Full transcript: Robyn Exton on London Real
0:47 This is London Real. I’m Brian Rose. I also host London Real in this same studio. We usually get three people here, get them together, try to figure some things out. We’ve had guys like Bruce Perry from the BBC series Tribe. We had Tim Ferriss from the Four Hour Everything.
1:00 We had MP George Galloway in here talking crazy. It’s been fun, but we’re here today to talk about tech. My co-host is entrepreneur Colin Pyle, who runs an online language school, Lingos, Crew Cafe, Coffee. What’s going on with you? Yeah, it’s good. It was in Germany early this week, finalizing the biodegradable pods.
1:18 Love it. It’s exciting. Going to order a lot of pods and a lot of coffee. It’s game time. Dropping serious cash to get lots of things that hopefully I can sell later.
1:32 Very good. Before we get to our guests, I just wanted to shout out to TaskRabbit, which is our new partner. You might have seen Lauren Sherman here a few weeks ago. I know you watched that episode. Dropping Science. She really represented that company. They’re here in London.
1:45 They’re a company that outsources errands and skilled tasks. I’ve used them for London Real. You’ve used them for Silicon Real. Used them for everything. She’s saving my life.
1:54 They’ll do everything. They’ll get coffee. They’ll clean your house. They’ll fix your plumbing. They can do crazy tasks. You had someone go and work GoDaddy for you.
2:01 Yeah, change ownership of a web domain to my company from me personally. I just didn’t have time. Be amazed at what they can actually do. Just ask the question and see if they can do it. Highly skilled. If you use the code REAL25, you get £25 free.
2:18 Basically, they’ll go do something for a couple hours for you if you use that code. There’s no reason not to. We love them. We love any startups coming to London here. Go check them out.
2:27 I haven’t told them any friends of mine. It’s like two free hours. Get your house cleaned. That’s what I did. We had a Christmas party. We had someone help us clear up.
2:38 There you go. I love it. Check them out. On to the show. Our guest today is Robyn Eckston. She is the founder and CEO of Datch, which is the lesbian dating app.
2:49 It’s for women to date who they want, when they want, where they want. It’s the first app that’s been built purely for a lesbian audience. You guys are part of the Weira incubator program. As of what, today? Today we leave. Everything’s being packed up. I left with it all kind of sprawled out over the office.
3:07 We leave tonight. All right. I want to get back to that. You’ve also just finished an angel financing round. £100,000 is the rumor?
3:14 It was in September. That’s fantastic. Those are great stars. Welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you for having me.
3:23 You’re doing great, by the way. You know, Robyn, you have a very unique business model. Yes. A very unique business. A business. We haven’t had this business on here before.
3:33 I was wondering what it’s like when you meet people and tell them what Datch does. When you meet VCs and tell them what Datch does, what you tell mom that Datch does. And what’s your reaction like? Always different. It kind of tends to group into different…
3:47 People are always a bit, like, surprised. I think you always… You’ll get people that will be like, oh, okay. And they’re just like, processing, what do I say next? What’s the appropriate thing to say here? Like, don’t reveal anything. Okay.
4:00 And then there’s other people that are just like, cool, never met someone doing that before. That’s really interesting. Some people focus on the dating part. I think I was talking to a friend’s dad and he was like, what do apps do? And I was like, okay, cool. Yeah, we’ll go through that bit.
4:14 I think everyone has a different reaction. I haven’t met anyone else doing it. Well, obviously, since doing it now, we have some competitors that are out there. But yeah, when we started, we were the only people doing it just for women. Okay. And that word, like lesbian, you said on one of your Twitter feeds that sometimes that gets blocked by, like, video filming and all that stuff.
4:30 Google has some really bad filters on LGBT terms, so we don’t appear on Safe Search because it has lesbian in it. Okay, which is frustrating. Yeah, so, I mean, there’s some big, I think, BT filters. There’s really big things. A lot of charities are kind of lobbying the government to get that changed because it’s, you know, if you’re a 16-year-old and you’re trying to figure out your sexuality and you’re trying to research it and you can’t find content, that’s not cool.
4:53 Okay. And, you know, for people that don’t know, I mean, this is going to come up sooner or later, but, you know, there’s a male gay app called Grindr that’s hugely popular. Seven million people that use it in 190 countries. It’s mentioned on Girls. You know, this last week, yes, I watched the show Girls.
5:08 But it’s pretty revealing. I also watched Downton Abbey. I just told everyone about it last night. But, I mean, like, this is a very big business. It has huge implications.
5:20 It’s got a lot of implications, whether as you don’t have to go to a specific physical geography to meet people, you can now do it via app. And I know there’s real things happening here. So, I don’t know, we want to hear all about your business. So, we usually ask people, can you tell us a bit about what you’ve done, what you’re planning to do, and why do you think you can win in this space? Okay. So, what we’ve done, we built it. Well, I guess the story of how I started it in the first place.
5:45 I used to work for a brand consultancy and was working in the marketing industry. And one of my clients was a dating business called Global Personals. And they run a really big network for dating. So, it’s a white label platform. That just kind of got me into the space and thought it was really interesting.
6:01 And a friend of mine was using Grindr. And he was working on the dating project with me. And I just thought it was phenomenal. Like, it’s the most amazing app. And at the time, it was a bit earlier on in its days where it wasn’t, I mean, it was promiscuous, but not to the extent that it is now. And he was going away for weekends to Paris.
6:18 And within, like, 15 minutes, he had to meet up with someone, and it was just for a coffee. But he could meet them for a coffee. And British people haven’t always historically been the best at making new friendships and social circumstances. People are a bit reserved. And I was like, this is awesome.
6:32 You can go to another place and meet someone. And that’s completely socially acceptable. It’s fine. It’s the easiest way to meet new people. And so, then I ended up, I did a straight app with him for a little while.
