The Viral Growth Of eCRUSH, And Launch of Ranker – with Clark Benson

Clark Benson, Ranker, Bootstrapping, Marketing, Scaling, Subscription (Membership) Model, Traffic

Clark Benson found a clever way to grow his dating site, eCRUSH. He had users send anonymous email to people they had crushes on. The recipients of those emails would enter the email addresses of the people they had crushes on. If two people match, eCRUSH helped them connect.

The scheme generated hundreds of thousands of registered users. And if you think that’s clever, wait till you hear how he monetized it. In this interview, you’ll hear how the business went from concept, to growth, to profits, to exit.

Today, Clark is building Ranker, a platform for ranking anything in the universe. We spent some time in the interview talking about how he’s growing it.

Clark Benson

Ranker

Clark Benson is CEO/Founder/Seed Investor of Ranker, a consumer site and platform for “Ranking the Universe.”

 

Pre Program: Before we get started am going to tell you about three great companies. PicClick is the first, it’s a one person startup from my friend Ryan in San Diego. PicClick gives you a visual way to search eBay, Etsy and other sites. Ryan is all ready doing one million products sales per month on picclick.com. Not hits but sales, go to P.I.C.C.L.I.C.K dot com to see how he’s doing it. 99designs it’s the largest crowd source market place for graphic design, when I use them I wrote a description of the design I needed and how much I wanted to pay, I got a bunch of designs back, I gave each design a feedback and picked the one I liked best and that’s the only one I paid for, try them for logo design, if you need a blog design use them, if you need app icon use them, there are so many different reason why you might want to use them, check out 99designs and you will see why so many past mixergy guests have used 99designs.com. And grasshopper, I have had them now as my...

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