the freedom of becoming a digital nomad, however. It’s a small price to pay for all the benefits, and there are a couple commonsense precautions you can take. First of all, only go to high-end eating establishments. Look for a meticulous level of cleanliness when dining out and use bottled water only, even for teeth brushing.

Other than those small measures, the best thing you can do is just accept that Bali Belly is coming for you at some point, ride out the 24–48 hours of misery, and get back to work when it’s over.

Minor Inconveniences: Business amenities are readily available, but be prepared for them to work inconsistently. Deliveries for things like whiteboards should arrive … eventually. There can also be difficulties in securing printing and scanning services, and there can be a several week waitlist to get something notarized in foreign countries. Also, the internet can be quite spotty at times.

A Traffic Jam in Canggu, Bali

Traffic in Bali s an absolute nightmare. The roads have no dividing lines, traffic lights, stop signs, or any other simple safety measure that keeps most New Yorkers from committing vehicular homicide on a daily basis. It’s pretty much every man for himself on these roadways. There are also no sidewalks, so being a pedestrian is no picnic either. In that sense, walking or driving anywhere is a verifiable free-for-all , one that can make driving in NYC seem like a leisurely stroll in the park.

I advise careful planning regarding any of these minor inconveniences that you might take for granted in the U.S. For instance, ATMs don’t exist on virtually every street corner in three different brand names, like they do in NYC, so using cash requires a travel plan to a known source. And even when you find an ATM, you’re lucky if it works.

Planning your phone calls to friends and family back home is also a good idea. In fact, the twelve-hour time difference makes it just about mandatory. Whereas it can be seen as a pro to eliminate distractions, it can also be seen as a con when you simply must call somebody for whatever reason.

Different Distractions: Different distractions exist in Bali from NYC or just about any place in the U.S. Instead of being distracted by a constant flow of text messages, phone calls, emails, and other alerts from friends, family, and coworkers, you’ll likely get distracted from some of the most picturesque backdrops and naturally beautiful landscapes you’ve ever seen.

Daily Live Music at Sandbar For The Sunset

For instance, rather than sitting in a hotel lobby or a boardroom for an informational discussion, you’ll be sitting on a soft, comfortable chair on a white, sandy beach with pristine, blue-green water in the background and a gentle breeze cooling your bronzing skin. How’s that for a dichotomy?

This is Sandbar (the same beach bar as above) at 2am.

The nightlife is also fantastic in Bali. If surfing is your thing, there’s plenty of that to be had as well; and there are some peaceful rice fields and other areas with breathtaking views to be appreciated as well. It all contributes to a serious level of FOMO (fear of missing out).

Avoiding those distractions comes down to the same thing as avoiding them anywhere else; you need to have discipline. I simply commit myself to four-to-five hours of solid, uninterrupted work every day and I achieve the professional output of probably ten-to-twelve hours in Manhattan.

The Ring of Fire: Hold onto your hats … literally when you venture into this part of the world. Lombok, which is about 100 miles from Bali, is precariously located on one of the most dangerous geographical locations in the world — the Ring of Fire. This is where the fastest colliding tectonic plates in the Earth occur, which causes approximately 90% of the world’s earthquakes.

Fear of Flying: If the thought of flying keeps you up at night and causes you to draft a new last will and testament as part of a pre-flight religious ritual, stay grounded once you get here. The area is infamous for having atrocious airline safety records. As a horrific example, an almost brand-new jet crashed shortly after takeoff a few weeks ago here, killing all 181 people on board.

List of Tools

Still with me? Cool; here’s a list of tools that have been quite helpful in building my app from a faraway land:

Slack: To communicate with my development team in Belarus.Earth Class Mail: A mail scanning and forwarding service.Airtable: For organizing my personal life and collaborating with the developers on my new app.Skype & Zoom : To conduct video conference calls with the development team and friends.Notarize: To get documents notarized regardless of where in the world you are.WhatsApp: To communicate via voice, video, and text freely with anybody in the world.Wunderlist App: To make quick reminders when I’m on the go.Dropbox: To access my documents from anywhere.

You might already know of some other helpful items or discover some new ones once you get here. If so, please let me know about them. Knowledge sharing is key to all of our success in the digital nomad community.

What’s next?

So, there you have it — the best and worst of my new life as a digital nomad in Bali, as well as some friendly pieces of advice to help you out. Where do I go from here? I haven’t quite figured that out yet. For now, I’m playing it by ear. Maybe I’ll stay in Bali for a while longer, or maybe I’ll move on to a new tropical location. Maybe I’ll even go to the other extreme and visit Glacier National Park. I doubt it, but one never knows. There is one thing I know for sure: if I work my ass off to make $78 million in my new crypto app, I’m sure as hell not going to lose it this time … (You really should read my Best-Selling Entrepreneurship Book — Explosive Growth.)

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On May 1st, Mark Zuckerberg ‘shocked the world’ by announcing that Facebook will offer online dating features to its 2 billion plus users. Although the timing is surprising, it is actually not far-fetched as Facebook began as a dating site called FaceMash in 2003, and has finally come full circle 15 years later. But most importantly, singles all over the world should be rejoicing, as this news should be the greatest thing for singles since…ever.

First, some quick background on myself. I’m the founder of Snap Interactive, which created the first successful Facebook dating app in 2007 called AreYouInterested? (AYI), and became the first publicly traded social media company. AYI would ultimately grow to over 100 million users. Our success was a result of pioneering countless online dating innovations. Many of these features are commonplace in today’s dating apps including: 1-click sign-up and profile creation using Facebook Connect, swiping, showing mutual interests, showing mutual friends (and friends of friends), the wingman concept, the ‘Hottie’ feature, and many more.

