#127 $2 Million in Funding to Build TikTok for Dating w/ 21-year-old Marc Baghadjian, Co-Founder and CEO at Lolly

Someone says, I will kill you in the next 30 days if you don't learn how to speak French. I promise you that in 30 days, you will speak French amazingly. The key differentiator is the urgency and the effort in which they want to do those things. What is going on, futurists? This is Michael Zuccon, your host and the founder and creator of Our Future. We're the go-to business podcast and media brand for young people. And today I have an awesome interview lined up for you guys today with a young founder, Mr. Mark Bagajian. Mark is a senior at Babson College and he's an awesome, awesome entrepreneur building Lolly. It's a Gen Z dating app that is like TikTok but for dating. So people convey their personality, their interests, their traits over video instead of just being kind of a swipe, you know, static image like Tinder is. They really want to innovate. I'm super excited for you guys to tap into his perspective. Hope you guys enjoy. You're getting all the coverage right now, man. You're in Forbes, CNBC, like where else are you at? You're like Business Insider. You just blew up, man. It's like past week, past two weeks. We have a lot of good press, but Forbes is the big one, Business Insider, Vox, and then a bunch of smaller publications. It was nice. Congrats. It's good. It's good because we were super lucky. Were you one of those kids who always wanted to get, like, I want to get 30 out of 30 one day. I mean, it's not like a main thought, but it's like you got on Forbes. How does it feel? Yeah, dude. I've always wanted to be on Forbes. Ever since I was a little kid. 30 under 30, I don't really know. I don't know much about that program. I hear a mix of things about the program. I think it's pretty awesome. I've always wanted to be Forbes 30 under 30, but I don't know much about it. Now you're Forbes 22 under 22, man. That should be the new thing. Are you 22? Yeah, when I'm 21. Is that a thing? Is there something like that? No, but that's what our future is going to create. We're going to be 30 under 30 is too old, bro. We're going to be the list maker, the kingmaker for young entrepreneurs. You're at this nuts house right now that's full of entrepreneurs. Yeah, right now we're in this house in Beverly Hills with a bunch of awesome entrepreneurs. It's called Launch House. They just nucleate great people. People who've sold their businesses. One kid's raising $100 million for Ethereum fund. He sold his company to Coinbase. Another kid, 22, sold his company to Lyft. Another person just raised a series A round. It's called Catch. Just a bunch of interesting things out here. I encourage you to come through. Let's talk about what you're working on, bro. The reason you got featured in the press is because you're working on a dating app for Gen Z. It's called Lolly. Tell me about what your app is in 30 seconds. We are building the most fun way to date online on your mobile phone. We're using short form video to do that. We're basically a fusion of TikTok meets Tinder. You come for dating, you stay for the fun ecosystem, stay for the content. It's like a talent show for dating. No, it's more just you being yourself. Everyone is, I would suppose, interesting in their own way. Everyone is talented. People are interesting. Tinder only has one dimension, one layer of dimension for a person. That's if they're hot or not. You can't really sell your interests. You can't sell your personality on a Tinder. It's hard. Pictures just do that. Then it's just three pictures. That's why it wins because hot people win on its platform. If hot people win on your platform, everybody else wants to go. It's like the club. It's pretty easy rhetoric. It's pretty easy psychology. If you could build an ecosystem where hot people can still win, but also allow for people with personality or people with cool interests to also win, you all of a sudden open up that access to three more dimensions, four more dimensions, multi-dimensional dating. I can win, and I could potentially get a date with someone who's way out of my league because they're super into cooking, and I'm a master chef. That's all the videos on my profile. Were you personally driven to create this platform because you weren't satisfied with your experience on Tinder? You wasn't coming through or what? Tinder was good, but I was super frustrated because I'm a very expressive guy. I'm eccentric. I make a lot of noise and high energy. It's really hard to do all that on Tinder. I just can't be fun on Tinder. It blows my mind because I'm just like, dude, that's not me. It's so hard to be me on that platform. Look at Tinder. It hasn't innovated since 2012. Yeah. Look at TikTok as everyone's being themselves. That's the future of media, right? Taking away the buttoned up kind of hot or not Instagram influencer shit. It's me and you, and this is who I am, and we're accepting that. What is Mark doing on the app? I'm a girl or I don't know, maybe even a boy to be. I'm looking at Mark's profile. What are you doing? Just girls, but as I scroll through, on my end, I don't know. That's a really good question. What would you be doing in the video? Could be a video of me fencing. He used to fence a lot. Could be a video with