6:43 We thought that we should make Grindr for straight people. And just, we didn’t know what we were doing, frankly. Great idea. Grindr sounds like a lot of fun. There’s one out now, right?
6:54 There are so many. There’s like 163 apps or something for straight people now. Because this was quite a while back. So, like, Badu is probably one of the biggest, I mean, there are tons and tons of apps for straight people. We weren’t particularly techy at the time. We were all very brandy, so we were doing our vision and values.
7:11 But it kind of just got me into the tech scene. I then started going to some meetups and just, I read the Lean Startup and was like, oh, this is interesting. And then, it was with some girlfriends in the pub. I’d realized quite a few problems of what I’ve been doing. And, yeah, it was with some girlfriends.
7:26 We were looking at another lesbian dating site. And I kind of, it all clicked and was like, oh, I need to make an app for women. And that was kind of how it all started. So, I got a really bad private beta that was kind of put together really quickly, used it to test and see how our users wanted to go dating, because no one had really made an app for women. So, I wanted to learn the behavior and see what the patterns were like, how did women want to use it? And then, got into Wira, built the team.
7:59 We rebuilt the whole app and built it basically around how women want to go dating. We just found some really interesting patterns and trends and behaviors of things that weren’t working in the private beta that we built. And a lot of assumptions that I think go into straight dating apps that are based around male dating behavior. And it’s really small kind of interaction-based stuff that means it works really well for guys, but misses quite a few tricks for women.
8:24 Can you give us some examples? So, I think loads of the dating industry has hinged off Grindr. They were kind of some of the first people into the market, and they set a lot of the behavior which other people have copied. So, Grindr shows you the closest user to you. And for gay guys, especially, that’s great because they meet up within four hours or 20 minutes or half a day or whatever, but they meet up really quickly.
8:45 So, seeing that closest person to you is really relevant and really useful. Women rarely do that. They’ll tend to book a date ahead. So, whether it’s two days ahead or for the weekend or for a week’s time, they’re always booking it in advance. And so, if I’m in shortage, it’s fine if a girl that I’m chatting to is in Clapham because we’re going to go on a date in Soho.
9:05 So, that whole kind of distance thing just doesn’t really matter in the same way. Things like profiles. So, normally, you have one really big picture and a really small amount of text. And the way men and women behave, like for guys, that’s normally enough. If you’re like, yeah, I’m attracted to you, guys will often send a message because they’re like, yeah, let’s just talk and see what happens.
9:22 Girls have a few more processes normally that happen before that, so they want to just see tiny bits more of information before they send that message. One profile picture isn’t enough. So, on our private meter, we were seeing every conversation just started with like, hey, winky face, like, hey, what’s up? Like, nice eyes. Then there was really bad conversations because no one was asking anything useful, but that’s because there wasn’t anything useful to ask them about.
9:44 So, we were realizing this just like for women because the conversation is so important before the meetup, we had to make it easier for them to get that conversation going and start talking. So, we ended up building our profile that are all kind of like Pinterest inspired. So, you have these like boards that are basically that you upload pictures of what you do at the weekend, like what kind of food you like to eat, where you hang out. It’s like really small little insights, really easy to upload.
10:09 It’s a nice, easy thing to make, but it also means that when you’re viewing someone’s profile within like three seconds, you get what kind of a person they are without having to read that really awkward text stuff. So, you’re like, okay, I get your vibe. And I’ve got something to ask you about that’s like a kind of hook of a conversation that’s not just, you look fit, let’s start talking. And it makes the conversation a lot better. Interesting. So, how many images are we talking on an average profile, like six or eight images?
10:33 No. So, people, it’s interesting. We’re kind of having to help people realize what stuff to upload. So, I mean, at first we didn’t put any guidance in of what they should upload. We just left it completely open and allowed them to upload whatever they wanted.
10:43 And it started off, everyone was just uploading loads of pictures of themselves because that’s kind of what everyone did on every other dating site and dating app. So, we now kind of have like coach marks and stuff that are coming through and it’s, as soon as someone starts, they upload a lot. So, it’s kind of getting them over that first bump of adding a few extra images and then after that, they kind of come back like weekly to update it with new stuff.
11:04 So, on average, it’s like between five and six fields on a profile. Wow. Okay. And what are you guys planning to do? I know you’re just based in London now.
11:12 Yeah. You’ve had some angry reviews on your apps because people can’t get you in America. I know, yeah. That’s a good, that’s a high quality profile. It’s, oh, it’s like a problem. It’s really like stressful because I want to go there really quickly.
11:27 But at the same time, we’ve got so much stuff to do here still that it’s not like the right time for us to be there right now. I am going over to the States in February for a conference called Lesbians Who Tech, which is its first ever conference, so we’re demoing there. But we will be going to the States this year. It’s just a matter of when the right time is for it. Okay. Right now, it’s London only.
11:46 It’s in the UK, so it’s available across the UK. And it’s completely free? Completely free, yeah. Okay. We’ll get into business model, I guess, at some point.
11:53 The last part of that is why will you guys win? Why do you have it right as opposed to, you know, the other people? It’s a big space, like you said. People see this as huge potential. Yeah, it’s a really big opportunity.
12:04 I think we’re the right people because I know I feel like we care about it the most. We saw it first. We have obsessed over it for the past like nearly a year now. We know this community and our community knows us. So we spend more hours with these women than anyone else can have time to catch up with at the moment.
12:23 And I think just almost like what Dutch is now already, like the users that are on it, they’re the people that are going to make it the thing that runs well and makes it successful because it’s an amazing community of wicked women. Like we had a night last night and I met loads of them and they’re just great people who are making friends and kind of welcoming other people into the community and kind of going, you know, great to see you. It’s a really great group of people.
