Little Rock native Christian Rudder returned home Friday to help kick off the 2015 Made by Few conference.
Rudder, 40, is the co-founder of OkCupid, one of the world’s largest dating sites. Made by Few, presented by the Few creative agency in Little Rock, has grown into a nationally up-and-coming tech and creative conference that draws hundreds.
The conference, in its fourth year, runs through Saturday from several venues in downtown Little Rock but primarily from the Central Arkansas Library System’s Ron Robinson Theater in the River Market District.
Joining Rudder at this year’s conference are Randy J. Hunt of peer-to-peer e-commerce site Etsy and Tobias van Schneider of online digital music service Spotify. Hunt was scheduled to speak late Friday afternoon and van Schneider is scheduled to address the conference Saturday afternoon.
Rudder, a Little Rock Central graduate, co-founded OkCupid with fellow Harvard students. He also is the author of “Dataclysm,” a book that analyzes trends in social media, focusing on the human interest angle of that data. In 2011, he and his co-founders sold OkCupid to IAC, a corporation that owns Match.com and other dating sites such as Tinder.
Fortune reported this summer that IAC was planning an initial public offering of its dating site portfolio, the Match Group.
Rudder continued to run OkCupid in New York after the sale but stepped down in February. He remains based in the city and is considering writing another book.
“I’d been with OkCupid for 12 years and felt like it was time to do some chilling,” he said.
Rudder said the hardest part of growing OkCupid was getting users to the site. He said the firm still wasn’t making much money when it was sold but IAC recognized its potential.
“Nobody wants to use your site unless everybody else is using it,” Rudder said. “The first few years, the only problem we had was customer acquisition.”
Eventually, the OkCupid blog generated some press and helped establish the site as mainstream, he said. Until that point was reached, the team simply had to grind it out.
“The lesson I learned from starting up was to have co-founders you know well with distinct roles,” he said. “That’s very important.”
Rudder’s “a-ha” moment with OkCupid came when he realized that subscriptions to the service represented its “golden goose.”
“I was shocked by how much more effective it is to get 10 percent of people to pay 10 bucks than it is to force ads on people,” he said.
Rudder was involved with another Harvard startup, SparkNotes, a free online study guide (think digital Cliff Notes), which was bought by Barnes & Noble. That experience served him well during the IAC acquisition, he said.
Other Friday speakers included Aaron Draplin of Draplin Design in Portland, Oregon, and independent designer/writer Ash Huang of San Francisco.
Rounding out the Saturday schedule of speakers are Elana Schlenker of Gratuitous Type, a magazine devoted to graphics based in New York; Harper Reed of Chicago-based mobile commerce platform Modest Inc.; Kyle Durrie of Power Light and Press, based in Silver City New Mexico; and Jason Scott of nonprofit digital library Internet Archive, based in San Francisco.
Made by Few continues Friday night with the Designed by Few competition from the River Market to benefit the THEA Foundation. It wraps up Saturday night at 7 with an after-party from the Junction Bridge.