Startmate’s Amir Nissen takes a seat across from me at the ATP cafe, wearing his customary board shorts and t-shirt. He’s ordered a green tea with honey, and stirs as we speak.
Nissen has been spending a lot of time in the offices lately, acutely aware of the pressing need to grow users and the number of chats which take place on 7pmanywhere, the dating website he co-founded with Vita Smid. I feel guilty for interrupting Nissen’s afternoon. All the Startmate companies are under the pump lately, but he appears glad to take a break, even if just for a half-hour chat.
He looks tired. While the site has been growing, he knows the rate of growth needs to double each week from now, until the U.S trip. It’s a big ask. The pair has been spending seven days a week at the Startmate offices chasing users and optimising the platform.
“Ideally we’d like to have 100,000 users by the time I get to the U.S,” says Nissen. “Given that we’re on 1,500 now or 1,300 now, it’s like we have to grow 100% each week for the next seven weeks.”
“Now, if you take that like most Y-combinator startups have like a 10% a week growth rate and even that’s like super hard and most of them don’t achieve it; like how the f**k are we going to get 100,000, like 100% a week? So that’s difficult, but yeah you’ve just got to keep pushing on.”
Without ramping up growth Nissen knows it will be difficult to raise money in April, and at the moment growing fast is the focus. When we last spoke it was mid-January and Nissen and Smid were settling into a new city, starting a new-year health kick, and looking forward to meeting the other companies taking part in the accelerator.
At the time, Nissen said reaching critical mass was the most significant challenge for 7pmanywhere, recognising people weren’t likely to share their dating activities on Facebook or Twitter, eliminating the viral effect all startups crave. The only other options were creating awareness through content (e.g., events, blogging, media) or paid advertising. Although the pair has now opened up the platform outside hometown Melbourne, figuring out how to grow (and grow fast) is still the biggest challenge.
The pair has been experimenting with different methods of acquiring new users, but Nissen says StumbleUpon paid discovery has been driving the most traffic recently. It’s proven more effective than Google Ads in the cluttered market for dating sites. He’d also tried events but they’ve proven expensive, time consuming, and haven’t resulted in the desired media coverage.
“We’re finding our site is not at all viral, but just as a pure pay-for-conversion, it’s actually net positive. And we’re getting around $3 or $4 a conversion on StumbleUpon. If were to go Google AdWords and use dating, it would be $2 a click. So compared to how much it normally costs to get a conversion, it’s a godsend.”
“That was also a driver for opening up to the world — we’ve had some really good vanity metrics. In the last week, we’ve had close to 1,000 sign ups, so the user base has doubled. And 20,000 profiles are being viewed and rated on which is a massive vanity metric. But yes, it’s starting to take shape.”
7pmanywhere co-founders Amir Nissen and Vita Smid (Image: Zach Kitschke)
There are some things the 7pmanywhere team would have done differently. In hindsight, Nissen says it would have made sense to go mobile first. People are used to chatting and texting on their phone, and an app allows them to chat while they’re waiting for a bus or when they’re bored at work. Smid is now working on an app, although it would have been easier to build it first.
“We definitely would have done the mobile thing almost first. And even just designed for mobile first because it’s much easier to start small and go big than it is to go big and compress it,” says Nissen.
At least the platform is starting to grow. The percentage of people who actually chat after signing up has improved markedly since opening the platform, and most people go on to do a second chat. Now, whenever a girl logs on to the site she’s presented with photos of several guys. The guys she picks receive an email message notifying them someone wants to chat. As you can imagine, the re-engagement among guys is higher than among girls.
“We’re getting 100 chats a day, and that’s without re-engaging the girls. So at the moment, guys get bombarded with emails. We haven’t sent anything to girls.”
Nissen says 7pmanywhere is experimenting with different messages to re-engage girls. It’s experimenting with different messages to see what works. The goal is to get people coming back for more chats.
There’s been a clear shift in gears from the Startmate mentors. Nissen says the office hours sessions with program coordinator Niki Scevak are becoming much more serious, as the program edges towards the pointy end.
“I’ve never been to Silicon Valley, so it’s good just to hear where we need to be in order to have a realistic shot of raising money. Niki’s getting a lot more black and white. It’s like, ‘If you guys haven’t got this, there’s no point in meeting next week.'”
That seems to be working. Nissen says knowing you need to push yourself helps you achieve more each week, because you want the mentoring time and advice. The week before last, Scevak said the team needed to get 50 chats. They ended up getting 400, after opening it up worldwide. This week, the goal is to get hundreds of chats each day. There’s no easy way to get this many users, certainly not for free. At the moment, StumbleUpon is driving traffic to the site, but it’s very much a matter of trialling everything.
“I know startups are hard and I know I’m doing this for five years at least. You don’t get into the game without thinking you’re going to be at it for 5 to 10 years. So for me it’s just more of a challenge. Even if we don’t raise money I’ll still be working on this the next day.”
Despite all this, Nissen is still upbeat. He’s also realistic about what it might take to grow 7pmanywhere into a sustainable business. He knows the ups and downs will test the team. For now, he’s focussed on growing users and keeping healthy. Both Nissen and Smid have their sights set on the U.S. Time will tell how they fare.
“It’s tough and certainly it causes a lot of stress on the team. You get down a lot, and that’s where the exercise comes in handy, and looking after yourself, because tomorrow’s another day.”