Mark Wormgoor had me on the CTO Compass Podcast, and we went deep on the origin story I don’t always tell in full, from fixing computers in rural Pennsylvania at 14, to building one of the most controversial dating apps in Silicon Valley history, to scaling products to over 100 million users.
Here’s what we covered:
- How admitting out loud that my original startup idea was failing set me free from the sunk-cost fallacy
- The 3.5-hour hackathon that produced the MVP for Bang With Friends, and how it hit 1 million users in 3.5 months
- Getting banned from the App Store, sued by Zynga, and how I rebranded to DOWN and eventually bought it back
- The three core growth levers every product needs: Acquire, Retain, and Grow User Value
- How I applied the same psychology framework to scale a live-streaming platform to 100 million users across multiple cultures
- Why AI creates noise, and why deep human empathy is the one edge it can’t replicate
- What “activation” actually means in practice, and why being specific about it changes everything
If any of that resonates, the full framework, including 65 psychological levers, is laid out in Outrageous Startup Growth.