Have you been on an Ohlala date yet?
Under the Sheets is an ongoing series of articles that chronicle what it’s like inside the office of Ohlala. Written from the perspective of the social media and content creation crew, the pieces show you the thoughts and actions behind what you already know about our content and application.
Okay guys, you can smoke in the meeting room, but only for today
On February 3rd, 2016, we launched Ohlala in New York City. Ohlala is a dating platform which instantly connects men who want to pay to meet beautiful women. The old incarnation of Ohlala, which is already live in seven German cities, has proven popular and our platform has connected many people, but New York will be something else. A different beast. Let us give you a taste of what it was like at Ohlala headquarters on launch day. Here we go…
I got to the office around noon, since that’s when the first of the press articles would be published.
New Yorkers sick of the uncertainties of the urban dating scene can now turn to a new app designed to reduce the complexities of dating to dollars and cents.
-TechCrunch
Not bad! Publications started pouring in after that. Bustle, TheNextWeb, ArsTechica. Bloggers starting blogging, twitterers started twatting. The good, the bad and the ugly. It didn’t matter though, people were talking and as soon as people were talking, the sign-ups began to accumulate. We weren’t even live yet. The office bristled with a nervous energy.
Launch day was in full swing.
Why are we launching at 21 minutes past midnight?
21 is my favorite number. Duh.
We’re a small team. The CEO, CTO, marketing, content, community, tech, design – we could all fit in a Spanish elevator. The office is what a realtor might regard as cosy and we all know what that means. Launching in a city over 6000km away was ambitious, for us. As much as startups change and develop like wildfire, NYC was a logistical behemoth. Time zones. Languages. Culture. We were going to have to work hard to pull this off – for starters, due to our policies regarding profile verification, photos and privacy – each and every person has to be individually checked. Even if everything else went smoothly we’d still have a huge backlog of profiles to get through so new users could use Ohlala the way it was designed. Fortunately for us, things went off without a hitch, so there was no need for creative problem solving, just the laborious repetitive task of releasing user profiles. Sorry if you guys were expecting drama but as you can see from the picture below we are a highly capable and professional bunch.
We’ve been live for ten days at the time of writing. Our userbase is growing. We have some creative marketing up our sleeves and to top it off we’re moving into a larger office next week. Now that is optimism incarnate. There will be more updates like these to come, many, many more. But it’s ciao for now, from what has got to be one of the smallest global companies operating in 2016 (although this may need some fact-checking).
See you, space cowboys.
If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere
With love, Ohlala
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What are you waiting for? Try an Ohlala date today.
