Amanda Bradford, CEO and Founder of The League, has appeared on a new episode of ‘This is Your Life in Silicon Valley’, a podcast hosted by tech industry veterans Sunil Rajaraman and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.
Recorded in front of a live audience, the podcast gets different Bay Area personalities to give their takes on the region and some major tech trends.
After describing how an early graduate role at Salesforce brought her back to the West Coast from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, Bradford told the hosts what she felt was wrong with online dating in 2019.
She highlights a lack of efficiency, authenticity and vetting, noting that when she used other dating apps she would often seek more information about a match via LinkedIn before meeting. This informed her decision to have professional profiles feature as part of singles’ applications to join The League.
The entrepreneur brought up statistics from her own dating experience to explore the idea of a relationship “funnel”. She said she met under 10 people from almost 1,000 matches, and that her boyfriend met under 5 people from around 150 matches. This was true across multiple dating sites, according to Bradford.
Video may be a way to increase efficiency, she claims, as two minutes streaming to one another is far more similar to a date than messaging for extended periods of time. The League is in the process of introducing video features under the banner ‘League Live’.
The hosts then run through some of The League’s competitors, giving Bradford the chance to comment on each. She says Raya is full of “C-list Instagram micro-influencers”, and Tinder is for hookups. OkCupid is “quirky”, while Bumble is a “fake startup”.
On the question of dating apps attempting to get rid of their users by matching them, Bradford says The League distinguishes between good churn and bad churn. Good churn – users entering into a relationship after spending time on The League – counts as positive organic marketing.
Find the episode here.