12:51 Okay. You mentioned kind of you alluded to business model. We just had, you know, Garrett Davies from Adbrain in here. Is this a mobile advertisement business model in the long run? It will be.
13:02 But the crux of the business is going to be around a premium version of the product. So that will run on subscriptions. We also know that kind of traditionally what we’ve seen in the past year is that women monetize really well with micropayments and making small in-app purchases. So I think we’ll have a series of possibly features that you can access like for a limited period of time. And then we’ll have premium which will have a bundle of those features that will come together.
13:27 Okay. Very good. What’s Wera been like? And for people that don’t know what Wera is, can you describe how you found them and how it changed your business? They were literally starting up as I was kind of just starting to do tech stuff.
13:39 So it kind of watched their journey at the same time as when I was starting to do mine. For me, they were the right accelerator because I was a single founder and they were the only people like most others accelerated. You have to have a tech co-founder to join. So yeah, applied for it. And it’s a nine month program that is run by Telefonica, which is O2’s parent company.
14:03 And you will get 40,000 euros investment as a convertible note. You’re in there for nine months. And then there’s a series of kind of mentors and talkers and different people that come in and help accelerate your business. So yeah, it’s done now. It’s been really good.
14:19 When I think about the company that I went in as and what I am now, it’s like, you know, Pivotal. I would 100% do it again because I’m so much further ahead than when I went in. It’s incredible. There were amazing teams that I did it with that are great people that helped my business, like really helped me and made great friends from. It’s been a really cool experience.
14:42 And what’s next? Do you have to leave the nest? We’re going another startup. We’re moving in with them. I’m not ready to go totally solo yet.
14:52 We have to share the space with other people. Slowly, right? It’s like going to university and having a roommate. Exactly. We’re flat sharing for the moment.
15:02 It must be strange to leave that wire there. I don’t know because I haven’t been in there, but it must feel a bit like university. Like, okay, for the next three months, I’m going to be here. I can’t really do too much. I’m going to meet all these people, but then now you have to go do it.
15:16 It’s an absolute bubble though. Even geographically, it’s not here. It’s a bit further away. You’re completely in this bubble. There’s so much stuff that happens there.
15:26 So many events in the evenings. They have the O2 network, which means they have a very different audience of people that come in. Which is a very unique opportunity in itself. So you kind of feel like you have to make the most of it while you’re there. So you tend to go to those events in the evenings rather than coming to stuff that normally happens over here.
15:43 So it’s a very immersive experience and it’s been nine months, which is a long period of time. I thought it was just three months. It’s nine. Most of the other ones are three. So you say here.
15:56 Here is shortage, which is where we are, which is technically the Silicon Roundabout. We’ve had arguments on this show, whether it’s the center of tech in London. But it’s central to tech in London for sure. You’re a shortage story, right? You’re born and bred. You live here.
16:10 Is that a big part of what Datch is? Yeah, it was. I was way too biased when I started it. I live here my whole experience. My group of gay girlfriends, we go out here.
16:24 Our lives are centered around East London. So when I started, even like our branding was very East London. It was quite like a gnarkey kind of lesbian clubbing scene in East London. It was very kind of pivoted around that. What’s gnarkey?
16:39 When you describe something as edgy, it doesn’t sound edgy at all. Quite not aggressive, but not vice would be like being way too generous to ourselves. It was kind of trying to be quite, I don’t know if I should swear, but kind of like fuck you. We’re doing this cool new thing. And it was all just based around who I probably spent my time with and what I thought was a really exciting space.
17:00 But then kind of realized that, oh, there’s a bigger market outside of Shoreditch. Maybe we need to ease it off a bit. And we had users who were 55 years old saying, these images are quite daunting to me. Is this what this is all about? And we were like, no, it’s not.
17:20 We’ve gone a bit too far with it. Everything kind of started here. And I used to work in all the cafes here and I, like, office shared with a friend here. Spent a lot of time on campus. I did all the meetups that ever existed.
17:36 So it was kind of weird moving out of here. And that’s why I got a scooter, because I was like, I need to get around. I’m not used to this having to get public transport places. Why can’t I just walk? So, yeah, I’m kind of looking forward to coming back.
17:48 So you altered your marketing a little bit. Definitely, like completely repositioned our branding. I remember when the lawyer first looked at my T’s and C’s, it was like filled with swear words. You need to get rid of this. So we did that.
18:03 It’s now, it’s a kind of like female lifestyle centric. It’s a very approachable brand, I think. So it shouldn’t really matter what age you are. It’s something that’s just very female focused. But I mean, ultimately, you are selling kind of, maybe you are selling that vision of that East London lesbian experience, as opposed to just a generic one, because people kind of want to grab on to something.
18:26 Even the people that watch Vice aren’t necessarily the people doing the Vice things. Yeah, I think the problem was we had people using it that were feeling alienated by it. And I think as we go into other markets and other countries, it’s kind of too extreme. And I think that was right for me, and that’s what I liked. But actually, we’re talking about a much wider pool of people.
18:44 And the most important thing is someone who is realizing their sexual identity and kind of trying to work out if they’re gay or not, shouldn’t see something and go, oh my God, this looks terrifying. That’s great if you know your sexuality and your greatness looks cool. I identify with this. But people that don’t know, it needs to feel approachable and something that they can come into to check it out. And where’s your audience generally?
19:08 Is it heavily based London? And then in London, is it? It’s very London centric. And then we’ve got pockets around Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, Newcastle Pocket. Fair amount going on in the West Country, which I wasn’t really expecting, and quite a big Glasgow pocket.
19:26 Within London, you just see patterns as people are going to work and it moves more centrally, and as they go out into the evenings, it moves more out to zones two to four. But it’s not particularly biased to East or in any direction. It’s kind of quite, yeah, spread out. Okay. You know, this is Silicon Real.
