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we've done deep dive research studies on how can we help everyone to become more successful daters so what makes data successful So the faster that you can the faster you're going to find someone who's like yes this is the type of person that I want to be with Justin McLoud the founder and CEO of the fastest growing dating app hinge I built hinge because I wanted a girlfriend but we had to suffer through a lot of failure to finally get to success why does the world need another dating app I think it just needs one really that works well I'm going to be completely honest much of the reason why I never used dating apps is I had no success so if I wanted to be the world's worst dating app user what would I have to do a lot of filtered photos with you and sunglasses are hanging out with a lot of friends one-word answers to your prompts just like everyone and what about serial datas some of us have models in our head that are exceedingly narrow they have to be over 6ot and need to work in this type of job and so you go out and you're just looking for some reason to say no because it doesn't fit your model give people more of a chance AI the conversation around Ai and relationships has always been quite pessimistic sex robots and stuff yeah that's certainly not going to be what a Hing is working on the bigger leap though is to move much closer to a Matchmaker model and setting up dates with a much higher likelihood of success it's happening already it used to take a thousand swipes in order to get on a date and now about 50 likes have you seen any changes in the dating culture yeah in order to get on a date people need to know this so quick one this is really really fascinating to me on the back end of our YouTube channel it says that 69.9% of you that watch this channel frequently over the lifetime of this channel haven't yet hit the Subscribe button I just wanted to ask you a favor it helps this channel so much if you choose to just subscribe helps us scale the guest helps us scale the production and it makes this show bigger so if I could ask you for one favor if you've watched the show before and you've enjoyed it and you like this episode that you're currently watching could you
please hit the Subscribe button thank you so much and I will repay that gesture by making sure that everything we do here gets better and better and better and better that is a promise I'm willing to make you do we have a [Music] deal Justin what is your job title I'm the founder and CEO of hinge and to quantify what hinge is and the impact it has on the world how many people use as a product its reach can you give me some color towards that uh well I I can say that today we're setting up a date about every two seconds so every other second someone's going on a date because of hinge um we've created millions of relationships and I'd say marriages at this point the scale is far beyond I think what I imagined when I when I started this thing I probably need to understand you a little bit better because it's so abundantly clear from all the CEOs that I've interviewed that that there's often a series of catalyst moments that send them on the path indirectly I mean it's like the first Domino that falls in their life that brings them to be sat here today for us to be talking about it what are those first dominoes in your life that film I I don't think there are a number of them that probably like ended up defining my my life I was an only child um had a entrepreneur father who had ran a small business and um and my mom worked for my dad I sort of naturally as a kid good at math I was good at computer science uh I would spend my summers at nerd Camp uh going and learning how to like code as a kid and I will say addiction is the last piece because I I wanted I like was desperate to be cool as desperate to fit in and that actually became like a huge piece of it as well for me in your first year of University you went to see a drug and alcohol counselor is that correct I did so when I went to college you know it was I would say the overachieving part of me started to slip away and I kind of just doubled down on the uh drinking and drugs and partying my freshman year at the end of my freshman year I thought to myself like gosh you know like I haven't been to bed sober since school began like not one single night and maybe I have a problem like maybe something's going on here so I I voluntarily went in to see this drug
an alcohol counselor it's like very sweet woman named Jane and she listened to me empathetically and heard me out and she was like Justin you know I I think that you probably have a pretty serious problem with drugs and alcohol I think that you should definitely keep coming back and seeing me and I think you should stop and I was like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa like that's that was like what are you talking about I'm like a 19-year-old kid so I just kind of ignored that and went about the the partying um but I had some inkling at that point that like probably something was not good you went to rehab eventually I did I had to spend my summer in rehab after my freshman year in order to even come back to school because I I would I'd still get in trouble a lot at like with campus safety or whatever getting caught drinking or uh and I'd been written up so many times that I actually got referred back to that same drug and alcohol counselor for an assessment and she's like well I've already actually assessed this kid he clearly has a problem so I had to spend my summer in rehab in order to even come back my sophomore year so many people I've spoken to had an alcohol addiction at some point in their life speak about the 12 step program and the role that that played in them turning their lives around did you when did did you learn about the 12 step program at alen did it help I did and I would occasionally go to meetings and they were like people from the town like no one no no one from like college was going to these I was literally the only college student I did stop drinking the the and the day that I graduated from college and um and 12-step programs was like a huge piece of of my recovery after that time why that day I woke up that morning after being out at a party the night before was graduating that day I'd gotten a okay job in Washington DC where I was going to move in the and once School ended but I just remember thinking to myself like that the steering wheel in my life was broken that's kind of how I and I think that gets back to your sort of enslavement idea or that you just don't