I talk about our wild startup story while providing dozens of case studies on management, innovation, and growth, in my new book, Explosive Growth: A Few Things I Learned Growing To 100 Million Users & Losing $78 Million, available on Amazon.

As someone with years of experience in the online dating space — both as a site owner and a user, I couldn’t be more excited about Facebook’s entrance into online dating. As an expert in the industry, several online dating site owners have recently asked me for my opinion and if I think Facebook will be the online dating app killer. And I can confidently say ‘No’ — quite the contrary.

I believe that Facebook will be the ‘Gateway Dating App’ that ‘pops the dating cherry’ for tens of millions of singles who have never previously tried online dating. These newbies will then become curious to see what else is out there and start using niche-dating sites in addition to Facebook Dating. There are a number of studies that support the idea that the average single uses several different online dating sites simultaneously.

So, as someone who is single, why am I so excited about Facebook’s entrance into online dating? Simple — Facebook is the only company in the world that is capable of delivering the elusive ‘Holy Grails’ of Online Dating Apps that are necessary to create the truly extraordinary product experience that has been evading singles until now.

Here are the top 5 reasons that Facebook is uniquely positioned to ‘Make Online Dating Great Again:’1. Facebook Will Introduce 100 Million New Singles to the Online Dating Pool — and That’s Great News for Singles

After launching dozens of dating sites over the years, I’ve learned that the only thing that matters to users (whether they realize it or not) is if there are enough people on the dating app who meet their search criteria.

This is called the ‘network effect,’ which means that a product becomes more valuable when more people use it. For example, when a female from New York City signs up on a dating site, that’s a new search result and potential connection for many other users. So for a dating site to flourish you need a massive user-base with a constant influx of new users.

Here is why an online dating site needs so many active users in order to create a compelling user experience. Let’s assume the site has 100,000 users spread out equally in the U.S. The most basic search of just an age range, gender, and location, will immediately reduce the pool to less than a hundred profiles to browse through, which will take just a few minutes. When more detailed search criteria like height, body type, and ethnicity get applied, that number is further reduced to just a few results. This is why the same legacy dating sites continue to get bigger over the years, while new innovative dating sites launch but disappear just as quickly.

Facebook has over 200 million users who identify as ‘single’, and if just one-third (33%) of them use the new dating features (67 million), Facebook likely becomes the largest dating site in the world with a never ending supply of new singles to browse through in search of romance. And that’s great news for singles.

2. Facebook Can Offer the Holy Grail — ‘A Truly Great User Experience in Online Dating’

Facebook will stay true to their values and focus on creating a great user experience, something that eludes most dating sites. Ironically, online dating sites are one of the only businesses that lose customers when they are successful.

Most dating sites operate on a subscription model, which generally means optimizing the site to get men to pay to contact younger attractive women. Although many dating sites have created successful business models using these tactics, studies consistently show that both men and women find the ‘experience’ on most dating sites to be grossly inadequate. This is especially true for attractive women who get bombarded with countless messages (which are often inappropriate) from unsuitable partners with no accountability for the bad actors.

This lack of accountability leads to inauthentic profiles and low quality users, leaving most singles frustrated as they endure low quality matches and countless bad dates.

Facebook, however, has a huge advantage. Facebook has always prioritized delivering a great user experience, even ahead of generating short-term profits. This long-term mindset has paid off handsomely. By not cluttering the site with ads or a pay model, an inconceivable 1.45 billion users flock back to Facebook several times daily. This laser-sharp focus on providing a great user experience is something that Facebook’s management does not get enough credit for, but as a user I surely appreciate.

This same thought process will likely apply to Facebook’s dating features. If Facebook focuses first and foremost on creating an incredible experience for singles, everyone will win in the end.

3. Facebook Can Create an ‘Awesome Search’

In order to provide advanced searching functionality that singles want on dating apps (religion, ethnicity, height, etc), you need two things: 1) a lot of profiles and 2) a lot of meaningful profile data.

This is a great source of tension for dating site operators because most dating sites just don’t have enough data points on its users to offer these advanced search filters. And, even if they did, the quantity of search results would be too few to keep users swiping. This is why most swiping apps only offer the most basic of search functionality.

Enter Facebook. With over 200 million singles and a plethora of data for each of them (more than100 data points per user), Facebook is uniquely positioned to successfully offer this ‘Holy Grail’ advanced search functionality users have been craving.

4. Facebook Is in Position to Create the Holy Grail Of ‘High Quality Matches’

Creating quality matching algorithms has always been the achilles heel of dating sites. Think about how often you get a suggested match of someone who is too far away, a different religion, much older (or younger), or is someone you have nothing in common with.

Dating sites fall short on creating relevant matches due a combination of: 1) lack of users, 2) lack of data on those users, 3) and a lack of talented product managers and data scientists to create a great algorithm.

Fortunately for singles, Facebook has all the ingredients to create ‘The Holy Grail Matching Algorithm.’ Lack of users? Not a problem as Facebook has over 200 million singles. Lack of data? Again not a problem as Facebook has over 100 data points per user. Lack of engineering talent? Definitely not a problem there, as many will tell you that Facebook has the world’s greatest product and engineering talent.

Let’s talk more about that awesome engineering talent. While Facebook’s early competition back in 2005 (remember MySpace?) foolishly focused on short-term profits at the expense of a quality user experience, Facebook was making a crucial discovery. Facebook realized that if a user got seven or more friends in their first ten days, the user became “addicted” to Facebook and returned to Facebook over and over. This is called the “aha” moment, and occurs when a user understands a product’s value to them. Note to entrepreneurs: Identifying and optimizing your “Aha” is one of the only 3 metrics that matter for startups in order to achieve explosive growth.

