Woman reveals how she launched dating app that became a $30M success

When Amanda Bradford became newly single for the first time in a decade, in her twenties in business school, she realized that not everyone out there was looking to date a career-focused and ambitious woman like her. Unsatisfied with the dating apps that were currently on the market and inspired by the 'power couples' in her Stanford Business School class, the Texas-born entrepreneur took matters into her own hands. Bradford built her app, The League, from the ground up - and after launching almost a decade ago, it remains the only dating app entirely engineered and coded by a woman.

But The League is not like your average download and swipe dating app - to get some of the highest match rates in the industry and more New York Times wedding announcements than any other app, she had to think outside the box. Last year, the CEO sold her app to Match Group, who own apps such as Tinder and Hinge, for an impressive $30 million according to Forbes - she spoke exclusively to MailOnline about how it went from an idea to a success. 

The League brands itself on being exclusive, emphasising 'quality over quantity' in terms of it's driven and goal oriented members. While it might seem odd to get your CV out on a first date, singletons using the app aren't looking for a casual hook up - it's for those who are looking to hear wedding bells, 'know what they want and refuse to settle.' Bradford told MailOnline: 'I started The League back when I had just gotten out of relationship and the dating app era was just taking off. Tinder had just broken out, and people were using it, but not all of us, especially women, didn't really feel comfortable being on some of the apps. I think a lot of them had more of a hook-up culture and a short term casual nature to them, and I felt like the technology made a lot of sense that you could meet a lot of people using these dating apps.' 

The app founder added: 'But I wanted there to be a community where it was for long term relationships, where you're not feeling like you're on a meat market, so to speak. I really wanted to build one that community like you would have at university or graduate school, which was where I was studying at the time. There was a lot of very ambitious career, oriented people, and I was watching them all couple up.' She admitted: 'I was actually in a relationship at the time, for most of business school, so it was only towards the end of my time there that I realized sort of how great of a community that was for dating. I wanted to build something like that in the digital space, so you didn't have to go all the way to Stanford University in California to to meet ambitious guys and to meet guys that actually wanted an equal partner was the way I described it.'

In the second semester of business school, the ambitious singleton hired an engineer to to build out the concept and I tried to keep it really simple - her idea was 'a vetted community where you have to apply to get in.' She explained: 'You have to spend a little bit of time on your profile and by nature of that, you're going to screen out a lot of the people that didn't want to put in the effort. I likened it to being an owner of a bar or a restaurant with a 'no shirt no service' sign and actually having standards for entry and for submitting a profile. So everyone would have to sync their LinkedIn - that is a big difference from a lot of the apps. A lot of people just let anybody sign up, and you could say you went to Oxford, Harvard, with no authentication. No verification. So instead of that, I actually wouldn't let anybody write anything I made them have to pull it from LinkedIn if they wanted to show that kind of information, and that made the data integrity much higher than any app out there.'

The CEO claims: 'Still, to this day, we're kind of the only dating app you can really trust the data in there. You can trust that information because I think it does tell a lot about someone's ambitions and their career path, and where where they want to spend their time'. Amanda started working on the app alongside her studies as a hobby, before realizing it could actually be a career for her. She spent her last summer semester trying to get it off the ground, develop it and raise funds: 'I had spent a lot of my own money in business school. I took loans out. I didn't have parents that paid for it or anything. I thought about it like, if I spend another $20,000 to get this developed, I've already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on business school. So I was like, let's just consider this a very expensive internship'. She applied to a lot of entrepreneurship classes at Stanford and got rejected because she didn't have a co-founder. 

Having 'never managed this kind of project before,' she had to hire and fire a multitude of people and make some mistakes along the way, which felt like 'changing a car while the tire is driving'. Other unique features of the app include only getting three matches per day rather than endless swiping, and being able to hide your profile from co workers to avoid awkward interactions. The American entrepreneur explained: 'Those are the matches you're supposed to meet and you should have a good conversation with. You should text during the week and get to know their personality and treasure those matches, instead of seeing matches as these consumable things that you go through. The League's a lot slower and more methodical, and I think people sometimes get frustrated by that.' Amanda's dating life before the app included men telling her they 'don't date career women' and they 'want someone that's going to be at home' for them and the kids.

She said: 'Sometimes men will say they want someone with equal intelligence, equal career success, equally motivated. But then, when it actually comes to building a family together they tend to assumingly put the woman in this more traditional role with raising the kids, with housekeeping, with cooking and cleaning. It's a cultural change that's happening and some people are slower with it. Other people are faster on it. I noticed at business school, for whatever reason it felt like the guys were more progressive in that respect and so the part of me was like, okay, I need to track down these men and and put them in one app so we can all find them'. Amanda admits that there are less men than women in the League, and there 'probably will always be' because in her experience not every man wants a 'super equal egalitarian partnership'.

The CEO millionaire revealed: 'I have a lot of women in my group of friends, we are single, but it's single by choice. It's not that we couldn't find a boyfriend or be in a relationship, or even get married if we wanted to, but we haven't found one that we think it's actually superior to be in that relationship where we think that's gonna help us a accomplish more than we would by ourselves. It's like having a standard to find your equal that is actually gonna encourage you and push you to new boundaries and help you accomplish things that maybe you wouldn't do on your own. With one of The League's taglines being 'if you'd rather be single than settle,' Amanda says it can help you 'find someone that's gonna really bring you up'. She added, 'That's a high bar, especially if you're a very successful person in your own right. It's about being proud of the fact that you know you can live a great life without a partner. You don't need to sacrifice your hopes and dreams and the kind of relationship you want, just to be in a relationship'.

While the dating app is free to download, Amanda admitted that she does put some features behind a paywall - including the ability to see more profiles, see more about someone and see if they've liked you already. You can also pay more to find dates in multiple cities if you're someone who travels around a lot. The app is also integrating with other platforms like Strava, IMBD and Doximity to widen the different careers within the community - bringing in high caliber athletes, doctors, and people in creative spaces, all of which might not necessarily be on LinkedIn. Read the full story: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12874511/A-lot-dating-apps-let-anybody-sign-standards-newly-single-student-looking-quality-quantity-men-launched-rival-Tinder-30M-success.html?ito=msngallery

Want more stories like this from the Daily Mail? Visit our profile page here and hit the follow button above for more of the news you need.