Could you tell us about Evolso in a few words?

Evolso is a new flirting app that offers unique features to female users. It allows women to initiate contact with male users, and gives matches the opportunity to organize their first in-person interaction in their shared favorite venues. Basically, women get to pick guys they want to meet, based on the places they both like to go.

What distinguishes you from Tinder, or other competitors?

We are different because we understand that male and female users have different problems when it comes to dating. Guys experience a lot of rejection, and for girls it’s the “creep factor,” or unwanted contact from men. We solve these issues, and we also focus on real life interaction of the users. We’re not passive the way Tinder is, and It’s not all just about looks.

Tell us about yourself. How did you become CEO of Evolso, as a first time entrepreneur?

I became the CEO of Evolso in 2012 at a Startup Weekend event in Romania. I pitched the idea and formed a wonderful team that is still together today. I was very fortunate to have found like-minded people who wanted to build and create as I did.

And what about your team? Are you all first-time entrepreneurs?

Yes, we all are first-time entrepreneurs, with different backgrounds related to the tech industry! But that’s par for the course these days. We’re learning a lot. It’s all about your will to learn, asking the right questions and being in the right place at the right moment with your breakthrough idea.

The Evolso Team:

You’ve mentioned “giving the power back to the girls.” What does that mean to Evolso? How does Evolso empower women?

Alin Stanescu presents Evolso at a tech summit at Techsquare.

Evolso wants to focus more on girls in offering them unique functionalities inside the app, functionalities that male users will not have. We think that if girls let the guys know exactly who they like, this can be a real game changer.

We started out with the idea of a purely “events-based” app. That idea is still a part of how Evolso works, but the inspiration for the app being girl-centered was something that evolved gradually through the mentorship we experienced here at StartupYard. We were constantly challenged to find an angle; an experience none of the other apps can offer. At the same time, we looked at ways that users “game” the current generation of apps to get the most feedback from other users. We found that a lot of this gaming of the system would be eliminated if we changed the rules; if, for lack of a better phrase, we threw out the idea of “fairness.” Allowing women to take the initiative makes this a different kind of product. Who says dating is fair anyway? That’s an assumption we’d like to test here.

The Evolso team with mentor Ludovic Neveu.

What kind of market do you plan to target with this app and platform? How old are your ideal users, and what are their interests?

Our target market is university aged students. Students who want to meet each other, enjoy their student life and have fun. Our desired market is the UK and the English speaking people of Europe. Our users will need to be willing to socialize, open to new people in their lives, and never forget to have fun.

What’s your overall marketing strategy? How will you get to the critical mass you need for a dating app service?

Well that is top-secret now isn’t it? Just kidding. The way we are planning to do the magic is that we want to have Official Evolso parties in key periods for the students in the cities we are targeting. The critical mass factor (of app usage) can be reached in creating the “word of mouth” effect with the parties. We want to be the first thing students think about when they go inside a club and they are reaching for their phones. We are showing venues also inside the app. All the venues that want to be a part of the concept, in the near future, will advertise our app offline or online. Similar to what Foursquare is doing.

For those of us, like me, who pretty much missed the online dating game completely, what has changed with this technology in 10 years? Why is it more attractive now than in the early days of Match.com and other web-based services?

The dating market is very competitive. Only if you are really good, will you really have a shot at making it. At the beginning, online dating websites such as Match.com where very popular, the problem was that you could not use it all the time. Now you have all the technology you need in your pocket, you can access the information when you need it. It is much more attractive now, with a push of a button and a swipe to the left or the right to see what you are looking for. It’s easy, fast, addictive and fun. Evolso is offering all of that, it is easy to use and is offering quality regarding the content it provides.You have it in your pocket and use it for fun. It offers mystery and intrigues the user with not knowing who they will find as a match. Venues are important too, for the first real interaction between users, that’s why we focused also on offering them a way to break the ice and meet for the first time in their favorite common locations. There are other dating apps out there. Our aim is to do something unique that is especially attractive for young, active women. We think that despite the size of the market, that is a segment that has so far gone underserved.

Tell us about your experience at StartupYard. What have been the ups and the downs, and who have been the most valuable mentors for Evolso?

