Bindr: Your New Dating App

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Welcome to the Business Gay podcast, where we talk about all things business, marketing and entrepreneurship. I’m your host, Calan Breckon, and on today’s episode, I have CEO and co-founder of Bindr, Mary Richardson. Mary brings over six years of experience in building startups, marketing, community building, public speaking and software to her role as CEO. Her experience in being involved in software companies, as well as her social awareness, enables her to build a loyal community around Bindr. She has won several pitch competitions and awards, including a women in tech diversity and inclusion award and her first ever 2SLGBTQIA+ entrepreneur award with a $60,000 prize at this year’s Startupfest in Montreal. I’m excited to talk about the business of community and dating apps with Mary. So let’s jump in.

Hello. Hello, Mary. How’s it going? Welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:42] Mary Richardson: Hi Calan. I’m good. How are you doing?

[00:01:44] Calan Breckon: I’m good. I’m very excited to have you. So a fun story. We met recently in Montreal because you ended up winning at startup Fest. So first of all, congratulations again on winning at Startup Fest. That was absolutely amazing.

[00:02:00] Mary Richardson: Thank you so much. It’s not the first pitch competition I’ve done, but it’s the largest one I’ve won and it’s the most impactful, for sure. Super excited to have one, one that’s so meaningful to me for specifically queer entrepreneurs.

[00:02:18] Calan Breckon: Yeah, definitely. And it ended up being, was it 60,000 or did it end up being a little bit more?

[00:02:23] Mary Richardson: I’m pretty sure it’s 60,000.

[00:02:25] Calan Breckon: Okay. I was like, oh, I heard a rumor it might have kicked up to like 70,000, but we heard a rumor.

[00:02:30] Mary Richardson: That it was 70 as well. Um, actually, the founder of startupfest came up and whispered in Becca’s ear and told her that there was an extra investor, but we have not heard that yet. So according to, you know, QueerTech and a few people, they’re like, we’re pretty sure it’s 60, so.

[00:02:50] Calan Breckon: Okay, well, you might want to reach.

[00:02:51] Mary Richardson: Out and be like, hey, super exciting.

[00:02:52] Calan Breckon: Who is that other. Who is that other investor? We will happily take that extra $10,000. Thank you very much. It goes a long way, definitely. So let’s dive right in for the people. What is Bindr? Like, why did you win the competition? But, like, what is Bindr?

[00:03:09] Mary Richardson: So, Bindr is a dating and community app for LGBTQ people where they never have to set their sexual orientation. So with that, we’re making it more open and fluid. We’re trying to fight bisexual erasure by not having to label yourself as anything and just make it a more welcoming community to meet people. So, personally, I started it because I felt like there was a lot of places that weren’t right for me. I felt like I was either on the queer side or the straight side when I wanted to meet more than one gender. And queer apps that are specifically meant to be more fluid have very high pay walls where you have to pay to talk to people. So I tried to make something that I felt I would really enjoy, and it kind of organically grew on its own.

We are doing a lot for the community right now. Over the last year and a half, we have hundreds of thousands of users, so it’s grown very quickly, and we give free chest Bindrs out to people that can’t afford them or need a better one. We have geolocated resources on the app and on the website where people can find help where they are. That’s expanding to Canada. Right now it’s just United States, but we’re kind of working with what we know, but we want to make that worldwide because the app is everywhere. It’s legal to be queer, and, yeah, so. And then I think the one thing that really did it for startup fest is we kind of accidentally made another company. So because we were bootstrapped and we’re a startup and we needed a way to grow quickly that was not spending millions of money burning our marketing dollars, basically. So we built our own growth tech so that we could scale quickly. And after talking to people about it and how it works, we’ve gotten over 100 people reaching out, wanting to use it, started licensing it out to other founders, and that was a whole new.

A whole new company that came from it that still goes back and revenue shares to Bindr and we spent 45 minutes really digging into the technical nitty gritty of this with the judges, and they loved it and kept calling it revolutionizing and talked about how we can use this. So what it does is get whatever you’re implementing, whatever your website is, to the top of the search ranks. Like, overwhelmingly, like, overpoweringly. We work with Google instead of against it to get it at the top.

[00:05:42] Calan Breckon: Like SEO.

