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This essay is based on a conversation with Julie Griggs and Daniel Dietzeck, founders of social dating app Fourplay. Griggs, a former physician assistant, and Dietzeck, a former nurse, launched the app in 2019 with no technology experience and left their jobs to manage the startup full time in 2022. Essays have been edited for length and clarity.
Julie: I was finishing up my clinical training and dating. I wrote in my profile on the app that I would only be matched with men who had single friends that I could take on double dates with. Within the first week, over 30 men told me it was so much fun and a better way to date. They joked about me starting an app.
Daniel: We had never really dabbled in business before, let alone coding.
Julie: I literally Googled “how to start a business.” From there I Googled how to start an app. And I learned the term “MVP.” [minimum viable product] We kept wondering, “What does that even mean?” We started reading books and learned about the concept of a development firm. A development firm is a company that you can outsource work to a company that will build it for you. It took us about nine months to build the MVP and we spent about $25,000.
Julie: Our first 1,000 sign-ups started coming in, but the timing was bad. We launched in 2019 and then COVID-19 hit shortly after.
Daniel: It was really bad timing for us. But it gave us the time we needed to really flesh out what our business was and what the value of our business was, because we had never done anything like that before. We relaunched the app in January 2021.
We had to split up our co-CEO roles and create strict rules about texting each other.
Julie: I don’t think that all friends can start a business together. It’s a huge challenge. I don’t think they should start a business together and I understand why it would destroy a friendship. Daniel and I are weird people.
Daniel: We made this plan. It was a really silly plan, but it’s worked for four years. We would only communicate about Fourplay on WhatsApp, and only about our personal friendship on iMessage. I would never think to text Julie about Fourplay on iMessage.
Julie: Overall, starting a company between friends is a very challenging proposition. We clashed a lot when we first decided to call each other co-CEOs. It was very stressful because we wanted to feel like we had equal control. But in reality, it made it hard to communicate with each other and hard to make decisions. Once we established our roles in the business, it all actually fell into place.
Julie: Danielle handles the marketing and growth side of the business. She does a fantastic job in that regard. I’m better at the operational side of things, like running the day-to-day operations and fundraising.
The first MVP failed, but Fourplay’s users helped save the company
Julie: After the relaunch, things were going well for about a year until we started receiving emails from users. Then, all of a sudden, the app started to have problems. A developer from the outsourced company told me privately, “I didn’t fully understand your concept. I never expected you to have 1,000 users, let alone 11,000 users. If you keep going like this, your app will completely break.”
Julie: It was really upsetting. We tried to fight them and resolve the issue, instead of taking on the burden ourselves, but they just handed us the contract. Honestly, it was a good lesson for me and Daniel. We learned that we needed to hire someone in-house.
Julie: Interestingly, we got help from two guys we met at Fourplay. They were both founders and CTOs and they said they were always happy to help out. We didn’t have a background in that field, so we asked one of them to do a final round of technical interviews. After the interview, he called us and said, “This guy can do the job, you should hire him.” And we did.
The transition from healthcare to the startup world was difficult at first.
Danielle: It was a hard transition because I didn’t really see myself as an entrepreneur. My mental image of an entrepreneur was a guy like Mark Cuban, wearing a suit and sitting in a boardroom. Once I realized there might be a way to bring compassion and empathy to the dating scene, it all started to click.
Julie: I agree with Daniel. It was hard at first because I consider myself a nurturer. I had to figure out how to do that in a startup. Now I love creating an environment where people actually want to work.
Julie: I also invested a lot of time and money into my career as a physician assistant. It was a big sacrifice for me. So there were moments of uncertainty. I sacrificed a lot of my 20s to become a physician assistant, and now I’m going to sacrifice a lot of my 20s and 30s for Fourplay? But the feedback from our users gave us confidence that we were doing the right thing.
I have a lot to learn about technology, but being on TV made me feel like I was on the right track.
Daniel: One of the first lessons we learned is that no one is going to steal your idea. We were so scared to have a conversation with anyone. In the early days, some people would sign non-disclosure agreements. But we found that founders are generally willing to help others start their own companies because they’ve been through the same thing before.
Julie: We were also really surprised by the complexity of the technology. As a general user, you get used to how easy things are. You don’t realize how long things actually take. What might seem like a trivial, small feature to us can actually be very complex from a technology perspective.
Julie: Our first big success was when one of our first user-generated content videos on TikTok got 1 million views and turned into downloads almost instantly. She wasn’t even an influencer, it was just a group of roommates that we found to make videos. It was a perfect hit with the algorithm. We got almost 1,000 new downloads overnight.
Julie: A really great moment for us was when we did an appearance on Live With Kelly and Ryan. I was still working as a PA and a friend texted me to turn on the show. They were talking about Fourplay and pretending to be on a date. I posted on LinkedIn asking if anyone had the link and I watched it on YouTube after work.