Amanda Bradford (LinkedIn | Twitter) is all about connecting people. She’s the Founder and CEO of The League, a community designed to help the overly ambitious meet.
While some people call it the “Harvard of Dating apps”, Amanda actually came up with the idea while at Stanford. “I was actually inspired by Stanford because when I went to business school, it was very evident that having an administration layer was very helpful for social activity and helping you make friends and helping you find people to date or to do business with. So I felt like, could The League serve as that administration layer and could we create a community of people just as ambitious as the folks I met at Stanford and do it without having to pay $200,000 to actually go and attend business school?”
And she did just that. The League has passed over 10 million in revenue – and it’s still only just getting started. Amanda Bradford sat down with The Mission Daily to talk about her hustle, her risks, and some advice that shaped her.
She honed her hustling skills early. When she was at Salesforce in a technical sales role, she started thinking outside the box: “. My quota was 125,000 a month, which was the result of I think about 30 deals usually. Because I ended up getting really scrappy. And if I couldn’t make my number, I would then start going and selling like $2,000 deals that I would just make. They hated me a little bit because I would create all these custom Amanda packages they called it … But they’d be like, ‘This is out of our budget.’ And I was $5,000 below my quota so I’d be like, ‘All right. Well what if we discount it 20% and I tie these three things together and it fits?’ And no one had ever bundled it like that before. So I think you learn a lot about, at least in this role, I was very autonomous and I could be my own CEO of my little consulting business.
She took a chance on herself: Amanda didn’t need to go to Stanford. She was working at Google and had her Salesforce experience under her belt. On paper, going back for a degree didn’t make much sense. In fact, her parents discouraged it. But Amanda took a risk. “Yeah, encouraged me not to just go and be super concerned about pedigree or collecting credentials. [00:28:30] And I do think that pragmatism stuck with me because at the end of GSP, I had one semester left, and I was like, “I might as well go try to make this ROI positive if I can.” I wanted to do a startup, and I felt like the timing was good. So the way I convinced my parents is I said, “I have this job offer from Facebook. They are giving me until January. If this doesn’t work out, I’m going to go get a nice job and have a nice existence. So I’m going to basically take a really expensive six month internship”, [00:29:00] is what I called it, an unpaid internship. And you know what? It caused me to hustle like crazy. I think having that timeline, we basically built an entire product and launched it and got traction and got funding in six months.
She learned to share life-changing advice. When it comes to making decisions, patience is key. “My professor has this quote: ‘The best choice is always chosen from the most attractive alternatives.’ Which basically means don’t ever just make a decision with something in front of you. So I think that was a big lesson I’ve learned is that it’s patience and discipline to post and then go do two other reference calls with the people, even if you like this one candidate the most. I tell my girlfriends, ‘Always three leads. Even if you like lead A the best, or boy A the best, you want to have multiple people that you’re talking to, so you don’t get too attached.’”
Business and dating advice from Amanda Bradford herself? You best believe we’re over here taking notes.
Want more? Check out the full interview on our podcast.