To ensure that new users reached that magic number of seven friends, Facebook dedicated some of their best engineers to figuring out how to surface that long-lost cousin or friend from first grade, and imported them into their users’ suggested friends list. It grew their network effect substantially, and it proved to be a brilliant strategy that paid obvious, long-term dividends.

The same special-sauce super-secret awesome algorithms that are used to ‘suggest new friends’ could easily be repurposed to create the ‘Holy Grail Matching Algorithm’ for singles.

5. Facebook Can Offer the Holy Grail of Location Based Dating — Connecting Singles at the Same Venue

Imagine the next time you’re at a bar, a Billy Joel concert, or the Knicks game, and in seconds you could view, message, and meet up with like-minded singles at the same venue — how awesome would that be!

Since GPS functionality was introduced into the online dating experience with the advent of mobile phones, a whole new wave of swiping (aka ‘hook up’) apps have taken over the dating scene. The main benefit of these lightweight matches is to connect singles nearby, enabling them to meet up with each other in literally minutes. And this has worked pretty well evidenced by the explosive growth of swiping apps including Bumble & Tinder, which I detail in an article called The 5 Genius Things Tinder Did To Achieve Explosive Growth.

But the Holy Grail of using location to connect singles is knowing who else is single and at the same venue. It’s one thing to know somebody is within 2 miles as dating apps currently tell you, but the extraordinary user experience would be actually knowing that a potential match is at the same venue.

For various reasons, no dating site has been capable of delivering this extraordinary experience until now. Facebook’s product chief, Chris Cox, indicated that, “Facebook dating will be community-focused, including integrations with the events and groups you’re a part of on the platform.” And that’s great news for singles.

Just imagine if the next time you’re at a bar, restaurant, sporting event, concert, or even while sipping a drink at the airport terminal bar killing time, and Facebook showed you potential matches at the same venue. Pretty freaking awesome!

As you can see, Facebook is uniquely positioned to offer an extraordinary online dating experience for singles, and achieve something that no online dating site has been able to do so far. As someone with more than a decade of experience in the dating industry as both a founder and a user, I want to highlight some specific ideas that would help Facebook ‘Make Online Dating Great Again.’ Here they are:

My Top 20 Ideas For Facebook to ‘Make Online Dating Great Again’Incognito Mode
There are still many singles who consider online dating ‘taboo,’ but are, let’s just say, ‘online dating curious.’ An incognito mode will make the transition easier for these tens of millions of singles who are still not quite ready to ‘expose’ themselves to dating apps.Set Me Up Feature
Many dating sites have courageously tried (and failed) to let users and friends set them up with other singles. Facebook, however, has the requisite ‘social graph’ that can provide the seamless user experience to make the elusive ‘set me up’ feature work. It’s a natural dating feature as we all have had our single friends ask us to go through our list of friends and set us up. It’s also a great way to get non-singles more engaged on Facebook as they love setting up their single friends.Recently Single
Offer a ‘recently single section’ that displays users who recently went from in a relationship to single. Warning — for better or worse, this feature has the potential to dramatically increase the rate of break-ups.Make the ‘Status Update’ Magical
When singles ‘Check In’ at a venue, show them a list of singles or matches nearby. This feature could even ‘Make Flying Great Again,’ as checking in to an airport could turn the typical dreadful airport experience into a romantic connection.Create ‘Singles Friendly’ Event Labels
When users post an event on Facebook, give them the ability to indicate that other singles are welcome to attend — you can label these events ‘Singles Friendly.’ These ‘Singles Friendly’ events would be searchable and appear for singles under their ‘recommended events.’ To alleviate the valid concerns that unwelcomed and age-inappropriate strangers will show up to your ‘Singles Friendly Event’, here are two suggestions: 1. Give the event creators control as to who can see these events based on age-range, gender, etc. 2. Let the event creator have the ability to hide the event details, such as its location, and singles must request access to unlock the details.Show Me Other Singles at the Same Venue
Since singles are always wondering who else is single (which led to one of the worst ideas I’ve had as a founder where we created ‘singles bracelets’ for users to wear when they went out), the ability to know who is single at the same venue would facilitate conversations and matches. This aligns perfectly with Facebook’s mission of ‘Bringing The World Closer Together.’Where Are the Singles At?
Indicate how many singles are attending events posted on Facebook. This will finally provide an answer to the question asked by singles all over the world every weekend — “Where Are The Cute Single Girls/Guys Going Tonight?”Gender Ratio for Events
Show me the ratio of single Males to Females at ‘Singles Friendly’ Events posted on Facebook.
(Note: the previous two ideas were core features of an awesome, but too early for its time, 2011 social discovery startup called ‘Hotlist’, founded by Chris Mirabile and Gianni Martire).Gender Ratio Search
Let users search for ‘Singles Friendly’ events based on the gender ratio.Ask Users to Update or Verify Their Relationship Status
It was unclear if Facebook will limit access to the dating features only to users who label themselves as ‘Single.’ If true, this would exclude a lot of eligible singles as many singles keep their relationship status blank. The simple solution is to let users with an empty relationship status access the new dating features.Include Users with the Relationship Status — ‘It’s Complicated’
Let’s not kid ourselves. Anybody who has an ‘it’s complicated’ status is (about to be) single. Please make sure that these confused people can access the new dating features as well.Show How We Are Connected
Show how we are connected to potential matches beyond the first degree (ie: You Know Cliff who knows David who knows Jessica).Awesome Dating Profiles: Let Singles Import Their Instagram and Facebook Photos, Groups, Events, and Interests
Compelling profiles that show off a user’s unique personality and interests are severely lacking from most dating sites. This leads to many very bad dates that singles are all too familiar with. But more importantly, robust profile data would help singles avoid their first-date nightmare — being a Hillary fan and going out with a Trump Supporter (or vice-versa).Photos Stats
Tell me which of my photos get the most ‘attention’ so I can optimize my primary dating photo.Make Search Awesome
(This Is Very Much a Personal Request) — Please let me be able to search for a female, late 20s to 30s, preferably Jewish, who enjoys watching basketball, while eating steak (or who at least is not vegetarian), while listening to Billy Joel (or some other classic 80s music), who enjoys traveling to exotic places, where we will brainstorm how to innovate and grow our startups. Also, leveraging the data around check-ins and status updates can provide all sorts of innovative ways to search for potential matches based on similar interests in restaurants and travel destinations.Recommend Matches
As described above, repurpose your super awesome algorithms to recommend high quality matches daily to singles.Show Matches Nearby
Include ‘Matches Nearby’ in the ‘Friends Nearby’ feature on Messenger.Indicate How Strong a Match People Are
Based on all of your data and algorithms, it would be great to know if I’m a 20%, 63% match or 95% match with somebody.Reconsider Including a User’s Current ‘Facebook Friends’ in the Matching Algorithms & Search Results
Mark Zuckerberg stated that, “your friends aren’t going to see your profile, and you’re only going to be suggested to people who are not your friends.” This is shortsighted. Here’s why: Singles frequently add prospective romantic interests as ‘Facebook Friends’ to learn more about them and better connect. Excluding these dating prospects from Facebook’s dating algorithms and search results would unnecessarily eliminate potential matches for many of its users. From all of my years of experiments and analyzing user feedback with AYI, I have first-hand knowledge that Facebook users are craving some, let’s say, algorithmic lubrication, to uncover romantic interests amongst their single ‘Facebook Friends.’ In fact, including ‘Facebook Friends’ in a user’s matches was the catalyst in our growth to 100,000 new users in one day and ultimately growing to 100 million users.Don’t Charge
There are countless add-on features that you will be able to charge for down the road, but please don’t charge users for the basic search and messaging functionality, as this will greatly limit its usage. I learned this the hard way as the activity for my dating startup dropped 90% when I started charging for core features.And One Final Bonus Idea…Bring Back the ‘Poke!’
Facebook’s first successful foray into online dating — just kidding, or am I?