The Evolso desk at StartupYard

The experience at StartupYard was and still is amazing. I highly recommend young entrepreneurs to try and enter an accelerator if they want to develop their business ideas. Things here are going at an insane pace, and the amount of knowledge you get is purely priceless. Ups and downs? Every startup has ups and downs, the idea is to play the game right and win at the end. One downside was the time we were spending inside and working 11 hours per day, and the upside was that we were spending the time inside and working 11 hours per day ! It is our project. We need to make it work no matter what. The most valuable mentor to us for the moment is Cedric Maloux, who has been there for us at any given time offering his support and guidance to choose the proper path when faced with a problem. He is one of the best minds here at StartupYard. Other valuable mentors for us are Ondrej Bartos for helping us with contacts when we were stuck in the process, David Booth for giving us advice regarding the vision, Viktor Fischer with feedback about the path we are taking and many more. StartupYard’s unique quality is that they are offering a list of very valuable mentors that can change the way a startup will evolve. [ssba]

It Takes:  “#invites/users * #acceptedinvites > 1” to Tango

Andrew Chen wrote a fascinating piece recently on habit forming feedback loops. I suggest you read it. I’ll wait.

Alright, well if you haven’t read it, Chen focuses on 3 key types of “feedback loop” that are essential to growing a social app’s user base, and subsequently increasing its value.

Here are the 3 types of feedback loops he outlines:

1. A feedback loop that rewards content posters when they push new content into the network.

2. A feedback loop that rewards passive content consumers with relevant and valuable content.

3. A feedback loop that rewards (and culls) connections within the network.

Cracking the Chicken and the Egg Problem

But how did they GET THERE?

As we’ve been finding a lot with our current cohort of startups, many appear to be confronted with a chicken-and-egg conundrum. Namely, they will need engaged users to create content and keep the platforms viable, and they will need content to win engaged users. This is a sticky wicket that many social and mobile platforms are currently struggling with. Which of these things comes first? And at first blush, it looks insurmountable. How do you get the equation: “#invites/users * #acceptedinvites > 1” to work when you can’t inspire users to invite friends, and you can’t inspire friends to accept the invitations?

Failing to execute a user-feedback strategy that follows Metcalf’s Law, as Chen points out, will cause the opposite effect to take place: a social network that is losing users is losing value, meaning it loses more users, and is accelerating its loss of value.

However, there is hope.

All Your Base Don’t Belong to Us

I think a fair bit of this startup anxiety about growth comes not from lack of self-confidence in the startup’s abilities, but from pride. In a world of startups where the “me too” pitches flow like Hollywood scripts, a lot of founders are probably afraid of being perceived as derivative, rather than innovative. They tend to see their potential social networks as essentially divorced from, rather than dependent on, the existing ecosystem of competitors. But that isn’t the case at all. The fact that there are 10 Million users in your product category already is a good thing, because it means there are users looking for a product like yours, and there are sure to be a fair number of people who will want the innovation you provide over an established competitor, whether it’s in price, efficiency, or a host of other areas. As we say, if you don’t have competition already, you almost certainly have no market, just a piece of technology looking for a problem.

Tending An Unwalled Garden

So it’s important to understand, if you want to initiate feedback loops that will actually continue to grow, a number of things about your market and your target users. And it’s also important to understand how those users differentiate themselves. Luckily, most of the users a new social network would want to attract are *already* seeking the features or the community your new network would provide, and they are probably already doing what your network will allow them to do more cheaply, more quickly, or more efficiently. Your garden needs to have doors to other networks- they just need to be in the right places.

There are 3 basic types of users for a social network, one for each type of feedback loop: the content creator, the content curator, and the “lurker,” or content consumer. They’re often described as following the 1/9/90 spread, meaning that there are 9 curators for every 90 consumers, and 1 creator for every 100 total users. That means on any typical social-based app or platform, 1% of users will actively generate compelling content (hopefully), 9% will engage with that content actively (sharing, curating, editing, recommending, commenting), and 90% will view the content, and take no other actions.

Each of these user groups carries out a vital function, and their activities feed each other’s loops. Each social-based network has particular strengths. A content creator can be rewarded for the total size of her audience (Youtube profit sharing is an example of this), encouraging her to create more similar content. At the same time, viewers can be rewarded by a cornucopia of fresh content that they enjoy, presented to them every time they log in. Content curators, editors, mavens, and social butterflies, the 9% of users who can be relied on to share knowledge with others, can be rewarded in a few ways: some networks, like Facebook, reward this type of behavior with positive reinforcement: your attempts to join the conversation garner positive likes, making you feel like a content creator, without the hard work involved in actually creating the content you comment on, or share. Others reward this behavior through enhanced perception of status: followers on Twitter, or a rough prestige score, or a rank, such as those employed by some fan forums, or curation-heavy services like delicious and Scoop.It.

