The team at Founders Podcast had me on to talk about something I’ve spent the better part of 20 years figuring out: why some products go viral and others die quietly, and what the difference actually comes down to.
Listen here: Apple Podcasts · Spotify
It starts with a bad date. That’s genuinely where this whole journey began. A disaster of an evening that made me realize the dating industry was broken and nobody had actually fixed it. What came out of that frustration eventually became Bang with Friends, and then a decade of experiments, pivots, and hard lessons across multiple apps and over 100 million users.
We covered a lot of ground:
- Why highlighting a universal taboo can be one of the most powerful levers for viral growth
- How to engineer FOMO through authenticity, exclusivity, and scarcity at every stage of your launch
- Why being genuinely human is your biggest competitive advantage in an AI-saturated world
- App store optimization and press outreach tactics that still work today
- How to navigate platform risk and startup burnout without losing momentum
The thread running through all of it is the same thing I keep coming back to: if you understand how people actually think and feel, you can stop guessing and start building growth that compounds.
If you want to go even deeper on the frameworks behind all of this, that is exactly what Outrageous Startup Growth is built around.