In conclusion, a transformational opportunity exists for Facebook to elevate the online dating experience for singles. I hope Facebook incorporates some of these ideas to ‘Make Online Dating Great Again.’

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The Only Three Metrics That Really Matter For StartupsAreYouInterested Surpassed 10 Million Users In Just 11 MonthsExplosive Growth Book

This is taken from Chapter 8 of my new book, “Explosive Growth — A Few Things I Learned Growing To 100 Million Users,” available on Amazon.

Explosive Growth is about the wildest startup story you’ve never heard of (until now). This compelling and inspiring narrative gives you a step-by-step playbook to achieve explosive growth, combining hilarious storytelling, proven tactics, and case-studies.

After a couple of years of non-stop explosive growth, which included acquiring 100,000 users in one day, the growth of our dating app, AreYouInterested (AYI), began to suddenly slow down. This wasn’t a big concern, however, as our focus had shifted from user growth to revenue growth. And so far the strategy was working. We were able to grow revenues from $3 million to $19 million in just two years due to our new subscription model, which even ranked us as the 36th fastest growing tech company in North America according to Deloitte’s Fast 500 Technology List.

Revenues for Snap Interactive from 2007–2012

However, this focus on revenue growth at all costs was causing some other key metrics to suffer. And soon after, the revenue growth itself suddenly and unexpectedly plateaued. At that point, we were very data driven, so collecting and analyzing pertinent data seemed like the best approach to begin solving our problem of diminishing growth.

We were measuring and trying to optimize thousands of metrics, which inadvertently caused us to lose focus on the reasons we were successful — having a remarkable and unique product that users loved to interact with and talk about. We needed to get back to the basics and figure out where we stood with them to understand how to create a new growth rocket. The three critical questions we needed to answer were:

Was our product still remarkable?Did people love our product so much that they were telling others about it?Were users coming back over and over to use the product?

It’s easy for companies big and small to get lost in all the data and lose focus on these three key questions. These three insights are crucial, because they are actionable and predictive of future success, provide invaluable insights with only a handful of users, and are relevant at any stage of your product life cycle.

However, if the product isn’t unique, and people don’t love it (and don’t keep using it), at some point, you will start failing and it may be difficult to comprehend the reason. On the other hand, if these three questions can be answered with favorable results, all the other metrics will fall in line, and success is imminent. I discuss some other crucial questions that will help your startup succeed in “The 3 Questions Every Startup CEO Needs to Ask to Reach 1 Million Users.”

Fortunately, it was pretty easy to measure these things and get the relevant answers we needed.

The three questions above correlate to the only three metrics that really matter:

Whether or not a Unique Selling Proposition exists (USP)What Your Net Promoter Score is (NPS)Do You Have High User Retention

Obviously, there are numerous other metrics you’ll need to measure in order to manage and grow your business including growth, engagement, and profitability metrics. The problem with most of them is they do little to tell you why your product is underperforming. The reason USP, NPS, and retention are the only ones that really matter is that they tell you why your product is underperforming, and hopefully give you the insight you’ll need to fix it.

