I enjoyed reading this post. The guys did pretty good job in a single weekend. However, I think it would be beneficial to do more research on female online behavior. Pinterest certainly should have been one of the first places they went to acquire users and build buzz. If there are women, the men will come. So, since women tend to be more cautious when it comes to digital dating, I would have launched in more female-oriented spaces as well as the tech world. That's just coming from a girl :)
This is an interesting story and I think the guys did a great job on PR but PR is not the end game here. How are you going to get women to sign up? And paying women to be "virtual girlfriends" doesn't count (or at least that's a different business).
If we were to start over again (and if it wasn't just a weekend thing), we would have make the site invitation only and keep the men to women ratio 50:50. Then grow the userbase slowly (with whichever way we could).
Overall, according to our user stats, women had no problem signing up. It's just that we launched in the tech circle with overwhelming numbers of men.
Great little article bootstrapping the start-up. I hope to see a follow-up if the company gets traction. These article help me keep in touch with the technology that is currently being used. I was unaware of SendGrid until I read this. On a side note, I'd like to see complete solutions a la Google Mail - Send & Receive Grid.