[00:05:44] Mary Richardson: Yeah, it’s very strategic, targeted SEO with a little AI help in there that makes hundreds of thousands of landing pages instead of one so that it indexes at a higher rate. And we were talking about all the different uses that we could do, how we could make all the affirming stuff for queer people come to the front. People could use it as election tech. Like, there’s so much different uses beyond just startups, and it’s crazy, honestly. But the more we dug into it, the judges said when they were talking to other founders, they kept thinking in their head, well, this, this would probably be the winner if they had Bindrs technology on it. And that they kept thinking back to us and they’re like, if we keep thinking back to how they could help other people, like, that’s kind of a sign as well. Plus, they loved the actual app and the message that we have behind it and the goal that we have behind it of trying to make a safer place for queer people.

[00:06:44] Calan Breckon: Yeah. So there’s a lot to unpack here. Um, my background is actually like SEO. And so, like, that is my jam. So we’re going to talk after the podcast about that, for sure. But I want to. I want to. I want to pull it back and go back to kind of the story and the journey that you were on that got you here because you mentioned by erasure. And it’s definitely a thing. Like, it is definitely a thing. Like the whole by now gay later. Like, you know, it happens all the time in the community. So I want you to share a little bit more about your journey and your experience on the dating app, specifically. Like, discrimination you experienced during that time.

[00:07:21] Mary Richardson: Yeah, I mean, it’s been on dating apps. It’s been in real life. Like, when you talk to people that either say, like, ooh, you’re bisexual, like, straight people fetishize you or think that it’s weird. Some gay people have told me that I’m not gay enough or like, lesbians don’t want to date me because, and obviously not every people, but my own personal experience, I felt that it’s happened a lot where, um, if I’ve been with a man before, they. They don’t want to talk to me. So.

And just like the pick aside thing where people are like, oh, you’re. You’ll come out later, you’re just not there yet. And like, no, this is who I am. I technically identify as pansexual, but I don’t like labels. And it’s all under that bisexual umbrella. And, um, we, me and my partner have both had our own journeys with this, that it was very close to our heart and we’ve seen it happen to us and our friends.

My co founder was in a same sex relationship for twelve years, that when he tried to come out as bisexual to his partner, they said, like, if you’re bisexual, you don’t love me. Like, you can only be gay to be in a relationship with me because we’re both Mendenna. Um, and we’ve seen this happen a lot and we’re just really not chill with it.

[00:08:47] Calan Breckon: You know what? It’s interesting you bring that up. Cause I have a person that I was intimate with and we had this conversation around how the reason their long term relationship hadn’t worked out that they were recently out of was because he was wanting to explore this side of him that he did enjoy maybe being intimate with females, maybe not having relationships with them, but, like, every once in a while had that interest and his partner couldn’t fathom that. Like, couldn’t understand that aspect of it and was like, either all or nothing. Um, and I think we do need to have these conversations in community, and we do need to give that visibility out there because it has been very staunch. Like, either you’re gay or lesbian, or, like, the b is very small in the LGBTQ community. Um, and so I think it’s important we have these conversations, we share these stories, because we have so many different ways of being. And actually, stats recently have started coming out. I just read an article the other day that, like, nearly 50% of Gen Z’s are identifying as just not straight.

You know, no labels really, but they’re like, not straight. And the majority of that not straight are kind of classifying themselves more in the bisexual fluid, pansexual kind of space.

And so it’s. It’s just, we need to stop putting people in the boxes. You know what I’m saying?

[00:10:14] Mary Richardson: Yes, exactly. We use that with our marketing a lot. Like, we don’t force you into a box that you don’t want to be in. We don’t force labels on you that you feel like you have to stick with. And I even had students at startup fest at Montreal, in Montreal come up to me, talking to me like saying, I love this no label aspect because he said, I am bisexual. But as more I put it out as a label to myself and talk to people about it, I felt the need to prove to them that I also like women and kind of pushed myself to being a little more hetero. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. And I do like everybody generally, but not when I feel pressured into it. And I totally feel that because on dating apps, we found that when you go to set select your sexual orientation, some of them have like 20 of them and. But you first, you look at like the first three to five and you’re like, I don’t, I don’t fit here if it’s not right there. And you feel like that they’re focusing on those ones. Um, same thing with, in real life, like when you’re identifying as something that’s a little more obscure that you feel like you have to educate people on, it’s harder to. When you can just say like, I am who I am, I marry, I’m human, I love the person not, doesn’t matter what your gender identity is to me. So. And I think, like you said with Gen Z, that’s becoming much, much more prevalent that they don’t really care. And the startup fest, like, the queer judges that are amazing people, they said, some of them are older, and they said, when I was younger, you could not be out and have a job at all. And now, like, this new world is giving us such hope. So that that’s really a lot more of what we’re trying to lean into. And for everybody, our app has such a wide age demographic because sometimes older people will come up and they’re like, yeah, but it’s not for me. I’m like, no, there’s actually a lot of the older generation on here exploring theirselves from the first time because it feels like a more welcoming space to do so.

