First post from the AMA series.

First post from the AMA series. Pretty simply about how we started and built the first versions of LFG.

Can you please talk about the first steps of launching LF.Group: from picking the idea to PMF?
Really interested to hear about the very beginning: what you did, and how you understood you were on the right track and should keep going.

To make it easier, I’ll throw in topics, you can say a couple words on each:
1. What other ideas you had back then, and how you chose between them
2. Did you raise money, or bootstrap
3. First users — where did you get them?
4. Did you build the MVP before users, or users first and then MVP?
5. What acquisition channels worked at the very beginning? did you try anything else?
6. How did you understand metrics were good enough and you could scale? at that stage was monetization more important, or retention?

Alright, let’s go point by point, I’ll try to answer short and to the point.

1. The idea was simple: I played a ton of World of Warcraft and finally decided to make something for myself. And the problem was eternal: “how do you find a decent person to play with at your rating and time.” Everyone was sitting in Discord, obviously. So we decided to start with a bot so we could build an audience faster and also less dev. We kicked off with custom lobbies for Hearthstone (threw out a call and played with whoever joined) and parties for key runs in World of Warcraft (picked your class params and rating and threw out a call). It worked like a simple “looking for” post; the main feature we built was the ability to see a search request not only on the server where you left it but on other servers connected to our bot too.

2. We raised. Almost right after the first demo and the first 10k users. $1M USD and the lead was Grishin Robotics.

3. Like I said, Discord, since we made a bot. There you go manually to a server admin (local community) and make a deal, plus even back then we started working with streamers, since a lot of them have communities in Discord too.

4. Honestly it’s hard to say what “users before or after MVP” even means here, I don’t fixate that hard on that concept. Probably we just started acquiring users with the first working version.

5. We onboarded communities into the bot manually. Manually came to streamers, manually posted wherever we could (Reddit, different communities).

6. No way. You just had to grow and see that growth wouldn’t stop the moment something happened. No monetization. The main task was to understand whether the use case works and whether it can grow at the needed pace. DAU/MAU growth ahead of Retention growth in this case. We started making money already much closer to the exit.

Overall it’s hard for me to say there was some kind of PMF as such; what was proven was the idea that with bloggers you can sell in-game items & currency and it works and it got bought. And we managed to grow it to decent numbers and very fast (in under half a year from zero to $10k USD GMV per day — in our case basically revenue since the goods were bought out).