GTM Sauce

Zoom University · B2C · double-dating video app for college students

Name the app after a trending meme; post jokes in every college Facebook group

40,000-person waitlist, 7 women per man; top 10 in Social

Workedorganic-socialpr-launchcommunity

What they did

Named the double-dating app after the 'Zoom University' meme during COVID and leaned into it: posted funny content on meme pages and joined every college's Facebook group to build a waitlist before the app was built.

What happened

Waitlist of ~40,000 with a 7:1 female-to-male ratio; later a couple hundred thousand downloads and top 10 in the App Store social category.
Stage
pre-launch

In their words

Hunter Isaacson - Meet The Guy Who Solved Growing Apps

Play from 14:42
14:40

HostGood lessons learned, though.

14:42

Hunter IsaacsonI started this app, though, in 2017. So, it took two and a half years just to like go through multiple iterations, different designs, paid a development agency, and this one I fully sunset in 2020. And then, I built this one next. This is Zoom University. We had the idea of like, let's build a double-dating app for college kids. And it started with it was like, we literally, it was like a meme, because like Zoom University was a meme at the time. And we're like, let's just like embrace the meme. So, we like went on meme pages and posted content and just like funny stuff. What it did

15:13

Hunter Isaacsonis it like just got everybody excited about it, and we had a waitlist of like 40,000 people, and it was a 7-to-1 girl-to-guy ratio, which is in dating is unheard of. And that was a a real lesson I learned of like, women will do things because they're really comfortable that they're with another woman. That's what made it so great, is cuz like, oh, if you're a young girl, you don't want to go on like a video chat app and talk to some random guy, …

16:15

HostI remember the Zoom University Facebook group. Did you guys own that?

16:19

Hunter IsaacsonI'd have to ask my buddy, Danny, but I know we were in every single Facebook group for every college. The V1 of this app was actually done over Zoom, which was funny, like sending meeting codes. And then, we built this app very, very quickly.

16:33

HostThat's wild. I like the private chat and then the public chat. It definitely solves that problem.

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Tags: instagram, facebook, meme-marketing, waitlist, college-groups