Pregame Your Launch Before Your App Exists (w/ Amanda Bradford) | E2355
Amanda Bradford, founder of The League, explains how she built a waitlist and founding members through events before her dating app launched. Then Lon Harris and Alex Wilhelm revisit Jason's 2017 interview with Stripe's Patrick Collison.
The gist
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Bradford built The League on LinkedIn verification, hand-reviewed every application, and let users hide coworkers, a feature she says women especially valued.
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She pregamed the San Francisco launch with small, cheap events and door-to-door feedback, then opened to only 500 hand-picked users.
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A fake upgrade button showed about 15% of users would pay $15, and Bradford says she should have capped expansion at 20 cities, not 155.
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Collison cited about 700 employees in 2017, and Wilhelm notes Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in 2025 and now handles about 2% of global GDP.
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Collison's darkest moment was an 8-hour outage nobody noticed, and Wilhelm pushes back on his 2017 reasons for keeping Stripe private.
Amanda Bradford uses it
"We were the very first dating startup to use the LinkedIn API and also to have an admissions-based process where not everybody got in."
▶ Play at 2:48What they recommend · 1 pick
LinkedIn API
Software & apps
"We were the very first dating startup to use the LinkedIn API and also to have an admissions-based process where not everybody got in."
Made by someone on this episode
The League
· Amanda Bradford's
— A curated dating app that delivers a selective set of profiles each...
Also mentioned
10:28
Barry's Bootcamp
· "Barry's Bootcamp did the same thing. They had a time slot that nobody was booking, so they gave it to me..."
13:47
Soho House
· "We did parties at the best rooftop bars. We would work with Soho House."
13:50
Equinox
· "We did partnerships with Equinox because they have a place in every city we went to, and they would let us..."
18:23
Replit
· "Do it for Replit, a bunch of developers. And then I want you to do it for Salesforce as a SaaS product."
18:35
Salesforce
· "Well, Marc wrote the book on Dreamforce. I used to work at Salesforce. So that was a big part of his..."
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