[00:12:29] Calan Breckon: Oh, 110%. I could talk about older generations coming out at nauseam. I’ve done a podcast before where I had an older generation of coming out later in life, like after they got married to somebody of the opposite sex, had kids, did the whole family thing because that’s what you were supposed to do back in the day, and then was like, okay, I’m like, in my forties, fifties, sixties, and I’m still not happy. This still isn’t going away. I think I’m old enough to just finally like, explore here and go there. So it doesn’t surprise me that there’s older generations on your app.

[00:13:04] Mary Richardson: Mm hmm. Yeah, it’s really a big mix of it, and we love it. And I love reading people’s bios, as I’m swiping through that, says, you know, I’ve been in straight relationships my whole life, but I think I’m, like, 38% gay, and they put a number to it or something. And I’m like, this is. I just love reading it. I love hearing different people’s perspectives, or when they. I send out a welcome email that when you sign up for the app, you can respond directly to me, and it forwards to my email, and I see everybody’s feedback and how they like it, or I feel like this really fits me. And that’s honestly one of my favorite parts of being Bindr CEO is actually hearing from the users and, uh, listening to them and looking at them as like, wow, these are all people. A lot of. I think in the dating scene, a lot of people look at their users as just a number count that they need to get higher. And looking at it for, as every single one of these are people who felt like my platform was right for them is very motivating, and it definitely helps me, like, work harder every day.

[00:14:13] Calan Breckon: Definitely. For myself, I. I consider myself a sapiosexual, which means, like, I’m very, like, mental brain thought process. Like, you have to tickle me up here before you can tickle me anywhere else kind of a thing. Um, and with dating apps. So, like, Grindr? No, forget about it. That is not where you meet somebody else for the brain conversation. Tinder. Most people don’t even fill out their profiles anymore. It’s just like, here’s my photos. Like, swipe left or swipe right. Like, it’s all a commodification of, like, human beings, and it’s just, like, hinge was the only one that you kind of had to explain things a little bit more, and it took a little bit more energy to put into it. But other than that, it was so hard to find people that it’s like, let’s just drop all this stuff and, like, let’s just get to know each other like human beings again, not commodities. Um, so I’m very excited for what you’re doing over a Bindr. I’m curious. Raising funds as an LGBTQ funder or founder is not easy. Study by Startout shows that we received less than 0.5% of all VC funding. What’s your experience been like? So far. So I know you just won this big, giant prize, which was awesome, but what’s your experience up until that been so far?

[00:15:23] Mary Richardson: We got offered a few really bad deals that luckily we had some mentors on our side early on that were able to tell us, like, no, these people are taking advantage of you. Um, and, you know, the. Those numbers that you said are absolutely correct. I’ve done a lot of research into it. It drops even more when you’re a woman. A lot of queer founders that get VC funding are gay, white, Men that are usually out. So I think those are, like, for being out, but still, you’re looking at somebody who looks like you across the table, even if they don’t identify the same as you. So it’s honestly been difficult. I’ve gotten a few yeses. Like, I do have a lead investor, but it’s taken a lot longer than they anticipated. You know, when you’re a woman and when you’re queer, especially both together, VC’s are going to look for more reasons to say no. I think that’s always their job. With everybody, it’s looking for reasons to say no. But being able to, like, talk at start a fest to actual queer investors, they got me so much more quickly. There’s so much less of an education to it of why we’re doing this and why it needs to be needed, like, why the app is needed. Because I’ve gotten from just, you know, run of the mill traditional funders, like, well, just use whatever ones. You know, why does it even need to be a thing? And sometimes you just have to say, well, if they’re not gonna get it, they’re not gonna get it, but it’s harder to even get in those rooms, honestly, most of the funds like my query, my lead investor is a traditional fund, so I’m thankful with that. But a lot of the ones that I’ve gotten yeses for and I’ve gotten into the meetings are ones that specifically work with women founders or queer founders. So that’s.

It’s definitely been an obstacle to overcome. But that would be my advice, I guess, is to look for ones that want to specifically work with you and want to fill that because you can’t fit a square hole into a round peg. And sometimes, you know, we just don’t need to try.

