“All the people around you will serve as the foundation of your company.” Sometimes the best advice for starting a high-growth company has to be served up as simple as possible.
In our recent conversation on mobile growth, Dawoon Kang, Founder, and Adam Berlinsky-Schine, CTO, of Coffee Meets Bagel stressed the importance of valuing relationships; fitting advice for a company that has taken center-stage in cultivating a better dating experience.
Our thirty minutes together covered a wide variety of topics, from company origins all the way through to the technical complexity of sharing “bagels” before Branch links were integrated. What resonated most with me was the focus on growing an app’s user base.
Organic Growth Takes Time
As Dawoon put it, “Word of mouth isn’t always the best way to grow your app. People always talk about ‘how do you achieve a virality of 1!?'” So then, what’s their solution for young developers looking to achieve strong, organic growth with their apps? Part of it is just time. “The ideal way to grow is to have people love your product so much that they naturally recommend it to other people. But that takes time…” noted Dawoon.
Similar to what we learned in our chat with Gogobot, Dawoon indicated that user experience is the most important aspect for fostering growth. For Coffee Meets Bagel, this means focusing on creating meaningful relationships.
As we turned our attention to the product, Adam noted that the biggest technical challenges of building Coffee Meets Bagel have been making sure the company’s back-end is constantly evolving. In one account, this hinged on the trouble of migrating a PostGreSQL database to a NoSQL database – a process that still persists for today’s team. Adam pointed out, “Migrations are harder than doing it right the first time, so you really need to do as much as you can in the beginning – because it only gets harder from there.”
However, as we’ve seen, Coffee Meets Bagel is doing a lot of things right. They plan on using a recent series of $7.8 million to continue delivering the best dating experience to more and more people.