Explosive Growth: A Few Things I Learned While Growing To 100 Million Users - And Losing $78 Million

by Cliff Lerner

Seizing the opportunity to steal publicity, we piggybacked off this story and created controversy through our own press release that drove attention to our website. The press release stated that the shocking tournament loss made Duke students so upset and depressed that they flocked to online dating sites to cure their depression (misery loves company), and we provided some data to back it up. About a week later, we got an email from the school newspaper, the Duke Chronicle, asking for some more data around the Duke’s students’ online dating activity. They ran a follow-up story on it, and it quickly became a hot-button issue on campus. The story ended up getting republished all over the country,