This Week in Startups · Monday, October 26, 2026
Amanda Bradford explained how she used non-scalable guerrilla marketing tactics, offline events, and personal waitlist recruitment as a solo founder to pre-game the San Francisco launch of dating app The League before the app was built. She noted that she spent only four months building the app with an iOS engineer and later raised $2 million after demonstrating early user traction.
“So what I did is I created the same kind of thing. I was like, okay, Stanford is very selective. They only accept like one or two or 3% of people, depending on if your legacy or not. But my goal was to just have a very vetted community of people that really wanted like a serious relationship.”
“And then I closed $2 million after we launched. Again, in consumer especially, it's very hard to close funding without traction before you launch.”