Episode description

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Alex Ross is the co-founder & CEO at Gregarious, Inc. Gregarious is the company behind Greg, an app dedicated to helping people grow healthier and happier plants. Greg’s community has grown from 100 beta users in August 2020 to over 50,000 monthly active users today.

Alex graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, and studied data science and statistics at MIT. Alex has worked for companies such as Cisco, The Daily Aztec, and Cannon Trading.

Prior to founding Gregarious, Alex spent 4 years as Director of Engineering at Tinder. Alex also co-founded Enplug, a digital signage company that was acquired earlier this year.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The two critical steps in making a successful app
• An ingenious strategy for partnering your app with retail companies
• Why you should involve your customers in content creation

Links & Resources

• Tinder
• Enplug
• fitbod app
• Y Combinator (YC)

Alex Ross’ Links

• Greg app
• Alex’s Twitter: @AreteRoss
• Job opportunities at Gregarious
• Alex’s LinkedIn
• Gregarious, Inc. on LinkedIn

Follow Us:

David Barnard: https://twitter.com/drbarnard

Jacob Eiting: https://twitter.com/jeiting
RevenueCat: https://twitter.com/RevenueCat
Sub Club: https://twitter.com/SubClubHQ

Episode Transcript

Alex: 00:00:00

The two steps in making a successful app business are make something worth using, and then put it in front of the people who would use it.

If you have a plant, and you don’t know what to do with it, we solve that problem.

So, what we did is we reached out to a bunch of plant retailers, “Hey, we will help your customers have a positive outcome with your product.”

Can you put in our little QR code? And now when these retailers ship out a new plant, every single one of them has this little QR code in it.

It led to our first 15,000 users, I’d say. 

David: 00:00:30

Welcome to the Sub Club podcast. I’m your host, David Bernard. And with me as always, Jacob Eiting. Hello, Jacob.

Jacob: 00:00:53

Happy to be here. 

David: 00:00:55

You sound incredibly happy.

Jacob: 00:00:57

It’s great. It’s a Friday, David. The sun is shining. They’re grilling a bunch of chickens in my hometown. I got nothing to complain about. It’s gonna be great.

David: 00:01:05

Our guest today is Alex Ross, founder and CEO at Gregarious, makers of Greg, an app to help you grow healthier and happier plants. Prior to founding Gregarious Alex spent four years as director of engineering at Tinder.

Alex also co-founded Enplug, a digital signage company that was acquired earlier this year. Welcome to the podcast, Alex.

Alex: 00:01:27

Thank you guys. Good to see you. Thanks, David, Jacob.

Jacob: 00:01:29

Hi. 

David: 00:01:30

So, I’m going to try really hard this whole podcast and not call you Greg, but I’ve made that mistake.

Jacob: 00:01:36

I was thinking like, I get like annoying company name questions. Sometimes. I’m like, I’m sure you get more worse than me.

Alex: 00:01:43

But I’m considering just legally adopting Greg as alias or something. 

Jacob: 00:01:48

Yeah. You know, I mean, that’s a news cycle right there. A little bit of earned PR. 

David: 00:01:55

So I wanted to ask you, so obviously, you know, director of engineering at Tinder that’s, I mean, what a rocket ship that must’ve been quite a wild ride. So, tell me a little bit about, about how you ended up at Tinder and then, you know, if you do have any fun, war stories from there, that’d be great to hear. 

Alex: 00:02:16

Yeah, definitely. It was a rocket ship. Definitely some war stories, some wins, some losses. So, I came across Tinder and I was looking to get into like a consumer application. so I was interviewing with Uber and Twitter, and then I came across Tinder on an angel list. Actually the head of recruiting at the time reached out to me and I kind of took it on a whim.

To be honest, I had not used the app before, before even interviewing or anything. that’s kind of a challenge for Tinder is like, do you, how many of the teammates need to use Tinder? Because a lot of people are married and in relationships, and those are great people to have on the team. And so it makes it odd, and kind of difficult or complicated. 

But, basically I joined when it was around 70 people, if I recall. So, it was a pretty small team. There was already a global user base, so it was one of the scrappiest, global brands I think probably has ever existed. Because this was all right before Tinder or right around the time that Tinder launched its first monetization efforts.

And so there wasn’t really awareness as to like, great, there’s this like large, global, many millions of people are using this thing, but is it going to make money? Right? That was still an open question at the time that I joined. So, yeah, basically I joined and it was very, it was definitely still a startup.

And, so there was not a lot of structure and I think my manager changed on the first day, like the person I was talking about working with's desk changed, but I had a great time and basically I ended up creating the growth team. So I became very focused on, growing the international user base.

One of the coolest things that that team did is we decoupled Tinder from Facebook. And this was from Facebook login because like Tinder came to, came to fame by having, you know, you tap one button, it imports your Facebook photos. It basically made online dating as easy as it possibly can be because like you push a button you’re in and then you’re dating.

Right. And by making it that simple, it made it so you felt less than desperate by using it. I think it was like one of the important psychological dynamic, because if you feel like you have to work to start using that application, then maybe it means that like you aren’t having as much success in dating in the real world.

So, by making it simpler, it made it less stigmatized. More cool. Right? And so when we decided to then allow people to create accounts with a phone number that introduced all this complexity around like, well, are people going to want to do that? Then they have to add profile photos. They have to type in their name.

You have to introduce an onb...