For example, let’s say you look at poor growth or profitability metrics alone, and start firing underperforming employees. Then you begin thinking about new ways to grow and creating different marketing ideas. However, this will likely be a fruitless exercise, because the problem is most likely that your product simply sucks, and no amount of viral growth hacks, new talent, or new marketing tactics will overcome that. Whereas, if your NPS isn’t good (meaning nobody wants to tell their friends about your product), then the answer is clear: your product sucks! The mystery is solved. Unfortunately, in that case, you have a lot of work to do to fix things, but at least you know where the problem is.

Metric #1: Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Is the product remarkable? When our dating app, AreYouInterested (AYI),was new on Facebook, there were several remarkable things about it, such as seeing which user’s friends liked them, and near-instant signup and profile creation. Now, we had to determine if we were still remarkable enough to stand out from the competition, and regain that elusive and extremely valuable word-of-mouth growth. To measure this, we decided to conduct a simple survey.

Part of the survey included a key customer satisfaction indicator known as the net promoter score (NPS), which the next section covers in more detail. Also within that survey, we included some other key questions related to the overall quality and uniqueness of the customer experience, such as:

Which features of AreYouInterested do you use?What is your biggest frustration with AreYouInterested?What would make you more likely to tell your friends about AreYouInterested?Do you have any suggestions to make AreYouInterested better? What is the one sentence that best describes AreYouInterested?

That last question was crucial, because it told us if the majority of our users were experiencing something magical about the product. Users must come away with a singular message they’ll share with friends, otherwise, the message will never stick and spread. For example, Amazon’s original unique offering was to offer any book cheaper than the competition, and it worked beyond perfection.

We needed to know not only if our product was unique and had a great customer experience, but also if our branding was working.

Although there is no hard and fast rule about what comprises a good metric for it, I’d argue that a great USP is when at least 50 percent of the users identify the same remarkable item that best describes the product in one sentence.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Can you describe your product’s USP in one concise sentence? Is it truly remarkable?

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Have you asked your users to describe your product in one sentence? Did at least half of the responses refer to the same concept?

Some of the best marketing books for entrepreneurs whose lessons are detailed in Explosive Growth are: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip & Dan Heath, Contagious by Jonah Berger, Pyromarketing by Greg Stielstra, and Purple Cow by Seth Godin.

The results of that one question, “What is the one sentence that best describes AreYouInterested?” were eye-opening. We got answers that were all over the map, which meant we didn’t have one magical thing — a truly unique selling proposition — that customers fell in love with. That result meant either everything was remarkable to some users, or very little was remarkable to others. In our case, it was clearly the latter. This explained why our growth, especially organic growth, was stalling.

AreYouInterested was no longer remarkable. We would have to go back to the drawing board, because I didn’t see long-term success without regaining the ability to grow organically. The cost of acquiring users on Facebook was increasing by the day, because hundreds of millions of dollars had been raised by other companies — some much bigger than ours — that were building Facebook apps.

As a result, we spent a full year innovating to rebuild and relaunch as a “social discovery site” where users would meet new people through mutual friends and similar interests.

Friends of Friends (of Friends)

Although we were the first dating app to integrate mutual friends, most of our competitors quickly followed and integrated the concept of mutual friends, because Facebook made that very easy. It was an enormously popular feature, and we thought we could make it even better and help us stand out from the crowd by expanding it to friends of friends of friends. Unfortunately, Facebook didn’t provide this sort of information, so we had to build the feature ourselves.

Because it was truly a “big data” undertaking, using technologies unfamiliar to our company, I envisioned having the bulk of my team working on this feature for months. However, an unproven (but ambitious) engineer named David Fox boldly said he would take the lead on the task and deliver results. Having already witnessed his passion for his craft, and learning from past experiences, I gave him the chance to build something that would sing.

Ultimately, my faith in him was rewarded, because in just weeks, he almost single-handedly built something that matched up billions of social connections. Once again, the power of a terrific engineer — A-list talent — led to extraordinary results.

“Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good … they are 100 times better.” — Mark Zuckerberg, Cofounder of Facebook and internet entrepreneur

The relaunch was a sizable undertaking for our organization. We became the first company to introduce the “friends of friends” concept in online dating. A user could meet new people through mutual friends and friends of friends of friends, or, in Facebook terms, meet singles through a user’s social graph. Just knowing users had a friend in common — even if it was a second-degree relationship — was important to singles, especially women.

Through this relaunch, we had created a powerful new way to connect people, something nobody else was doing. It looked like a great feature, so we ran the same survey asking the same question once again a few months after launch: “What is the one sentence that best describes AreYouInterested?” The numbers didn’t budge — people still didn’t have a salient conception of our product. I began to worry that the entire rebranding around friends of friends was a huge was of time and a bad idea.

You Don’t Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression

We learned a very painful but valuable lesson from that survey: it’s very difficult to change what a product is in the eyes of the existing user.

We implemented a bunch of new features that definitely added to the user experience, but nobody recognized that. Even more frustrating, several other new dating sites were getting very popular and growing rapidly with the same features.

A product named Hinge used the same concept of meeting people through mutual friends, and it gained great notoriety for it. It became the core of their brand, because they arrived on the online dating space with it. That feature wasn’t associated with our brand, however, because people already identified us with their first impression of us. We were “The Facebook Dating App” — the original — and that’s how people were going to think of us, no matter what we did with AreYouInterested going forward.

The other thing that hurt us was we had become a paid app, and those new apps were all free. At that point, Facebook users weren’t paying for apps or content within apps. All those new features we added were great, but they didn’t do anything to change our brand, solve our problems, or improve our bottom line. Sadly, the most eye-opening result of that survey came from answers to the crucial survey question: What is the one sentence that best describes AreYouInterested? Most users said we were the Facebook dating app that costs money.