19:42 So let’s talk real and ask you a couple, you know, hard questions. We mentioned before, like, you’re going to get from Google and Vodafone. The board of lesbians is going to put up a bunch of barriers. You’re going to get restricted. You go talk to VCs.
19:55 I think you’ve been open and saying that some just can’t touch you. You know, IPO might not even be possible. How do you deal with things like that? I mean, a small business is hard enough to do a startup. Yeah. Do you know what?
20:05 With every business, a business won’t be for some investor. Some people just go, no, this isn’t the kind of thing we’re interested in. And for some people, maybe that’s a reason, because their fund comes from a certain country where they just would never want. So someone had investors from the Middle East who just wouldn’t ever align with what their values were. And so they wouldn’t be able to put money into this business.
20:25 You know, they said, like, yeah, no sex, gambling and alcohol. No fun. So, yeah, that happens. That’s, it’s fine. It just means that there are some investors that are for us and some that won’t be.
20:39 I think there’s a big difference between what we do and what Grindr does. I think Grindr has those on Channel 4 last night on the news. There’s a really big piece about Grindr being used to facilitate the use of crystal meth and sex orgies. And they were kind of talking about how the role that Grindr plays in that. So that’s not something that I think will crop up as much within our audience.
21:03 So I don’t think we’re looking at the same kind of community that happens. As Grindr has grown to Grindr, we have Grindr’s used for hookups. And at Datch at the moment isn’t being used for hookups. It’s not to say that in the future it won’t move towards there, but at the moment it’s not. So I think as a community of people, it’s not quite as scary or kind of like as extreme as maybe some people see Grindr to be.
21:27 I mean, we know Grindr has been very successful. You talked about it earlier as far as the communication is different between, you know, women as opposed to men that you see. Are there any other, like, big reasons why Grindr will not be able to develop a Datch? Well, so Grindr, they made Glenda at one point, which was because they were being asked by women to create it for women. And then they just went for the mass market and created Glenda, which is meant to be for everyone.
21:50 But it was, I mean, they added a lot of interest stuff into it. It was a relatively similar structure to how Grindr worked, but they had a bit more kind of profiling around what your interests were. And it started being used as a hookup app, which I think is probably because it came from Grindr. And so people just put it in the same box. I think they’ve never had the interest to do it so far.
22:13 So, I mean, they might do it at some point, in which case they might bring on like a female team to start looking at it and running it. They don’t have any data on female behavior at the moment, but that’s not to say that they won’t be interested in it at some point. Okay, Colin, what am I missing? I just had a question. I’m inexperienced with the online dating or period app dating.
22:33 So maybe just tell me how, I guess, online dating evolved and then now the app scene is dating evolved. Are you seeing the same trends that happen in the online dating that’s happening in the app dating? And do lesbian-specific online dating sites, do they take off or is it everyone? Yeah, so the online dating sites were, traditionally the lesbian sites were always reskins of gay male sites. So the biggest that’s always been out is Gaydar Girls, and it’s just literally a reskin of Gaydar with girls put on the end of the logo.
23:05 So things like when you sign up, it asks you how much body hair you have, which for a guy, it’s probably fine if you’re signing up, because it might mean you’re like a bear or a twink or whatever kind of you’re using to find your other guy. For women, you’re like, why are you asking me this question? Not cool. Then there were other sites that were created, I think a lot of them started using the white label platform because that was really big in the online dating era.
23:27 They would just do like a reskin and then some of the networks were set up to deal with LGBT users. Some of them weren’t set up to deal with it very well, so it was a really poor experience. There were very few websites, there was a couple of websites that started that were their own platforms built specifically for women, and they were okay, but it was a completely different style of dating, and I think my personal opinion is, online dating on websites, as it was, never really hit the mark.
23:51 The fact that it was never socially acceptable as it was, like it wasn’t kind of commonplace behaviour in the UK, is because it didn’t fit the problem, it didn’t solve the problem, it didn’t fit the need. In the way that Tinder has, Tinder’s created something that people talk about, they’re totally comfortable with it, and whether it’s a kind of circumstances of time and people are more ready for it now, or they just created the right product that addressed the problem in a really great way. Tinder, what’s Tinder?
24:17 Tinder is the biggest straight dating app that’s come out in the past year, so they didn’t release their numbers, but they’ve got millions and millions of users and you just swipe. It’s like hot or not, and if you both say each other are hot, then you know, you get told. It’s not defined, I think it started off definitely very date focused, I think it’s become a bit more casual over time, just because of the volume of people on it. Is there a lesbian and gay section of that?
24:45 So you can select that you’re interested in women, unfortunately it still shows you men, which is a bit annoying, but it’s just a really simple way to meet other people, and it’s really fun. Okay, now you have a unique problem that say Grindr doesn’t have, is that you have men trying to get on your app, and so you have to vet all the people by phone and things like that? That’s been a big learning process of all of it, so we started off, I think this was my lack of product experience when I started, we had like nine steps in the validation process to really filter.
25:15 Now we just use Facebook to kind of automate it. We had a phase where we were doing phone calls, just trying it, because a lot of people didn’t want to use Facebook, because if they’re not publicly out yet, or if their parents don’t know, it kind of feels a bit scary to use Facebook. It’s completely private, you’ll never find out that someone’s used Facebook to sign in, or that they’re part of Datch, but we were using phone calls, and so at the moment we still get about five guys a day trying to sign up, so we’d have phone calls from guys being like, hey, yeah, I’m just looking for a threesome, and we’re like, right, well, if you could try another site, that would be better.
25:51 I would have never thought guys would have tried to sign up, because sooner or later you realize you’re not a guy. There are different kinds of guys. They think they can turn everyone’s eyes. Yeah, they want to convert you. That’s a challenge.
