Zadeh and his co-founder Alex Mehr on the set of the “Find a Job. Zadeh acknowledges that it wouldn’t have been possible to build Zoosk from scratch today when social media networks have too many rules and too much content. Back then, surveys like “Which Sex and the City Character Are You?” could attract significant numbers of female users to Zoosk. To achieve this, they used satellite applications on Facebook as vehicles for targeted advertising. “You have to have a critical mass in every metropolitan area to become a useful product.” “If I have eligible singles in Los Angeles, it is not helping people in New York,” Zadeh explains.
The bigger challenge Zoosk would have to overcome was acquiring users from all genders in every geographical distribution. “Dating is not only a marketplace it is a hyper-local marketplace.” They kept growing rapidly after those first days. You were ordering servers, and on Christmas Day nobody was going to give you a new server.” But the boost it gave Zoosk was worth the challenge. “Elastic computing and AWS weren’t as prevalent as today. “Our servers were melting because we were getting so many users on the platform,” he says. Zadeh barely got any sleep during those days.
When he woke up on Christmas Day, they had 200,000. When Zadeh went to bed on Christmas Eve, they had 30,000 users. Zoosk was launched on Facebook on December 18. When Facebook opened itself up to third-party applications, Zoosk was quick to make its move. In 2007, when social media was just becoming what it is today, Zadeh and his partner Alex Mehr recognized the macrotrend and knew that consumers were going to spend a lot of time on social media, while most other dating companies were too late to see the opportunity. His one word of advice to aspiring ecommerce entrepreneurs Is passion really that important for success at business? Zadeh's view. His 3 secrets for acquiring any business. Why the Dressbarn acquisition has worked so well (growing at 50% month over month!). How he acquired the first 200,000 users overnight for Zoosk and solved the classic chicken-egg problem, common in marketplaces (men won't come till there are women and vice-versa)ĭid he rig Zoosk to favor himself and get dates with attractive women? In this episode we talk to Shayan Zadeh, the co-founder of Zoosk (sold for $250 Million) and now the CEO of Dressbarn. Click here or on the image above to listen to the podcast.
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