Podcast: How This Dating App Company Spiked User Engagement to 30.5 Million Chats a Day After rethinking her company's approach, the co-founder of The Meet Group shares how it found its stride -- and generated $76.1 million in revenue.
By Jason Feifer
Introducing our new podcast, Problem Solvers with Jason Feifer, which features business owners and CEOs who went through a crippling business problem and came out the other side happy, wealthy, and growing. Feifer, Entrepreneur's editor in chief, spotlights these stories so other business can avoid the same hardships. Listen below or click here to read more shownotes.
Catherine Cook Connelly had a problem. "We did this survey, which said "85 percent of users don't really want to pay you,'" she says. That wasn't entirely unexpected: She's the co-founder of a dating app company called The Meet Group, and the dating industry is full of free apps. But to make money, she'd need a lot of her users to view a lot of ads.
Related: Learn How One Simple, Yet Unexpected Change Helped HelloFresh Boost Its Sales
That leads to the next problem: User engagement was down. "So we really wanted to focus on, how do we have as much engagement as possible to keep users coming back? Because that's the key," she says.
The Meet Group owns four apps, called Meet Me, Skout, Tagged, and hi5. And to solve that problem, Cook Connelly and her team would have to radically rethink not just how their users engage with each other in the apps, but what kinds of tools a dating app should have at all. For example, what does video in a dating app look like? And what does live video look like?
After years of experimentation, The Meet Group seems to have found its stride. Last year, it reported $76.1 million in revenue, up 34 percent year over year. In May, it reported its first quarter results and showed revenue up 51 percent year over year. All of that means Cook Connelly's engagement is going way, way up.
Related: How He Convinced 300,000 People to Work With Him, From Malaysia
So how'd she do it? That's what this week's episode of Problem Solvers is all about.
Best Self makes products to help entrepreneurs perform at their highest level, and that includes smart tools like a dry-erase 13-week wall calendar. Their most popular product is a beautiful journal, which entrepreneurs can use to help organize their time, set and achieve goals, and so on. Best Self's co-founders suggest devoting five minutes every morning to it, to create the habit of thinking about your day, your needs, your time, and your goals. The journal helps you step back.
ProsperWorks knows what everyone in sales knows: CRMs are really tedious. "Somewhere along the way," its website says, "CRM got really hard to use." And that's why ProsperWorks has built a CRM that's the opposite. By integrating with tools you're already using and eliminating repetitive tasks with automation, ProsperWorks is beautiful, easy to use and drives productivity to help you and your team sell more, faster. Try ProsperWorks for free by using our link.
