Dean and Maxwell Rotbart had me on Monday Morning Radio to mark their 700th episode, and we spent nearly an hour getting into something I don’t always talk about at length: what it actually felt like to have Bang with Friends pulled from Apple’s App Store overnight, and how that crushing setback became the foundation for everything that came after.
Listen to the full episode here.
Monday Morning Radio has been running since 2012 and surpassed a million downloads last year, so it was an honor to be part of their milestone 700th episode.
Here’s what we covered:
- How getting kicked off the App Store forced a complete rethink of the business and why that turned out to be the best thing that could have happened
- Why understanding customer psychology is the foundation of every growth decision I make, and why guessing is so expensive
- How resilience isn’t a personality trait but a practice you build through repeated adversity
- The mindset shift that takes you from chasing users to genuinely serving them
- How Down went from crisis to 17 million users and a spot in the top 10 dating apps in the US
- Why continual experimentation beats strategy documents every time
The through line of the whole conversation: setbacks are only crushing if you treat them as conclusions. The founders who come out the other side are the ones who treat them as data.
If that resonates, Outrageous Startup Growth goes much deeper on all of it.