me. Honestly, most likely than not, it's a video of me and my boys dancing at a party. I'm looking at my profile now. I don't know what to think about it. It's me on a hike with my best friend. It's me dancing to I Got a Feeling. It's just a sick time. It's me and all my boys in my dorm room, pre-gaming to get ready to go, to go out. That's from Babson. Yeah, it's from Babson. I still go to Babson. I'm a senior at Babson. Me shotgunning a beer. It's me shotgunning a beer with my best friend, Quinn. That's another video. That's me. I'm going to be a monkey. I'm going to be kind of fun. I'm a high energy person. You're for the boys. I'm for the boys, as you know. I love it. That would be me. We've been very fortunate that a lot of people see their own profiles before they even download the app. They're like, oh, dude, I could put all my pottery stuff. Or, oh, dude, I can put all that stuff from Coachella. Whatever. It could be your videos from Coachella. It could be from your videos. It could be from you. It would be me and my podcast doing some podcast stuff. Doing some shit. That's my passion. That's what I would put on there in the studio. That would be one video. Another video would be you surfing. You with your boys just laughing. Are you saying a funny joke? There's so much. An impression. My Joker impression is pretty good. Oh, my God, dude. Do you want to show me? My dad was a drinker. Yeah, dude. That's pretty good. One night, he came home crazier than ever. Mom took a kitchen knife to defend herself, and dad didn't like that. Not one bit. No, I would use some impressions, but I really like it. It's just a beautiful concept. Has any of these other dating apps that aren't Tinder, that aren't dedicated to the young audience, do this? Because I know there's adults who are not going by the hot or not philosophy on their dating apps, right? It's more like, I'm a working professional, or I'm divorced. You know what I'm saying? Are you borrowing from an app, or is this totally unique? Totally unique. I mean, I'm borrowing from TikTok. From TikTok, yeah. I mean, I'm just borrowing from TikTok. I mean, I just see that people are dating on TikTok, but it's a power law distribution. It's one to many. How many users do you currently have, and did you get a big lift from the Forbes coverage, probably the CNBC coverage, all that shit? No, we did get a lift from that. We don't want to delve into numbers today. We're a little guard about the numbers, but enough for us to raise two subsequent rounds right out after the other. We had our first round, we raised a million, and then we raised another round, completely a new round, another additional million. Right now, we're sitting on $2 million in commitments, and we can only bank $1 million on top of the $1 million that we already raised. From John Scully? From a lot of people. We had a lot of awesome people just enter orbit. We had SV Angel, Ron Conway's firm. We had co-founder of Wired, Jane Metcalfe, all the way to some more standard institutions like Mexico's Ventures and Correlation Ventures. John Scully, the former CEO of Apple, invested in your company? John Scully ended up jumping in, and he ended up participating as a shareholder in the company. Wow. You met him at a party? Is that how it went? No, John, I had cold emailed him two years ago. I just built a relationship with him over time, and he's just been a supporter. People who listen to this podcast know about cold emails and how to get in touch with them. So, kudos to you, bro. Cheers to you for getting in touch with the former CEO of Apple and Pepsi. That's very impressive, my guy. What's the plan? It's to raise money. Why? Why do you need to raise money? Is it for engineers? Is it for- Yeah, dude, half of it's going to go to talent, and then 25% more than that will go to marketing, and then the additional 25% is just buffer. You'd be surprised at the expenses that you incur. We want to be very generous, with the money that we spend to hire the best talent. The biggest mistake that startups will do is that they don't pay for good talent. One engineer could be the make or break of the cut business. They could think one great product person that you were so begrudgingly paying $150,000 for, or whatever, $200,000 for, could give you the best idea. They find a product market fit, and then the business becomes a business. No, this is really good. No, I understand. I mean, you think the simplest problems can get solved with money, and it's not the case. You need the right minds on those problems. I interviewed the former. We're not the current director of engineering at Instagram. And what he said, the crazy thing about social media, you're just scrolling and it's seamless. You don't understand that how highly engineered these companies are, that that can happen. Everybody has a unique feed, billions of people, and hopefully billions of people will be on your platform one day. But it's just insane to think about this. If you want to scale this, it's got to be like seamless, right? And you need the people to do it. That's right, dude. That's right. It's just people. It's just great people. I mean, that's the secret to every business. Does that mean you're going to hire a head of human resources or something like that? To hire people? No, I will be running for. Yeah, dude, you