Anika had me on Your Brand Amplified, and we got personal in a way I don’t always go in interviews.
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We talked about the origin story, Bang with Friends going viral, the pivot to Down Dating, scaling to 17 million users. But we also got into the stuff underneath: the mistakes I’m not proud of, the moments I didn’t have the right perspective, and what it felt like to watch my app crash after getting kicked off the App Store.
Three things I come back to no matter what I’m building:
- Put yourself out there. Discomfort is the price of entry. You can’t build anything real without being willing to be vulnerable and get punched in the face a few times.
- Build resilience. Not as a concept, as a practice. The failures I’ve had taught me more than any success, and I think that’s true for most founders.
- Develop genuine empathy for your users. Not the kind you perform in a pitch deck. The kind where you actually live their life, understand what they feel, and build for that moment.
We also got into how I think about FOMO, not as a trick, but as something you engineer through urgency, social proof, exclusivity, and scarcity in ways that actually respect your users rather than manipulate them.
The reason I wrote the book wasn’t ego. It was because I grew up with limited resources in a small Pennsylvania town, and I genuinely believe that anyone, regardless of background, can build something extraordinary if they understand how people think and feel.
That’s what Outrageous Startup Growth is about.