Keeping these three interests in balance is an important, and ongoing process. Facebook users will recall the deluge, reaching its peak around late 2012 and early 2013, of “content creators,” who were actually content curators sharing memes and jokey posts on Facebook, in an effort to drive ad-supported clicks to their sites: 9-gag, Upworthy, and others were the biggest culprits of this kind of “click-bait” exploitation of the Facebook platform. They were leveraging real content curators, the users who enjoy sharing with friends, to gain access to passive viewers. Facebook responded by raising the barriers to virality for that kind of content: stopping shallow or non-rewarding content from swamping the typical newsfeed.

Respect Your User’s Roles

It’s important to keep in mind that most of your users will not want to be active creators of content, or to take any active roles, in a social platform. A lot of founders are probably in the smaller cohort of curators and content creators, and don’t empathize with passive users. And this doesn’t just apply to startups looking to create social platforms. The ghost-town that is Google+ fell victim to a super-user mentality that was baked into its product DNA , and from which it has never recovered. When Google+ was ready to switch on for ever user, even forcing users of affiliated services to have a Google+ profile, there remained no focus on rewarding them for the types of users they were. It remained an exclusive club, that everyone was forced to attend. When Google’s attempts to enforce their own culture on their users don’t come off as corny, they seem frightening. That’s not how you want to be perceived.

Don’t be *that* app

Instagram and Facebook both focus deeply on the rewards users get from generating content, but they don’t pester their users with reminders to use the service. Content creation is both stupidly easy, and uncannily rewarding. Others, Twitter for example, offer virtually no rewards for content creation, de-emphasizing depth of content through artificial restrictions, but focus heavily on curators, pushing their few active curators to gain followers and increase their profile, and leveraging large numbers of passive browsers to make that process rewarding. Still, Twitter allows its user-base to segment itself easily, relying on hashtags to make curating and browsing content seamless, and encouraging special interest communities to form in ways they can’t on Facebook. Interest is prioritized over relationships from user to user. The mix that you attract will be unique to your platform, but the platform should still be balanced toward the 1/9/90 paradigm, or it will likely not grow organically.

The question came from one of our startups quite early, on Day One, in fact. A team asked whether they would be signing any NDAs with our mentors. The answer is no, they won’t, but in the interest of clarity, we thought we’d make it clear what our view of NDAs or “non-disclosure agreements,” is.

A lot of startups are familiar with NDAs, and their members have probably signed one or two in their time. I’ve signed a few myself. But they aren’t worth much, particularly to a startup, for a couple of reasons I’ll lay out here.

They’re Worthless To Founders

You may have signed an NDA as an employee or contractor for a medium to large-sized company. In the context of corporate legal departments, an NDA makes a sort of sense. It is a piece of the due diligence of any company to show, through their normal procedures, that they value their proprietary information and practices, and are willing to defend them when necessary. Not to do so, in that context, would leave a larger company, and its legal officer, in danger of being found negligent, should legal action need to be taken against an employee who steals secrets, or leaks information.

On its own the NDA is not a powerful legal document that grants the company a right to control what you say, but it gives the company cover, in case an employee decides to really abuse their insider knowledge. But that arrangement is for employees and close partners, not for outsiders like investors. The only across-the-board exception to this general rule is for sensitive, one-time events like mergers or acquisitions, in which the details of the deal leaking could present major headaches for investors and companies both. In that case, NDAs are common, and not far-reaching in their scope.

All contractually obligated not to listen to your pitch

VCs Won’t Sign Them Anyway.

And with good reason. A VC may hear 50 pitches in a week. And even if he hears only 2, there’s always a chance that your pitch, and the next company’s pitch are similar. The VC would open himself up to unnecessary risk by signing an NDA with you, if he knows that tomorrow, somebody presents him with a similar, but possibly better, idea. The value is in the team that is receiving the investment, and how they are executing their plans, not in the idea. That is virtually always the case. And VCs know this, and don’t want to be barred, possibly for life, from dealing with companies that do things similar to what your company does. By the same token, you wouldn’t want a VC to say: “I won’t invest in you because I’m afraid of legal action on the part of one of your competitors.” Does that sound fair to you?

It Makes You Look Arrogant

Contrary to most of our wishes about ourselves, our ideas are not usually all that valuable. So unless your pitch or your presentation to an investor includes earth-shattering news that simply must not be leaked for fear of some catastrophic consequence to your business (for example: you’ve invented cold-fusion, or you have created The Singularity), you’re likely to come off as an arrogant jerk for making a VC sign an NDA to hear your idea for the next Candy Crush Killer. StartupLand, however it may resemble Hollywood these days, is not dealing in tentpole movie releases, and VCs are not leaking screeners to Pirate Bay.

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