never want to give that. The head of human resources is great, but you need to lead the culture charge. You need to be responsible for every hire that comes in the company. One-on-ones with all the people that get to the final stage of the company, like you need to do your diligence. You need to be on top of those things because you must protect your culture at all costs. What does that mean? You don't really get what culture means when you first start. What does culture mean? Culture, getting culture right, is the difference between someone going home at seven o'clock and someone not going home and sleeping on the couch and working five more hours. Think about it. There are people who want to take my lunch money. There are C-level people at some very big companies who just left very big companies who are building something, something that they don't want to do. They don't want to do it. Similar to what I'm building. He is coming to take my lunch money. I won't let him. I have a stronger back than him. I will outpace him. The secret is I have to build a culture around, hey, there is no not working on the weekends. You work on the weekends. It's preposterous for me to not work on the weekends. It would be asinine if I didn't work Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I don't work all day, Saturday, Sunday. I'm going to have three, four meetings on Saturday, maybe each 30 minutes long. It's two hours of work. It's nothing. Some people complain. Some people won't do that. Some people won't touch it. Me, our employees, I love it, but so does everyone else. When you come work with us, you should love building your business. You should love building your house. You should love building, watering your plants. You are an equity stakeholder once you come into the business. The reality is that anyone who gets involved has equity in this company. If you have equity in this company, and I'm fucking working seven days a week for your equity to be worth something, bro, you better expect you to work fucking seven days a week for my equity to be worth something. It's not fair. Why would I work seven days a week so that your equity is worth something? Equity that I would love to have. Equity that anybody would love to have. This perspective, honestly, is just key when it comes to people, with us internally. Whenever we get complacent, there are people in Monrovia, Liberia, dirt floor aluminum roofs who are building businesses. With nothing. Nothing. You have Wi-Fi. You have a laptop. You have internet. You have food. You have all the food you could ever want in the US. You have the libraries. You have all that plus millions in venture funding. How does it feel then to carry the responsibility of other people's money now with your vision? Obviously, it's a privilege. It's a privilege that I'm very lucky that I have. But it's two ways. I'm hiring my investors. I know my worth. I get to pick which investors I want to work with. And it is a mutual obligation. You guys are going to be capital. You're going to work with me. But it's not that I'm very blessed that I'm in this situation now. There's a lot of money out there. But I'm hiring my investors because I know what I'm worth. I know that I will succeed. And I know that I will make the people who give me money, money. Now, is it this company? I hope so. I really think so. You don't know. You never have a guarantee as an entrepreneur. But a serial founder will always guarantee. A serial founder who's resilient and works really hard will guarantee making investors money. And that's going to be you. But I'm blessed, dude. I'm blessed for my investors. They know it. I tell them all the time. And my signature sign-off is I'm going to make you proud. I love it. You're a hustler, dude. You emailed this Scully guy two years ago, and now he's an investor. It speaks to serendipity and just being able to network with people. I mean, what's your piece of advice to a kid who wants to do what you have and build a business and raise money, though? I mean, how are you able to even start? Is your co-founder an engineer? If I, theoretically, this is going to go crazy. This is it. I mean, they need to hear these anecdotes. There is a scene from Fight Club like this. If you take a gun, put it to your head, someone else takes a gun, put it to your head, and he says, you must learn, some dude's like, you have to learn French in the next 30 days or I will kill you. Let's just say theoretically. And you have an immense sense of urgency. I promise you that what would take six months for a normal person to learn, you will sit down for 20 hours a day, you will learn, you will learn, you will learn, you will learn, you will speak French so well at the end of 30 days. I'll be so impressed. I promise you what it is that anyone is capable of doing anything. Ladies and gentlemen, that was Mark Bogajian, the founder and CEO of Lolly. Check it out in the app store, Lolly. It's only available on iOS, but it should be pretty good if you're looking for a little romantic action. Here's the pandemic winds down. And as always, thank you for listening. Please leave me a review on Apple Podcasts. It takes less than 60 seconds. It really helps the show grow. And as always, I want you to do one thing and that is to stay frosty, everybody. Peace out.