26:05 That’s the other big problem of the old websites, is the number of guys that get onto them, so you’ll be messaging someone, and on some of the sites you can say in a relationship, a friend was literally telling me yesterday, she was on it, someone sent a message, she was like, I’m actually in a relationship right now, I’ve got a girlfriend, and the person was like, oh, that’s super hot, have you got a pic? And it was like, no girl is going to be asking you that, it’s like, you’ve got a girlfriend. Oh, okay, cool, sorry, see ya.
26:31 Does Grindr have that same problem? There’s an amazing Tumblr that’s called Girls of Grindr, and it’s girls signing up looking for their gay best friend, and they’re going, I really want someone to go shopping with. It doesn’t happen in the same way at all, but this is generally speaking, and it’s obviously not specific, but generally women aren’t as interested in gay male sex as men are in lesbian sex, and that’s kind of why I think a lot of men try to sign up to it.
26:57 Is this a problem as you try to scale your business model, trying to keep those guys out of the fray? Well, Facebook does it relatively well at the moment. There’s a possibility that at a time there are going to be guys that work out how to get past it, so we can’t completely stop all guys coming onto the platform, it’s just that we do the best we can to minimize it. Because you can sign up for a fake Facebook account. Yeah, so we don’t just check gender, we check like six different calls on your profile to verify if you are real, because we have people creating fake Facebook accounts.
27:19 Someone like people sign up, and they’ll have had the account for two weeks, and they like lesbian and bi girlies of London and Dutch, and then they like join sign in. They love your app so much, they just want to be a part of it. Maybe it’s like a challenge, you know, it’s like we’ve set up these things and people want to get to it. You should set up a page where they go, and they have to pay like five pounds, and then say thank you for donating. This is literally, like we were talking about this this week, like what are we going to do with these people?
27:44 It’s an audience, and it’s people who care about it, so maybe we just serve them lesbian porn, and we’re like, there you go, that’s what you came here for. Send them to a lesbian website. Fans of Dutch, you know, forum or something. And you know, you must be, you’re kind of on the cutting edge of like watching women, you know, lesbian interaction when it comes to the chatting and stuff, so is there anything that surprised you? Like you mentioned earlier, you know, guys might want to meet up before, and the girls are more likely to talk.
28:07 Is there anything else that surprised you like from a social experiment-wise that you can share? The most surprising stuff was just in some ways how unsurprising it was. So when I first started, I did the kind of profile verification stuff to try and make a secure community, make women feel safe and not like they were fake accounts, and try and encourage them to meet up faster, because I thought, you know, and I still think this is the truth of the matter, that you can’t tell if you properly, properly like someone until you meet in the flesh and like look that person in the eyes and know if you’ve got chemistry.
28:37 So I wanted to encourage women to meet up quicker, and it just did not work. Girls will never do it. Girls want to have conversations. They normally have to talk about three times before they’re going to meet up. So like first chat, hey, then like organizing the date, then just before the date.
28:52 They browse through tons and tons of images and profiles, come back and look to the same kind of profiles. It’s a very, yeah, it’s kind of how you would imagine women to behave where they look a lot, like browse through tons of things, then decide who they want to message, and a lot of online chat. Wow, fascinating. And what’s next for you guys? Is it all about like getting like a really big seven figure investment and like scaling really, really fast, or do you want to try to figure other things out first?
29:23 I think we’re still figuring things out first. Like the product went out in September, so we’re still learning like what works, what doesn’t. I think we’ve definitely got the next few months of making small changes to start like improving overall performance. Then once we hit that magical place, it will be scaling and taking it to other countries. So at the moment, it’s kind of just enjoyable looking at what’s working.
29:46 We built a game in, for example, I was interested in how the Tinder mechanic works and how you kind of play it in front of other people. And so we were thinking about how would that be relevant for girls specifically. So we have an interaction called Would You Rather, where you basically see a girl and an alternative. So it could be like a type of food that you like, or it could be what you do at the weekend. Horse riding.
30:09 Other times it’s like spiders and scorpions. It could be like anything. And it’s would you rather date the girl or do the other thing? So we didn’t say what it means. It’s like would you rather talk to her?
30:20 If you’re like in a room and you had the option of like a curry or this girl, which are you going to go for? Depends what you want. And then if the girls choose each other, we tell them what they chose each other over. So it kind of helps make that conversation start faster. So it’s things like that.
30:37 But you don’t tell the girls you got chosen over. Yeah, we do. If you didn’t get chosen, then it doesn’t come up. When you do choose each other, it says like you chose each other over horse riding and whatever. But it just it gets girls talking really quickly.
30:53 And they play it a lot like a kind of a scary amount. And that was just something that we thought was interesting and fun and just realized how popular it is. And now we’re kind of working out, OK, well, this is an interesting mechanic. Should we start putting it at other places throughout the app? So it’s like, yeah, it’s a kind of fun time now of looking at different things.
31:10 We’re only on iOS at the moment. So Android’s going to be starting really soon. So we’ll start building that probably in the next few weeks. And then once we’ve got both platforms running securely, it’s to other countries. How many users do you have?
31:23 We don’t tell people at the moment, I’m afraid. That’s OK. Good question to ask, though. You’re kind of new to the tech community here in London, right? I was just wondering what it’s been like the last few years because you were marketing before?
31:35 Yeah, brand strategy stuff. And yeah, so what’s it been like? Incredible. I think it’s amazing. I honestly think it’s just the best group of people.
31:46 The amount of stuff you’re learning, I think any job, any new job you go to, you have that great learning curve at the beginning where you’re going to be like, wow, there’s so much amazing stuff. But the amount of stuff you learn doing this job, the amount of people that you meet, the whole vibe of the whole community is the most open, welcoming, helpful set of people. It’s completely unique. I used to think marketing was quite cool because it would be going to shoots and things that I thought were quite trendy and going to nice restaurants.
