Interview with Michelle Spivak – CEO, Mutualii App [2021]

My family and I are doing fine. I have been living with my parents ever since I graduated from college in 2017. So I spent most of the pandemic with them. I was working remotely in the beginning of the pandemic and then in April 2020 I was pretty much just looking for new jobs, every day and trying to figure out a way to bring my app to life. And then in October, I got my current job which I have been at for over a year now. 

Then two months later, my dad and I both got covid. My dad got it a month before I did so I didn’t catch it from him and my mum was lucky she didn’t get covid from either of us, she never got it. But, fortunately for me and my dad, we didn’t get any dire symptoms.

We got back to normal after a week after having covid and things have been pretty much normal since then. So, I have been wearing masks to places and working from home a couple of times in a week.

Mutualii is an app for finding friends or romantic matches or both based on similar interests. I came up with the concept in 2017 after graduating from my college. So at that time I was watching LinkedIn tutorial videos at my desk. That was really what I had to do at my first job.

So I was watching hours and hours of videos wanting to fall asleep. I started thinking about how I can be more productive, what can I create and what’s a business idea that I can make so that I can make some passive income. 

So, I started thinking about what do you know? What do you like? I like designing, I love light and dance and I like meeting new people, I also had a lot of experience with dating apps because in college, even though I went to a city school, I went to the university of arts in Philadelphia, there are a lot of people walking on the street, the school itself is very small and I couldn’t find anyone that I was romantically interested in.

Tinder was actually the first dating app that I downloaded and I was looking through this app and I thought okay, it’s a lot, a lot of pictures. During that time they didn’t have anything to do with interests and I really wanted to find people who were into the same things as me.

Once I moved home after graduating, it became much harder to meet people because I was living in a town where there were a lot of families, a lot of older folks, not many people my age and still I haven’t met many people my age in my town so mostly I travel to Philadelphia on weekends to visit my friends and I downloaded other apps like Hinge and Bumble. I noticed that in these apps there were a lot of swiping profiles but they didn’t have anything to do with interests. 

So, I started thinking of an app idea where interests were at the forefront. So, basically, when you download the app you pick your main interests, let’s say you are into tennis, you will pick wellness and fitness as your main category, and then when a person clicks on your profile they could also see how many other interests you have in common but then I thought something else that could differentiate my app from the others and I thought about compatibility percentage so when you go set up your profile you pick what desired traits and preferences you have in a partner and they do the same.

For instance, do you want a person that’s a heavy sleeper, do you want kids or are you big on exercise, these are all the things that will be accounted for in that percentage? Not only that I wanted to have a lot of filters in my app, not just the gender or height and all that. There’s a filter based on what kind of relationship you are looking for.

So, you are looking for monogamy or an open relationship and then you can also filter according to your availability if you are available only on weekdays and weekends. So, once I had this idea I started sketching it and then I prototype it in a program called Adobe XD and then I posted it on Facebook and I had a friend telling me to take it down so that nobody copies the idea and told me to send it to a friend of his that was a developer. 

I actually went through two different sources before landing on the agency that built my app and I outsourced my app and I know that people say when you outsource, you don’t pay a lot for something and you don’t get a great quality.

So definitely that was running through my head and I went to two different sources but I am really happy with the agency I ended up with. They did a great job, the user interface is very friendly. I just basically gave them my prototype, I provided them with the logo and they did an amazing job. They started in June of 2020 and the app went live in December of 2020 so it’s live now in Google and Apple stores. 

It’s definitely tricky, I just take a day at a time, and honestly, I don’t do something on my app every day because I simply don’t have the energy after work and there are definitely times when I feel guilty. If I am out with my friends then I am thinking why am I out and not working on the progress of my app this week. 

I just need to keep reminding myself that it’s okay, it’s a lot to run a whole app while trying to work full time and I am new to this business so I constantly have to come up with terms it’s okay not to know things, it’s okay not to be constantly hustling or exhausting yourself because if you beat up yourself for the things you haven’t done, it’s not good for your mental health and you are not going to make yourself any more productive. So I have to just value the things that I have done and how far I have come.

So right now I am looking for just mentors to see what my next steps are. I am trying not to let it take away from doing things that I love, with the people that I love.

I’ll say find an area in graphic design that you are interested in and build your profile around that. If you are looking to work in a company, a lot of companies will be looking at your work and your portfolio tailored to their needs. Some companies want a designer that’s been in email marketing others to want a designer that is good with social media, print production. Personally, I find my niche packaging design.

I went to school for illustrations and those skills were for the consumer goods industries so now I am making fun designs for products and packaging and it’s a very creative side of graphic design which is awesome.

Another word of advice is if you are fresh out of college and you are looking at job descriptions and you see requirements like and they say they need people with two years of experience and you think you cannot apply because you don’t have that much experience, definitely still go for it. Realistically companies just want someone who can be trained and someone who is eager to learn.

I wish in college I could take classes in typography, web design, and business with the way my college worked. I don’t think that would have been doable but I think those classes definitely would have been helpful.

I have mostly had personal accounts for many years. I made an account on Instagram and Facebook from mutualii this year, so I’d say if I were a full-time social media content creator, I think posting consistently is the key that keeps your online presence. For my personal account, I just gained followers by meeting people in person and exchanging information.

For a business account, I just make a post and use a bunch of hashtags. I also try to make my stories weird and funny that grabs people’s attention and does that get me more users I can’t really say. I’ll try to keep my account separated, my first account would be for my artwork and I used just to post art, my second account is my personal account where I post dance videos and more of my personal life. 

Mutualii is my latest one where I just post for that business, I find that keeping your post to your theme or brand, it keeps your audiences separated and whoever comes to your app they can just look at your posts and the theme and decide whether they are interested and want to follow you.

I’d say follow your gut but also do a little bit of research before you jump into things. I know you like to seek out opportunities and see where things will take you but if money is involved I’d say find mentors before you jump into an investment rather than after.

The goal for myself would be to move out of my parent’s home cause I’ve been there for a really long and for Mutualii I would love to find a co-founder and investors. My real dream is to how it widely downloaded like some of the bigger apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge. I’d love to see it become a full-grown company with marketing and IT support. That’s the ultimate dream but for now, I am just taking baby steps.