Islands App Engagement Paradox

Greg shares the story of his company Islands' impressive metrics and eventual sale to WeWork.

"Islands had amazing metrics. The daily active users would send between 30-50 messages every single day. Weekly active users would open the app 47 times per week. The average user would invite 2.1 people. The retention was 50% at 45 days, which is pretty damn good for a social app - above what you'd normally see.

When we launched at schools, we were seeing 5-25% penetration on every school within a couple weeks. I wanted to raise a lot of money to scale this to every college in the United States. But at the time, this was around Facebook antitrust stuff, Twitter wasn't really innovating, Snapchat stock was at $5.90, and Houseparty was flat. Social was something no one wanted to look at.

I could have raised 2-3-4 million bucks to continue it, but I'm very much a go big or go home person. So we ended up selling the business to WeWork in May 2019. I would have loved to have continued building it out - it was a beautiful product people loved."