32:13 And then you just realise that actually a lot of the people are assholes and everyone’s very nice and it’s all about personal reputation and making yourself look cool and going for it for yourself. And that’s the complete opposite in tech and the whole scene is about helping other people and supporting each other and learning from each other. And there’s no way that I would have got the business to where it is now without this scene being how it is because I’ve relied so heavily on the help from other people and just advice and input from other people and learning, it’s, yeah, it’s incredible.
32:44 Everyone’s trying to help each other here. Everyone says that too. You know, Lauren Fatas grab it so that she comes over here and everyone’s just like, how can I help? We found it when we first met Bryce and everybody on the show, everyone’s just excited, we’re doing it. You know, Brian and I come from the finance world where it’s like zero-sum game.
32:59 It’s like, I’ve got to push you down for me to get out. Yeah, exactly. And whereas the tech space is so different, it’s refreshing. Yeah, it’s amazing. And over here I think everyone wants to see everyone succeed.
33:10 You know, maybe it’s because London always hasn’t been the premiere city and like we’re really making some progress. So I think everyone said, you know, you win, we win. Let’s get more people that win. Let’s help everyone out that comes over here. I think it doesn’t come up like in your brain because no one else is doing it.
33:24 You wouldn’t ever even think that. It’s like so many people have helped me. I would never even question helping someone else. It’s just what you do. It’s great and it’s exciting because you meet someone and it makes you realize where you were at that time and you’re like, oh, you’ve got so much good stuff to come.
33:38 And some bad stuff, sorry. But it’s so cool to be able to share what you’ve learned because you know that you’re going to be asking someone else that’s a year ahead of you to be like, oh, what do I do here? I don’t know what the best solution is. And when you think New York, you think San Francisco, is that daunting for you? It is a bit.
33:55 So I’m going at the end of February, New York and then San Francisco and it’s like a completely different scene. But even, you know, like the gay scene over there is really different. Like even between those two cities, it’s really different. So I am under no disillusion that we can just go there. I’m doing this as like a pre-wrecky to understand how is it different?
34:11 What do we need to change? Where’s our positioning within those spaces? If it’s not being super East London and it is approachable to everyone, what does that mean in those different places? And kind of got to get my head around that first as well as all the tech stuff. In terms of a market, is the size of the London sort of lesbian community this pretty close to New York maybe?
34:31 New York’s bigger. And San Francisco? Smaller. Like by percentage of volume it’s higher. Sorry, by percentage it’s higher but by volume there’s fewer people.
34:40 Sounds like each city you have to have almost a separate marketing plan. Kind of like a white plan guy. Rita said, you know, you go in there, New Yorkers, they behave differently than Londoners. You have an urban density there. But, you know, the East London thing might be a good fit here or the toned down East London thing.
34:56 But in New York you might want to come at it from a different angle. Yeah, and I think it’s kind of understanding that. Like how does that differ and how much do we change what we do? I think like we have a blog that’s really popular. It goes down, it goes, like that’s read mostly in America.
35:07 And, well, that’s a kind of a good sign that it is working over there. But even the kind of content that we’re producing, how do we make sure that we are relevant to the groups of women over there? I think the product will always do what it does, but it’s like who are the partners, who are the people that we kind of align ourselves with? It’s going to be the most important thing of how do we reach the right women that we think our app kind of solves problems for.
35:28 You know, I mean, just want to take it further than that. I mean, you know, back in the old days you would have to go to the gay bar to meet someone maybe of your sexual preference, you know. And a lot of times that’s a barrier to entry for a lot of people. Yeah, it’s terrifying. You know, we have like the long tail of everything in the internet, you know, expanding.
35:45 I mean, we have people in Georgia that listen to London Real and they’re like, there’s no one in my community that has these conversations. So we listen to you. And like for your app, I mean, you must enable a lot of people to, I don’t know, what is that, virtually coming out of the closet and interact with people without potentially… I was having to leave you home. It’s like…
36:02 It’s a big… It’s one of the things that I love the most about it and I think it’s most exciting. Most of our users are based around kind of like metropolitan cities but then the most engaged users are the people that aren’t. They’re like out in the sticks and they’ve got nowhere to go. You know, to go to a gay bar means like going up to Bristol for the weekend and booking a hotel and staying there for the night probably to have a night out and then go back to home where you’re probably not going to like come across someone necessarily for quite a while.
36:30 There actually is someone in my town who I could meet for a coffee and I can’t wait until we go to like China and look at a market where a lot of that infrastructure isn’t in place and it’s not well established and they might actually bypass a lot of the kind of gay hubs because people are just using apps. It’s the most simple way to meet other people and it’s so much more accessible. Can you get into China? Is the whole government an issue there? At the moment we would be able to as in like Grindr, Hornet, all the guys’ apps run over there.
36:57 So like Turkey recently banned Grindr so I don’t know what would happen when we go over there. But yeah, we definitely can go to China. Okay, here’s a question for you. Tomorrow you walk into the office and you have to sign an NDA. You can’t be involved in any more lesbian dating apps.
37:11 None of this stuff for like a year but you can be involved in the tech sector. What would you go do? What would the industry excite you? I try to think of all the really bad ideas we’ve had in the event we’re talking about. We’re like lesbian property rentals.
37:25 Is that an Airbnb? Yeah, we were like everyone jokes that lesbians move in together after the second date. So we were like, well, let’s just do that. There’s another team in Waira that do a price comparison for moving home. We’re moving in with a rental business.
