The Dating App Founder Who Wants You to Stop Swiping

Within minutes of meeting Amanda Bradford, founder of dating app The League, I had to bring up the company’s did-they-really-just-say-that subway ads.

“Date someone with a 5-year plan that makes you want to ovulate” one reads; “Achieve multiple goalgasms” suggests another. Covering three New York stations—Columbus Circle, West Fourth and Bedford Avenue—the innuendo-laden black-and-white posters have provoked a flurry of criticism and general mockery online.

I asked if the blowback had given Bradford any second thoughts about the campaign. “You want people to be talking about it,” she said happily while sipping an almond milk latte at the Australian cafe Two Hands in Nolita. “That’s a failed billboard campaign if no one takes pictures of it. It’s like, did it exist? Did it happen?”

Though The League is still dwarfed by competitors Tinder, Hinge and Bumble, its user base is all too happy to talk about the brand—and willing to spend on it. Bradford knows her audience intimately, perhaps because she built the app for herself and people like her. A self-defined “alpha female,” Bradford attended Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford Graduate School of Business, worked at Salesforce and Google, and initially recruited app users in San Francisco by bouncing from The Battery, a social club, to Ivy League alumni holiday parties, handing out League-branded cards to Silicon Valley’s most eligible.

Offering users the promise of a smaller, more selective pool of daters, The League has banked on this not-for-everyone approach since its early years. It operates on a freemium model, with paid tiers from $299 per month all the way up to $1,000 per week. The company, which Bradford claims has been profitable since 2017, was acquired by Match Group last year for a reported $30 million. Its “GoalDigger” ad campaign is the result of a new influx of marketing dollars from Match, and of The League’s attempt to appeal to a broader audience—one with less clearly defined goals. “Despite our stereotype as an app for rich, Ivy-League alums, this isn’t about money—and it never has been,” the company recently stated on Instagram.