[00:17:33] Calan Breckon: Yeah, definitely. What advice would you have for other founders who are part of, like, these disadvantaged groups when it comes to fundraising? Like, what have you learned through this process?

[00:17:42] Mary Richardson: I’ve learned that I have to be better. I have to come in as the smartest one and the one that’s really hard to say no to because I already have these disadvantages in me. So I have to come in and say, you know, it’s been a year and a half, and this is how we did it. We’ve spent with pride events probably 20,000 in marketing for the whole thing, but without pride events, like $5,000 in marketing, and we have hundreds of thousands of users. I talk about the story and get the emotional and then hit them really hard with really strong, good numbers that they cannot refute are good.

So I usually flip the ratios around. So if I’m saying, as a woman founder, you’re only going to get 2% of the funding for people of color, um, and for LGBTQ, like, do the same thing, flip it around, say, if only 98% of VC funding or 2% of VC funding comes to us, I have to be 98% better. And look at that. Look at every single competition, like, everyone that you’re going up against and think, how can I show them that I’m that much better? Because you already know you’re disadvantaged and you have to, unfortunately, work a lot harder, and that’s. You just have to want it more. But that’s honestly what entrepreneur is that I found is you get out what you put in.

[00:19:06] Calan Breckon: Definitely when you were earlier on, or, I don’t know. Throughout this whole process, was there angel investors that you went to and maybe found a little bit more easier to find, maybe a couple angels in your world, or did you have any experience there? Did you go straight to VC’s?

[00:19:21] Mary Richardson: So I did a lot of pitch competitions, actually. I was trying to get as much free money as possible because I didn’t know that much about traditional funding. Um, like, I did the classes I learned, but it was a little intimidating to me as a woman. I was worried people were going to try to take advantage of me because the first offer that we got was really, really bad terms. They wanted. The investors wanted to come on as founders and, like, write themselves into that to it that way, taking, like, 10% of the company, not giving us that much money. And I’ve seen people do similar deals, but it just didn’t feel right. It felt predatory to me. They were two white men that seemed like good people, but they didn’t have anything to do with the community. They’re very republican, and that’s not aligning with everything that we’re doing, especially in the states right now. So we were lucky enough to turn that away, but we did find, like, that deal itself made me very wary, so we bootstrapped it. I got $40,000 from pitch competitions that I kept winning. Thankfully, the first one I did was really scary to me. It was really big, and I won $15,000 for that first one, and then smaller increments for a few others. I got into an accelerator and then I got into a big girl accelerator is what I was thinking of it as, where they actually took some funding or they took some equity and gave us a good amount of funding. At Alpha Lab in Pittsburgh, we were able to get $100,000 for 2%, which is the same amount that, you know, those people were trying to get for 10%.

[00:21:16] Calan Breckon: That’s a pretty good deal. Yeah, that’s pretty decent deal, yeah.

[00:21:20] Mary Richardson: Especially for as early on as we are, where we only had 40,000 users when they brought us on and helped us grow, gave us a lot of mentorship, a lot of connections to VC’s.

So, and to this. To now, I think we’re at 200,000 raised with the 60k from, um, startup fest. The 40,000 that I personally was able to round up from pitch competitions and different, uh, grants and stuff that I was able to find and then.

But we’ve only taken equity out for, you know, so much. So we’ve been able to run really lean. Now we’re raising $3 million for our seed round, and that’s been almost. It’s been a full time job.

[00:22:07] Calan Breckon: Oh, yeah, fundraising. They say, like, you’re dedicated and it’s like months, months, and it’s just, you gotta slog through it and get it done. And it’s hundreds of meetings and, like, for every. What did they say? I think it’s like, for every hundred thousand you want to raise, you need to meet like a hundred people or something like that. Like something crazy, like you need.

[00:22:28] Mary Richardson: Our accelerator told us, get, like, if you get 40 warm intros, you should get six meetings set up from that. And one yes is what the goal is. So looking at it like that, I’m like, wow. And we started doing this during pride month, where we were going to events every single weekend, going to Canada for weeks at a time. Uh, and it was just hectic. Like one of my, uh, investment calls, I was in the back of a car, hot spotting, and I’m just thinking, like, they probably think I. I’m crazy to do this, but it was the only time I had to take it. And so we’re doing what we have to. Luckily, now we’re still doing one pride event this weekend in Harrisburg. So excited about that, but it’s calmed down. So we’re still doing a lot of, we’re doing drag shows and different stuff that we can sponsor in person, but it’s not back to, back to back events. So I can focus a bit more on, you know, being in a calm setting for my meetings.