It didn’t help that start-ups were raising tens of millions of dollars in funding, and a new competitor was offering a free product seemingly every day. Our biggest problem was like it or not (not), our paid business model had become our identity, and essentially our USP (Unique Selling Proposition).

Metric #2: Net Promoter Score (NPS)

“You can market your ass off, but if your product sucks, you’re dead.” — Gary Vaynerchuk, Hall-Of-Fame Entrepreneur and four-time best-selling author.

The NPS is an underutilized yet incredibly effective way to measure customer satisfaction. Our survey asked how likely users were to recommend our product to a friend or colleague on a scale from zero to ten. The responses were evaluated as follows:

A response of nine or ten means a user is a “raving promoter of your product.”A response of seven or eight means a user is a “passive promoter of your product.”Any rating from zero to six means a user is a detractor.Why Be So Hard on Yourself?

On the surface, it may seem a bit unreasonable to require a rating of seven or above for a user to be considered a promoter. However, the survey was trying to establish the potential for users to “actively promote” our product. If someone rated our product a six, they likely thought it was a decent product — above average — but they weren’t likely to rave about it to friends. On the lower end of the scale, it didn’t really matter if someone rated the product a zero or a three, because either way, they didn’t like it. That person was a detractor, and there wasn’t much we could do to change their mind.

On the other hand, if someone rated the product a nine, that meant they thought highly of the product, and were likely to rave about it to their friends and family. It was likely the product was something they wanted to bring up in conversation, because they found it so unique and interesting — definitely magical, a true USP.

In its early days, Tinder spread like wildfire due to several unique features, brilliant marketing, and a 10x product experience that had everybody talking about it. Every startup can learn from Tinder’s product and marketing strategy and execution which I analyze in the 5 genius things Tinder did to achieve explosive growth.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Ask if users have already recommended your product to a friend. Do you know what percentage of your users have recommended your product to a friend? If they said no, try to find out why. Perhaps you just haven’t made it easy enough for users to share your product — an easy fix.

To calculate your NPS, simply subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The NPS score ranges from -100 (everybody is a detractor) to +100 (everybody is a promoter). An NPS above zero (indicating more promoters than detractors) is desirable, but an NPS above fifty is viewed as an extremely positive indicator. Unfortunately for us, we learned that our NPS wasn’t very good, which explained why our organic growth had slowed.

The combination of a less-than-stellar NPS with some unfavorable responses to our additional questions was a rude awakening for us, but it also provided clarity as to why certain metrics were performing so poorly. As stated previously, surface metrics won’t usually reveal big-picture branding problems, such as the product being boring and ordinary. You may be winning the battle with short-term optimizations, but losing the war with a product that still isn’t unique and valuable enough for users to tell their friends about.

The data told us we still needed more innovation to achieve a true USP and a great NPS. We needed to make our product remarkable (again) so users would want to spread the word. The mutual friends concept, and even the second-degree-of-friends idea wasn’t going to be enough. We needed to go back to the drawing board at least one more time.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Are you actively measuring your NPS? Is your NPS above fifty? Don’t waste time and money by trying to market and grow a product that has a poor NPS.

Early-stage companies are obsessively focused on growth, usually at the expense of retention. That methodology is backwards, because retention should be the north-star metric of any early-stage product. If someone builds a great product that users keep coming back to, it will be easy to figure out how to grow it (raise money, spend money on acquiring users, ask users to share it, etc.) However, if a product has a low NPS, and you continue to focus on growing it, that’s like saying to the user, “Hey, my product sucks. Want to buy it?”

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Marketing a product with a low NPS is essentially saying to potential customers, “Hey, my product sucks, come check it out.”

Metric #3: Retention

Ultimately, retention is the most important metric to measure for any online business — if people keep coming back to the product, every other problem becomes of little significance. Establishing AreYouInterested’s initial user base was valuable, but we could always pay users to try it. We couldn’t, however, pay users to keep coming back, day after day, week after week, and month after month. An understanding of what drove users to continue to use the product repeatedly was the most important insight we had. A strong retention rate is irrefutable data that proves people love your product, and I believe the same goes for most businesses.

What drives people to continuously use an online dating site is a great user experience — that magic moment of getting messages (and ultimately dates) from people they want to meet. Getting a reply to an email from a potentially special someone on an online dating site will keep that user coming back, over and over. Of course, if that reply leads to a serious relationship, then to a commitment, then maybe the dating app did too good of a job; but that’s a whole different problem.

Facebook’s Magic Number for Retention

In the early days of Facebook, the leaders recognized a drastic difference in retention based on how many friends each user had in their first ten days. If a user had less than seven friends, it wasn’t interesting to them and they didn’t come back to the site often, as their newsfeed just wasn’t active enough to keep them engaged. However, if a user had seven or more friends within ten days after signing up, the retention rate was very high, as the newsfeed seemingly came to life. It’s probably a much different number now, but seven was their magic number in those days and early Facebook employees implied this was a watershed moment for them.

Another key metric that Facebook was obsessed with was getting 90 percent of its users to login six out of seven days per week. Obviously, any product that gets that kind of retention is going to be wildly successful.

The lesson here is that not only is it crucial to measure retention, but it’s also crucial to understand what ultimately drives users to come back to the product — your product’s “aha” moment. This can be figured out by separating out the high-retention users from low-retention users and analyzing the data to look for what makes the high-retention users different from others. Do they have more friends (Facebook)? Do they have more replies (AreYouInterested)?

That insight alone can change the business, because it explains what to optimize for.

