Heaps – Tinder for Groups

The sun is still shining, despite the fact that it is September, and I am meeting with Frederik Bjerager Christiansen, CMO at Heaps. Copenhagen Business School has several campuses, and I’m about to visit the business incubator at one of them. When I enter the office, there is full activity going on.

– There is some event going on tonight, I think that it is the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce that is here.

In the building, more than 30 companies have their offices. I explain to Frederik about what SSE Business Lab is all about.

– Yeah, this is the exact same thing, but for CBS students then. It’s a cool place. When you have been here for a certain amount of time, you have to show a proof of concept. If you succeed, you move down one floor to another office space. We should do this if it wasn’t for the other plans we have.

I ask him what the plans are, and he smiles mysteriously. Instead, I ask him about how all of this once started.

– This was in February 2014. I had been in Mumbai for an exchange semester, and was picked up at the airport by my friends. We were supposed to celebrate my return to Copenhagen, and it ended up with five guys drinking. At 10 someone asked, “where should we go out?”

This was a Tuesday, and Copenhagen doesn’t have an awful lot to offer on a regular Tuesday night.

– Then suddenly, on the other side of the street we could see a couple of girls also pre-partying. We thought that it would be great to team up with them, so we tried to communicate by flashing with lights and stuff. Someone suggested that we should through something on their window, but that felt like a bad idea. We ended up not being able to communicate withthem, and the night could have been awesome instead of the crappy night that we experienced.

The day after, the friends thought about the problem with not having a way of communicating in cases like this. And they wanted to find a solution.

– We started thinking and realized that “hey, maybe we should create an app that solves the problem”. So we did it.

The guys did some research on the market, without finding any real competitor.

– There was Tinder, but that’s more for dating. Two of the guys had girlfriends; our idea was not about dating, just partying. 

After meeting up after school, working on the app until 2 am every day, an outline was finished after three months.

– We have a mix of competences within the group. During the product development phase, the business people could not contribute as much as the rest of the guys. We decided to cook for the others instead, contributing in some way.

But as soon as the app was developed, the marketers found their way of contributing.

– We handed out exclusive invitations to the hot guys in school, saying that they could not tell anyone. Of course they did anyway, and the hype was on.

When a big fashion magazine picked up on the release of the app, the users started finding their way.

– We got 5 000 users the first day, 3 000 the second, and 2 500 the third. Denmark’s biggest newspaper also wrote about the app, and that drove even more traffic. On New Years Eve alone, we had 10 000 downloads.

Now, the friends were at a crossroads – should they go 100% on this idea?

– What if we in 20 years regret that we did not try? We had to do it, so two of us moved to LA to try the market over there. Quite soon we got invited to sorority meetings, and I’ve never felt more like a superstar than when I entered a room with 100 cheerleaders, all listening to what we had to say.

In one and a half month, the team got a strong traction in LA, and they will continue to target the American market.

– We are right now negotiating with potential investors. As soon as we are ready, we’re all moving to LA. It will be crazy!

Today, Heaps does not have a revenue model, but that does not seem to scare off any investors.

– This is the case for many apps. We decided to create the perfect app for the guys that wanted to party that February night. Not for the five guys that started a company the day after.

Heaps is Australian slang for “many”. The app has already found its place in the market, and if the LA adventure takes the team to the next level is yet to be seen. But the 80 000 users of today are actually quite many. That’s Heaps.