[00:23:32] Calan Breckon: Yeah, but you got to do what you got to do when you’re fundraising.

[00:23:36] Mary Richardson: Yeah, for sure. We found that is very, very true.

[00:23:39] Calan Breckon: So you’ve shared a little bit about, you know, what’s next. You’re doing your $3 million fund raise. That’s what you want to do. Um, what do you have? Is Bindr, like, out there? Is it full beta? Is it launched? Like, what, what territory are we there? Like, when’s your full, full launch?

[00:23:57] Mary Richardson: So we worked a bit differently than most apps, and talking to founders, I always encourage them to do similar, is just build and get it out and work on the rest as your platform’s already out. So when we, me and Brandon, my co founder, decided we were going to launch this, he built the first version in two weeks and had it launched to the app, to iOS. And then within two months, he had an Android build as well. They weren’t great. They weren’t looking like we look now, but we’ve been on the app store for a year and a half now. So all of we’re available fully on iOS, Android, and web. But I won’t say that it’s completely bug free, but it’s really good. And it’s. I love the design. I think it’s really fun. You know, it’s.

Feels really good and professional. There’s a few bugs here and there, but we work on them as we go. And that’s why we think it’s so important to launch early and get the feedback from your users, because what you think is wrong might not be what your user experiences.

For example, we never put sexual orientations in. Nobody ever asked for them. And that’s one reason we knew that that was the right move. People were asking for messaging, people were asking for age filters. They were asking for, because all of these things came kind of one step at a time. Um, we had the basic platform out there, got 300 people to sign up in a week, but the messaging was a little broken. We didn’t have any distance filters, we didn’t have any age filters because we wanted people to see as many people as they could, uh, at the, in the beginning, now we have all that. We have super likes and boosts and all the fun stuff. But uh, we are full launch mode we’re getting, depending on the day, anywhere from, you know, 500 to 2000 users sign up a day. So it’s full force right now.

[00:26:02] Calan Breckon: That’s amazing. That’s fantastic. Okay, where can folks go to find out more? Download the app, all that good stuff.

[00:26:09] Mary Richardson: So Bindr dot dating or Bindr dating.com. we own a lot of similar domains there, but a fun way to do it is just look up bisexual dating and you’ll find us. Or, you know, bisexual dating in your area too. If you’re in the states, you’ll find us. Or pansexual dating, then type in your city, you’ll find us. So that’s our fun little growth tech at work. But you can go to Bindr dating is all our socials as well.

[00:26:43] Calan Breckon: Okay, perfect. And if people want to reach out to you or something like that, is there like LinkedIn, what’s the best way to get in contact with you?

[00:26:52] Mary Richardson: Yeah, I’d say LinkedIn is my best way or my public facing email for Bindr is mary dating. And I will definitely would love to hear from people. I love to help students or new entrepreneurs. I love to get more advice from people who’ve been doing it longer than me or people in the queer community that have suggestions that have any ways that they think our app could be more inclusive or better or anything that they think I could do to help. Like, I really bet at the end of this, like my end goal with all a Bindr, I want to make a shit ton of money and I want to stop conversion therapy camps. I want to make them outlawed. I want to make them not a thing. I want to go in like with a squat team and take everyone out and shut them down. Don’t know how that’s possible yet, but that’s what our end goal is. And the dating app and the safe place for people to go now is the first step. So, you know, we want to make a real big change. And any way that people would want to reach out and have suggestions, I would love to hear any of it.

[00:28:01] Calan Breckon: Yes. All right. I’ll make sure I have all those links in the show notes for everybody to connect. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Mary. This has been absolutely magical and I just wish you all the best with what you’re doing at Bindr.

[00:28:13] Mary Richardson: Thank you for having me. This has been so fun. It’s been a great conversation.

[00:28:17] Calan Breckon: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. I know I did. I love chatting with Mary, I can definitely see why Bindr was the winner. She’s just so good at speaking and pulling you in and sharing her stories. And I hope that Bindr is going to be a huge success. Actually, I know Bindr is going to be a huge success. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Don’t forget to hit that like and subscribe subscribe button. And if you really enjoyed today’s episode, I would love a star rating from you. The business gay podcast is written, produced and edited by me, Calan Breckon. Thanks. Thanks. That’s it. That’s it for today. Peace, love, rainbows.