The Startup Journey: Coffee Meets Bagel

Dawoon Kang Co-Founder

A couple of months before we launched, we bothered all our friends— and told them to bother all their single friends—and we were able to collect 1,500 email addresses.

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Launching

For 3 weeks, we manually matched people who signed up, and collected their feedback. We faked it till we made it.

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Launching

One metric that can tell you whether there is a product-market fit:

How willing are you to recommend this product to your friend?

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Product Development

It is so important to retain a spirit of experimentation and iterating fast. Even if you think you have found the answer, you can always find a way to improve.

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Product Development

When your product is awesome, people will talk about it and tell their friends. In order for that to happen, you need a clear product-market fit.

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User Growth

I call it a dart game where you try different things to see what sticks.

We did events, flyers, partnerships –whatever we could think about – to get things going, till we could take off.

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User Growth

I think the most important thing is to meet with the right people.

It’s almost like dating: you have to meet the right people, and when you do, it almost doesn’t feel like you are selling.

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Fundraising

By the time you get to Seed A, you need strong engagement metrics. You really need the numbers to tell the story.

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Fundraising

When there is a clear product-market fit, there isn’t always a need for so much marketing—but, people are overloaded with so many things. Even if you have a great product, it is sometimes hard to be discovered. You need to achieve a certain user base to start taking off.

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Marketing

For any consumer business targeting the USA, definitely consider Shark Tank. The marketing and visibility is amazing.

Someone told me that being on Shark Tank is equivalent to $2-4 billion of marketing spending.

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Marketing

We didn’t want to invest so much effort into localizing and doing competitor studies only to find out that Coffee Meet Bagel is not a product-market fit.

It takes a lot of dollars to launch properly in a market. We spend a ton of time experimenting.

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Global Growth

Takeaways from the Kopi Chat @Blk71

www.Blk71.com

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