The unfair advantage is the investment.
The public version of a growth story is clean. Invites went out, a party happened, a brand got a fresh coat of paint. The real version is messier and much more useful, because it is the part that actually worked.
All great apps make it easy first. Then traction follows, and the traction is engineered. When I look at a company, I am not looking at the pitch. I am looking for the move competitors will not copy and the founder willing to make it.
Make it easy. Then make it unavoidable.
The three case studies below are not my companies. They are growth examples I love, and each one is here for the same reason: it shows how a founder actually thinks when the honest version of “just check it out” is not going to work.
Case study 01 · Manufactured interest
Seed the room before you open the door.
Harvard students invited their friends, and it spread campus to campus.
The data came first. Student directories were scraped, profiles were built, and the network existed before most of the campus had heard of it. When you signed up with your .edu email, your friends were already there and the connection requests started before you had finished your profile.
The story was never hidden. It is in the movie: scraping the house directories, pulling the photos, putting people on the platform to rate each other. That data is what manufactured the interest. The .edu wall turned an invite into access, and access into FOMO.
The founder did not wait for demand. He built the appearance of a full room, then let real behavior fill it. He understood that a new user’s first session is a judgment about whether anyone they know is here.
- A founder who can tell me, specifically, how the first 500 people got in and what they saw when they arrived.
- A product where the first session is about the user’s world, not the product’s features.
- A willingness to do the unglamorous data work before the launch, not after.
Case study 02 · Engagement before signup
Tinder
Do not ask people to try it. Make the first session about them.
Tinder threw parties on college campuses and grew from there.
The part that gets left out: everyone at the party already had an account waiting for them. The invite list was the user list. When people left the party and opened the app, they saw the exact people they had been standing next to an hour earlier.
That is real engagement, not a download. Someone who would never have signed up on their own suddenly had a reason to swipe, and every swipe made the next person’s experience better. It was a strategic way to activate users the honest way never would have reached.
These founders treated the launch as an event you attend, not a link you click. They designed the offline moment so the online moment felt inevitable, and they understood that a great app is easy first and unavoidable second.
- Founders who think in activation mechanisms, not marketing channels.
- A plan for the moment after signup that is as deliberate as the plan for getting the signup.
- Density over reach: a hundred people who all know each other beats ten thousand strangers.
Case study 03 · The reset
Hinge
Sometimes the growth move is deleting everything.
Hinge rebranded as the relationship app and took off.
Underneath the rebrand was a real problem. Fake accounts and low-quality profiles were poisoning the product, and no amount of new users was going to fix a broken room. So they started over: everyone’s old matches were deleted, the system was cleaned, and the problem was addressed head-on instead of papered over.
The CEO shared this story with me personally. It is one of the boldest growth decisions I have heard of, because it looked like shrinking. It was the opposite. Hinge is trending harder now than it ever has.
This is a founder willing to make the uncomfortable call. He diagnosed the actual disease, accepted the short-term hit, and rebuilt trust by removing what was fake. Growth that poisons the product is not growth.
- Founders who can name the thing that is quietly killing their product, and have a plan to cut it out.
- The courage to reset a metric that looks good on a slide but is hollow underneath.
- A product that gets cleaner as it grows, not noisier.
What I look for.
Builders
People who ship. Founders who have already built the ugly first version, put it in front of real users and changed it because of what they saw. I have very little interest in a deck for something that does not exist yet.
Growth hackers
People who understand that traction is engineered. Who can tell me the unglamorous mechanism behind their first hundred users and are already planning the mechanism behind the first ten thousand.
Conviction with a feedback loop
Persistence gets my attention. So does the ability to change your mind when reality gives you new information. I like founders who care enough about the problem to stay with it, and who can tell the difference between commitment to the goal and attachment to the first plan.
A hard entry point
An unusual route into a market is more interesting than a broad promise. Consumer networks, AI and growth infrastructure, vertical software for communities everyone else overlooks. Show me why this product, for this customer, has a reason to exist that a bigger competitor cannot manufacture.
Where I invest.
I am based in York, Pennsylvania, and I focus on local markets across Central PA, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh: founders who can win a county before they win a country. For LGBTQIA+ founders, the map covers the United States and Canada.
All areas I coverLGBTQIA+ founders, US & CanadaWhere I have a stake.
I have active investments in ReadyPlanGo, Mangia Rewards and ModLinQ. I also retain equity in Sweet Ride. Bindr and ColdStart remain my primary operating focus.
ReadyPlanGo
Active investmentMangia Rewards
Active investmentModLinQ
Active investmentSweet Ride
Equity holding
ModLinQ and Sweet Ride are also part of my building history. The career story describes that work; the portfolio reflects my continued ownership.
Bring the real version.
If you want to start a conversation, tell me what you are building, who needs it, what you have already tried to get people in the door, and where you are stuck. A working product, a concrete customer and the mechanism behind your first users is the best possible starting point.
My perspective comes from operating companies. The useful conversation is about the actual work: the product, the growth hack and what would make it unfair.
Connect with me on LinkedIn