37:37 Is this the, I mean, but just like you said that, is this the tip of a whole different way of marketing to that audience? I think it’s the tip of building products for women. I think that’s, I don’t actually know what the next thing would be. I know that I’m really interested in female interaction and female behavior. I don’t think it’s a very well-served market yet.
37:55 I think in some places it doesn’t need to be. I think in some places you don’t necessarily have to change the way a news site is designed to think about female interaction. But I think there are some places where gender is really important. And I think looking at different spaces, we’re actually building a product around how women interact, think and behave, the kind of triggers they see, how they behave online is a really interesting space. Yeah, that’s fascinating.
38:18 We always ask the question, I’m sure you’ve heard me ask everyone else before, and I’m going to hit you with it. Oh yeah. And give that young lady a bit of advice. What would you tell her? Don’t follow the path that you think everyone is telling you to.
38:34 I always get so annoyed that at school, when I was leaving to go to university, it was a clear set of what was going to happen. It was like, you’ll probably do a certain type of degree and then you’ll apply for a grad scheme and then you’ll just probably work your way through a company. And at no point did someone say, do computer science or do Russian, do Arabic, learn something new that could take you to a completely different place in a new experience. And I felt like when I discovered the tech scene, it was just this revolutionary thing almost.
39:04 I was learning to program and I was like, this is amazing, why has no one mentioned this to me before? And maybe I wasn’t at a time where I was looking out and going to see it, but it’s like yeah, start looking earlier, stop thinking that that’s the only path straight ahead and look at other things sooner and the more you start doing different things, the more you start realizing what you love and what you care about and you fall into some really cool things. You seem like you just got here.
39:27 She’s got the excitement of someone that just landed and she’s like, wow, this is so cool. You’re just about to leave Wyrest and you’re this excited. I know, and you’ve been doing it, two years you’ve been in this tech space, right? Yeah, so I quit my job a year ago. And then was kind of doing it.
39:42 So I went freelancer a bit before that to build my bootstrap, but was still in the company, so yeah. Okay, I’m not finished with the advice question. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? Someone else said it was the best advice they ever received, but I’m taking it, which was yeah, don’t fall in love with your product, fall in love with your customer’s problem. And if you are obsessed with that problem, you’ll work out the best way to fix it.
40:04 Very well said, very well said. The last question is, to the 20-year-old out there who’s listening from around the world, I don’t know, maybe they want to check out your app or whether they want to just kind of get involved in the business. I mean, you kind of said it earlier as far as don’t have a set way of doing things, but you think they should get involved in tech early? Yeah, I think there are so many things happening, like conferences and blog posts and websites and podcasts and just start looking into it now.
40:31 I think it’s the most exciting space to be working in, the amount of stuff, the speed at which things change at is so exciting. I think it’s just the best industry to work in. So look stuff up. I run something called Geek Girl Meetup, and we talk at schools to young girls about moving into Crows in Tech. Geek Girl Meetup.
40:52 Geek Girl Meetup. How old do you start talking to the girls? So we run that just for women in the London tech scene, but then the schools asked us to come and talk about what we were doing. And then we’re doing Unconference in May, and then the school asked to bring a bunch of girls up to the Unconference. And I was like, that’s the most incredible thing.
41:08 I wish my school had done that, just to meet a bunch of people doing these cool jobs I used to think that coding was like, yeah, the matrix, and it was just people in hoodies sat at computers. And when you start learning the variety of jobs that exist in this sector and all the different things you could do, like being a 16-year-old girl and hearing about that, I think you’d be like, yeah, that sounds amazing. I could do that. That sounds really cool. It’s amazing how role models play some subconscious in your mind.
41:33 Yeah. And again, you’re talking about for the last 50 years, we basically probably have been marketing to men first. So we have all these old-school ways that we just think are right. It’s like a marketing thing. It’s like product design.
41:43 Most people think to reach a female audience, you just market to women, and it’s like, well, what about building the bloody thing for women in the first place? It’s in tech particularly. So dating is a very male-led industry. Tech is a very male-led industry. And I think it’s never intentional.
41:57 No one builds a product going like, this is going to work really well for guys and really badly for women, but let’s just market to women. But it’s just that a lot of men have designed these things. And so little assumptions that might get made along the way means that they go, okay, we haven’t got as many women on the site. Let’s just target loads of women in our marketing. So they think about things like that.
42:15 But what if you actually built the product around women in the first place? Awesome stuff. Colin, what did I miss? I’m sorry, I kind of get mesmerized. I think I have two questions.
42:25 The first one, can you explain the name? Yes. I almost got wrong today and I apologize. It’s D-A-double-T-C-H. Datch means date catch.
42:37 Date. Catch a date. Very cool. Second. It sounds like a lesbian dating app.
42:45 I don’t know what that means. Loads of girls think it means something like dike related. Loads of girls think it means something snatch related. It does not. It’s a word.
42:53 It’s a good name though. The reason to put the word was because all the other lesbian sites were called girl to girl and like less on less action. And all these things were like super girly, super gay and it was about just being aware that could mean something new for our users and community. Cool. My second question.
43:09 So you must have pitched this app to like 50, 60 year old men. VCs. What was the dumbest question once someone asked you? You have so many. The classic is so the best was it was actually before I pitched and this guy was like, oh, so what do you do?
43:28 I run a lesbian dating app. Don’t be ridiculous. No, that’s my job. That’s what I do. You can’t be a lesbian.
43:37 And I was like, really? Why is that? And he was like, well, I’ve seen lesbians and you’re clearly not one. I was like, right. Well, funny thing is lesbians don’t have a look.
43:46 So you can’t spot a lesbian. So you’re not really in a place to say that. And he just literally couldn’t get his head around it. Conversation went on and on and on. And then at the end he was like, do you know what?