For us, it was obvious to see in the data that high retention users got lots of replies, and users who had few replies didn’t bother to come back. With that type of insight, we decided to eliminate all goals except one — to double the number of replies. We spent the next 90 days focused exclusively on this one goal, and this laser-like focus enabled us to increase replies by 400%, which correlated with an increase in revenues and retention.

We were able to enhance the experience for the users who were lacking replies, including improving our algorithms to surface better potential matches and building features such as “Priority Placement,” where they could pay for increased exposure in order to get more replies, hopefully leading to higher retention.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Do you know what single user action or experience compels users to come back to your product repeatedly? If not, figure it out now, because this could be the most important insight you need to grow your business.

Once Facebook discovered that “lucky seven” was their goal, they focused serious labor on increasing the number of friends on every user’s profile. They did this by suggesting friends based on data that nobody else was thinking about. Users logged in and saw friend suggestions based on a fourth-grade classmate, a person their third cousin met at a bar in Albuquerque a few years ago, and other previously unrecognized variables. They immediately become enamored with a connection to a potentially long-lost friend or the excitement of connecting with someone on the outer circle of their life.

The ideal retention metric for any online business should be based on how frequently a user comes back, what percentage of users come back in a certain time frame, or any combination thereof. Generally, one, thirty, ninety, and 360-day data should be sufficient to gauge retention rates, but it’s still important to discover why users keep coming back.

Further Reading: Legendary “Product Guy” and Venture Capitalist, Josh Elman, has some invaluable product insights regarding these metrics. Elman, who has incomparable experience and success leading product teams at Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, explains in his post, The Only Metric That Matters, that you must find a metric that serves as a “signal that (users) are using the product in the way you expected and that they use it enough so that you believe they will come back to use it more and more.”

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Growth without retention is worthless. However, retention without growth is a problem any entrepreneur should love to have, because it means people love the product. Do you know what your one-day and thirty-day retention is?

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Don’t spend significant money on marketing until your one-day and thirty-day retention is well above average for your industry. View my Top 10 Explosive Growth Tips For Entrepreneurs.

About the Author

Cliff Lerner is the Founder of Snap Interactive (now PeerStream), the first publicly traded social media company. Cliff recently published the Best Seller Business Book, Explosive Growth: A Few Things I Learned While Growing To 100 Million Users & Losing $78 Million, which can be purchased on Amazon. Contact Cliff if your business needs help growing.

The Only Three Metrics That Really Matter For Startups To Achieve Explosive Growth was originally published in The Mission on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some of this information is taken from my new book Explosive Growth — A Few Things I Learned Growing To 100 Million Users & Losing $78 Million .

There are numerous strategies that helped my startup acquire at least 1 million users on several apps, however these are the 3 questions that you need to be asking yourself if you want to grow your product to stratospheric levels.

1. Is There One Thing Your Product Does 10x Better Than Anyone Else?

If you look at the current startup ecosystem, you’ll see dozens of identical products differentiated by minor features or branding. Most of these products are doomed.

When you’re offering essentially the same value as another product, users have no real reason to stay loyal to your product, or to deal with the headache of migrating from your competitor’s product to yours — a concept called “switching costs.”

If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this:

A product that is merely marginally better than your competition is worthless.

In order for customers to switch to your service — and in order for you to retain your customers — your product needs to do one thing at least 10 times better than any other product.

And don’t just estimate your product’s comparative value. Find a way to quantify your product’s performance, and then organize an experiment to actually test it against your competitor’s. I call this the ‘10x Experiment’.

For example, when my dating app AreYouInterested first transitioned to Facebook’s app platform, we wanted to do one thing:

Help people find a date faster than any other service.

So we tested it. We had people sign up for our service and others, and time how long each service took them to find a date.

Because our app was the first to use ‘Facebook Connect’, our customers were able to sign up with a complete profile on our service 10x faster than any other. We were also the first app to implement swiping on mobile, which allowed our users to receive matches and messages 10x faster than competitors.

Once I verified this, I knew we were sitting on a goldmine.

Our dating app would soon after grow to 100 million users.

At the sametime, this 10x experiment would later force us to admit when a new competitor had a better product.

Several years later, a new app was on the market: Tinder. Hearing all the buzz about it, we ran the same experiment using AreYouInterested against Tinder. Everyone using Tinder found dates 10x faster than on the other dating apps, including ours unfortunately.

We knew right then that Tinder would grow explosively.

Legendary entrepreneur and author Gary Vaynerchuk sums it up best by saying, “You can market your ass off, but if your product sucks, you’re dead.”

#ExplosiveGrowthTip : Run The 10x Experiment: Have you quantified how much better your product’s core offering is than the competition? Is it 10x better? (Share your #ExplosiveGrowthTip on Twitter and tag @CliffLerner )

2. Are You Actually Data-Driven, Or Do You Pretend To Be?

Being “data-driven” is sort of like leading an “active lifestyle.” A lot of people claim to be active, but in reality, they jogged twice last month.

What allowed AreYouInterested to grow so quickly was that we were running hundreds of simultaneous tests and letting the data guide our development.

The key for us was to avoid being too selective about the data we measured. We tested and measured everything, and then let the data paint a thorough picture of where the opportunities were for us to double-down. This constant A/B testing enabled us to get 100,000 users in one day.

Growth Without Retention Is Worthless

If this sounds vague, let me give you an example. Many early stage startups focus on measuring one thing — growth. They will measure their number of signups month-to-month, create a chart that shows “hockey stick growth,” and call it a day.

However, growth only tells one piece of the story. If that same startup with “hockey stick growth” has horrible retention and loses 80% of users after a month, then their growth means nothing.

