Idea to MVP to Revenue in Under Three Hours
How I created a revenue generating Tinder Consultancy business in under three hours
Exactly one week ago today (Thursday 12th June 2014 at 5pm), I launched tinderus.com — a $50 Tinder Profile Consultancy Service.
I came up with the idea in London at 3pm that exact day and within two hours I had tinderus.com up and running. I chucked it on ProductHunt and within minutes received a wave of traffic, two $50 bookings and a whole host of comments, including a nice little comment from Tinder Co-Founder Jonathan Badeen.
Since that day, TinderUs has received around 45 paid bookings for $50. I’ve been featured in Business Insider among other publications and very recently I’ve had interviews with Elle.com, Cosmopolitan, TNW, DailyDot, Upworthy, Magnific and a huge interview with The Huffington Post.
The truth about the birth of TinderUs is that it started as a joke; “You should start a Tinder Consultancy for all the people out there who can’t get many matches”. Thus, TinderUs was born!
In terms of the business’ functionality, this is again a simple, stripped down process. Customers book through a simple PayPal button (with Contact Us form for queries). When we receive a booking, we prompt them for a time and date for a consultation to take place, including asking them to add us on Facebook so we can see their profile.
When the time arrives for the consultation, a member of staff will get online (I have a few friends who work in Fashion who are excellent at giving advice on appearance, conversation and overall personality). The consultant goes through five key areas:
Picking your best 5 photos from Facebook
Choosing your main image (this is key)
Curating your profile tagline
Giving you ideas and advice on opening lines
Providing you with expert advice on flirting and what to say in a conversation
Simple, quick and effective!
I created the site on Strikingly’s platform — an incredibly easy web page editor that allowed me to produce a beautiful website in a rapid timeframe. I don’t have exceptional design or coding skills, so Strikingly is ideal for me.
Reaching out to Journalists for press is another key angle to TinderUs’ growth. This process is always over-complicated by startups — just remember that Journalists are real people, whose job is to write up interesting news. If you email or Tweet them with something interesting, they’s a good chance they’ll get back to you.
This short journey proves that anyone can build a simple site and generate revenue with the correct idea. ‘Build something people want’ is a fantastic mantra, but there’s a lot to be said about hacking stuff together for fun.