43:56 I was at a wedding five years ago and there was a woman there and she had long hair and she was a lesbian. So maybe. Do you want me to introduce you? Christ. Wasn’t that a conversation from four weddings and a few?
44:08 It could be. It was ridiculous. We had some feedback from someone that was like, if I invest, do you think people will think I’m a lesbian? I was like, I mean, you invested in a taxi app. Do people not think you’re a taxi driver?
44:23 No, it’s probably going to be okay. What else? Who are would you invest in? I’m trying to remember all the other ones. One more.
44:33 People told me, I mean, it was meant in a constructive way and it’s a friend who said it, but they were like, you have got to stop putting into your pitch deck pictures of girls and girls kissing. It’s a real problem. And I was like, well, that again, it’s kind of what we do. Like, this is girls falling in love and they kiss. It does happen.
44:51 And they’re like, yeah, but you put it up on a screen and you’ve got a room full of men and you’re delivering your like proposition and there’s girls snogging on the screen and for like five seconds, they might lose concentration. And it’s not, you know, no one’s going to be proud to say that they saw snogging and lost concentration, but maybe it happens and say they’re like, yeah, you need to change that. There’s another good one, this person was like, do you think they’ll use it to have sex?
45:13 I’m sorry. No, probably just hold hands. I think that’s probably as far as things will go. So these are all like the 12 year old questions. Yeah.
45:23 Just for straight people, often they just get all sort of, oh my God. You know what I mean? They get all like quiet and whispery and awkward. People whisper generally when they talk about it. And then they say the word lesbian.
45:35 So how are things going with your dating app? It’s okay. We were in London, you’d like to think, we’re in London, it’s 2014. You can say the word lesbian and people won’t freak out. Are you afraid to go into the U.S.
45:47 And go into some states that are really, you know, hard against? I’m definitely not afraid. I’m excited about it because again, the same thing of like, that’s where the biggest problem is. It doesn’t stop you from being gay. It’s a lot harder to be gay.
46:00 So actually, those are the people that I think I’m most excited about kind of having on the platform. Sure, they can reach out and talk to people. What’s more frustrating to you is that someone who doesn’t address the issue and just skirts around it, doesn’t want to talk about the lesbianism or people that just ask you those really boneheaded comments like, are people going to have sex from your app? I think when I started pitching, the amount of times I was getting asked questions I was kind of, I guess I was a bit shocked at first, because I don’t know, I also hadn’t run like an LGBT business before.
46:32 I didn’t know these kind of things would come up. And so, you know, you get asked them in your personal life but then you’re like in a business pitching and you’re like, we’re asking weird questions about this. But then after a while you’re like, this is, people have questions about any industry that they don’t know about and that’s completely fair that if you’re not gay you may not know about like anything about the community. So it’s like questions that whatever questions to, that’s the question they have.
46:56 Good thing about tech and VC is that they will ask the question. Because it’s like, all right, well, how does this work? Is this going to make money that we don’t care? I do not think it was okay to say that I couldn’t be a lesbian because I had long hair. That was one that I was like, no.
47:10 If you’re listening and that’s you, shame on you. Shame on you, buddy. That’s awesome. How do people get in touch with you, Robyn, and if they want to work for you, what do they do? So if you want to work for us, best thing is to download the app and check it out but you can download us in the app store, 1A2Ts.
47:28 We’re like, email me, robinwithawayatdatch.com. We’re on Facebook and Twitter, Datch app on Twitter. I’m Robyn Eckston on Twitter. We’re everywhere. We’re on Pinterest, we’re on Tumblr.
47:39 Yeah, search us, you’ll find us. And I’m guessing word of mouth is probably some of the best advertising you get. Yeah, that’s kind of where most people are coming from at the moment. So we’ve just kind of started playing with Facebook ads but until now we haven’t done any marketing. So we’re just starting to look at that.
47:52 What if we got like a major prime-time series like Girls to mention Datch? What if we got Ellen to mention Datch? That’s what I want. Ellen. Ellen is like…
48:02 She’s huge in the States. She’s huge everywhere. She’s like the lesbian idol. I was at Ladies Who Impress on Wednesday night. So we sponsored, Crew Cafe sponsored the event.
48:12 I was making espresso martinis for a hundred ladies and they had four speakers, one incredible. And the first one was the comedian. She’s really cool. It’s a good event. So on the Ellen thing, that would be huge.
48:28 I’m sure you’re working on that. But then you’re not available in the US. You’re just going to piss off more people. No, but I think it’s going to take us a while to make friends with Ellen. Ellen, if you’re out there, please look up Datch and tell us.
48:38 I’ll be in Spain. Separation. Who knows Ellen? We’re going to tweet Ellen this week. Yeah, that’s the plan.
48:46 Robyn, thanks so much for being here. You’re just super fun to be around. You’ve got really awesome energy. I don’t know, you guys are going to do fantastic. Cool. Thank you.
48:54 Cool. The apps on iPhone now will be coming to Android later. Datch, D, A, double T, C, H, one or two T’s. There you go. I just wanted to thank TaskRabbit, our sponsor.
49:03 Use the code real25, 25 pounds. Go check them out. It’s all good. TaskRabbit.co.uk here in London. Anything else going on?
49:10 No, all’s good. We’ve got some great responses from people looking to help us out. So keep them coming as we grow, as we get bigger, more episodes. We need more help. Yeah, we’ve got a couple of people who already volunteered their services.
49:22 We’ve got TaskRabbit helping us out, too, so it’s all good. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can come see our faces on YouTube. The channel is Silicone Real. She’s got long hair. She’s got straight. It’s okay. I’ve got short hair.
49:33 So check us out there. We’re on Twitter at SiliconeReal. Give us a shout. And yeah, it’s about the people. It’s cool meeting people like Robyn. All the best.
49:40 Thank you.