Similarly, if the startup has a low Net Promoter Score (a score assigned by surveying users on their likeliness to promote your product to a friend), then all high growth means is that the startup is great at signing up new users — not that their product is high-quality.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Growth without retention is worthless. And marketing a product with a low Net Promoter Score & Retention is essentially saying to potential customers, “Hey, my product sucks, come check it out.” Do you know what your NPS and 30-day retention is?

Ultimately, to call yourself data-driven, you need a data analytics platform that can answer almost any question, including:

What user behavior correlates most strongly to users leaving your product?What is the point in the customer journey where customers realize your product’s value and become much less likely to leave? This is commonly referred to as your product’s “Aha Moment.”What do all of your best users, your “Power Users,” have in common?

Once that analytics system is in place, you are free to test anything and everything. You can “move fast and break things,” to quote Facebook, knowing that your data will instantly validate or invalidate your new idea.

You will also need a process to evaluate all of these tests. We developed a simple, quick, and effective system called ‘CIO’ (Celebrate , Iterate, Obliterate). Here’s how ‘CIO’ works — every week you would evaluate each test and do one of the following:

Celebrate : If an experiment exceeded our lofty goals, we’d ‘lock it in’ for all users. Iterate : If it showed potential, we’d tweak it and revisit in a week. Obliterate : If the idea didn’t add massive value, we’d remove it completely.https://medium.com/media/cb2def547be58a85f628a190b495e36d/href

If you’re doing this right, most of the tests will be obliterated. This is a good thing since it means that you’re constantly learning. Also, keeping ordinary features around will ultimately clutter your user experience and create a bloated code-base, so it’s critical to constantly obliterate mediocre ideas. And when the rare ‘celebrations’ do occur, make sure to actually celebrate, which for us meant playing Celebration by Kool & The Gang.

And as the Hall-Of-Fame entrepreneur Mark Cuban says, “You only have to be right once.”

With real analytics, you can test integrations with new platforms, roll out new features rapidly, and change up your operations quickly and without fear. This agility is key to explosive growth.

Without the instant feedback of a real analytics platform, you’re forced to build slowly, without an ability to validate and iterate on ideas quickly — essentially a death sentence for startups.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Building product and testing features without robust analytics is like driving blindfolded — it won’t end well. Do you have an effective dashboard with all your key metrics?

3. Do You Have A Vision For Your Culture?

Building a great culture can often times be orders of magnitude harder than building a great product. While your product won’t change without you authorizing a development, anyone within your company can affect your culture, making it much more difficult to control.

However, without a great culture, your company will fail 100% of the time.

Many founders are completely product-focused. They hire people for their skillsets, and dedicate all of their attention to building a perfect product. As a result, their company culture is created largely without their input, and it often isn’t pretty.

A great culture is built intentionally. It involves hiring employees that you REALLY enjoy spending time with, are eager to learn new skills, and will run through walls to succeed when the inevitable roadblocks appear.

It also sometimes means passing on people who have impressive skills, but aren’t the right culture fits.

A great way to screen for culture fit is what I call the ‘Beer’ (or Karaoke) test. As part of every job interview, we would take the candidate out for a social activity — bowling, karaoke, drinking, etc. We’d do anything as long as it was in a casual environment doing an activity the new candidate enjoyed . If their personalities clashed with our team, they were a no hire.

This isn’t to say that everybody who works together needs to also be best friends, but you spend more time with your co-workers than anyone else so it’s particularly important in a small group that people generally like each other.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Implement the beer (or karaoke / anything the interviewee enjoys doing for fun) test. Don’t hire someone you wouldn’t want to spend time with after work. Several of our best ideas came as a result of hanging out with coworkers outside of work.

Another key, and often overlooked, piece of your culture comes from your mentors. I was lucky to have Andrew Weinreich as my mentor. His unique experiences, as a result of creating the world’s first social network called sixdegrees, helped me navigate the explosive growth opportunities on Facebook.

The incomparable entrepreneur and Author of some of my favorite business books, Tim Ferriss says, “You are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.”

This concept may be the most important idea here. Your values, quality of your decision making, and motivation to achieve your goals and dreams will be greatly influenced by people you surround yourself. If you spend time with people who are negative and drain your energy, you won’t succeed.

Author of “Mastermind Dinners” and Networking Guru Jayson Gaignard has some prophetic advice for this: “Be a talent scout. Amazing people become increasingly amazing over time.”

Unfortunately, I didn’t meet Jayson until two years ago at his world-class Mastermind Talks Conference. I could’ve used his advice a few years prior when I inexplicably passed up opportunities to work with legendary entrepreneurs including Mark Cuban, Tim Ferris, and Gary Vaynerchuk, (more on this in my book), but I won’t make that mistake again.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Write down the five people you spend the most time with. If you become the average of them, would you be happy with that outcome? If not, it might be time to upgrade your inner circle.

Tweet your #ExplosiveGrowthTip and tag @CliffLerner.

All of these Explosive Growth tips and viral marketing case-studies are taken from my Best Seller Business Book, Explosive Growth: A Few Things I Learned While Growing To 100 Million Users And Losing $78 Million.

If you enjoyed this article, please follow me and hit that clap button below 

Thanks for sharing. I love several of these books and will pick up the others you recommend.

Considering your interest in innovation and entrepreneurial journeys, I think you’d enjoy my new book, Explosive Growth — A Few Things I Learned Growing To 100 Million Users & Losing $78 Million. It details the wild ride and lessons learned from being a startup ceo in the early Facebook app days.

I really enjoyed The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, & the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World.

Hi Matt — Impressive that you’re reading all of those books. Many of them helped me through some tough times while I ran my company. I’d love to send you a copy my new book, Explosive Growth, which I think you’ll enjoy. Let me know if you’re interested.