have have control anymore like I envisioned my life going like this direction like I I wanted to have a big career I wanted to go make an impact in the world I wanted to have like deep friendships I wanted all these things and yet every day it was like one more drink right one more drug and tomorrow I'll like start putting my life together and I've been telling myself that for years at that point and I remember thinking to myself like I don't know what the point of living is if if like without drinking but I'm going to try to find out out and it was just like how much longer am I going to allow this to continue to to go like I I I didn't get the job that I wanted right I wanted I wanted to go work at uh you know Goldman Sachs in banking which is the and that's just like what the I was a mathematical economics major and that's what all like the top math econ Majors went and did and and I didn't I didn't get the job I got some like you know decent job at some management consulting firm that no one's ever heard of in Washington DC and uh I'd lost the girl which we haven't talked about Kate yet but my I had a girlfriend all through college and I'd like lost her it's just it was just my life was like not headed in a good direction it was so clear and I just viewed that as a moment to like change it when did you meet Kate I met Kate the basically like literally the day I got out of rehab I like got out of rehab at 8 p.m. one night in Louisville Kentucky I Drove All Night back to school and uh and I woke up the next day and decided to celebrate getting out of rehab by going out and partying and drinking and uh Kate found me passed out in a stairwell like on the landing of a stairwell uh the first day of my sophomore year was her first day of school first day of her freshman year later in that year we had a class together we started sitting together we started get to know each other and we just had this incredible like magnetic connection when you reflect on meeting her and and how you felt and all of those things I mean you now are working in the industry when you look back is there anything that is consistent with you know all the people that hinge has brought together today that happened in
that moment because you know you see on the movies they say you'll feel this thing in your belly and there'll be butterflies and they'll be crazy you know all this kind of stuff what was your experience like did you have butterflies did you know she they were the one um I think I I'm not sure it was was like the moment I saw Kate like I knew she was the one but I think the our our like relationship really started to build as we got to know each other better and so it wasn't for me like one of those like instantaneous like this person is the person it just grew really really quickly as we got to know each other better whether that spark is a good thing or a bad thing I think has been debated I know you had Logan our our relationship scientist on um from hinge and I think the spark can sort of like burn out and what you're looking for is really like a nice SL burn within two years you had broken up oh we' broken up like we were on and off you know six or seven times I think during college and then finally by the end of college we'd really like gone our separate ways once I gotten sober um I would think about reaching back out to her all the time but I just wouldn't because I had enough sense to realize that like I had probably like messed up this girl's life enough and um it just like wasn't healthy and so I would I remember being like a year or two years sober and I would like you know dial her number on my phone and I would just like stare at it and then I would just like hit the end button and I just didn't feel I just didn't feel like I was good for her and I and I just need to stay away and when you ultimately end up reaching out to her when she's living in London and working in finance yeah so I I four years in I'm sober I'm at business school and I I finally I'm like okay I'm going to like write her a letter like an apology letter um and see if we can reconnect and I I wrote her this letter and she was living in she' moved to London at that point and she called me back the next day and she was with someone at the time and she's like well I'm going to be home for Christmas time so maybe I can see you at Christmas time and then she
called me back the next day and she's like listen I just if I see you I don't know what's going to happen happen and I just uh I have a stable life now I have a partner we just bought a flat like I just can't and so I was just totally heartbroken because I really thought in the back of my mind like someday we I just felt like we were like meant to be together and I thought like one day we're we're going to end up back together and I think in that moment I realized like wow I've really messed this up like there's no there's no going back you were at Harvard at the time yeah you're single you're sober which makes it hard to meet people I guess precisely I mean that's the thing is I is I um both it was very special with her and also I really had trouble meeting other other people like I really relied on drugs and alcohol as a crutch and when I graduated I threw myself into work and then I but then I arrived at business school where I think by the way we're there to like study business but it's like a huge party atmosphere and like everyone connects around drinking and and partying and I just just couldn't it was like just too hard for me to be around any of that it was hard for me to meet new people I mean that's the case for so many of us today so many people who much of the reason it feels like they continue to drink and do those things which they don't necessarily love is because it's almost unavoidable if you want to it seems unavoidable if you want to socialize and be not be perceived as a weirdo yeah and just the whole culture and the whole like that it was just all revolved around drinking so it was just constantly saying no constantly saying no thanks I don't drink like is this at all correlated you know you're in that situation where you you've given up drinking you bit heartbroken does this also explain why you were so compelled to do something in the dating space there was a business plan like a business school like business plan competition and so I was working on like a few ideas for that and nothing really hit like I was trying to work on I had like various little silly ideas and I try to work on them but
it always just felt like homework and I just like wasn't getting much traction and it was kind of shortly after everything had happened with Kate and she you know told me in so many words that like it was time to move on and there was this last chance dance party happening at at Harvard where people were going to like list all their crushes and then if two people like listed each other they would like let you know right before the dance so this was like a moment of like okay like we're heading towards the end of school I think it was around Valentine's Day and so this is like your last chance your second year if there's anyone that you had a crush on this is like your moment to find out I was actually like pretty excited about this because like I again I was like so awkward like I didn't know how to like connect with people or meet new people I just like I didn't know how to do that without the crutch of of alcohol and drugs and I was walking to class one day with the with the um student body president this guy Brett and he was like Yeah we actually decided to scrap that whole thing it was just too complicated like a thousand people all listing each other like how are we going to manage all the you know like too hard like we just scrapped that whole thing I I I went to class I started sitting there I started thinking and I was like I bet I could just like build this really quick on Facebook like I I I used to code I like knew how these kind things worked and Facebook had recently opened up their API for canvas apps like Farmville and things like that I was like you could just like go through and just check your friends that you liked and you could just build something like this really quick on Facebook so I enlisted a friend um her name was Francis and we got together and we built this thing um where people could like list their crushes on Facebook and would tell you if two people matched and we launched it and it made a bunch of matches it was fun and people had like a good time but then it was you know you find out if you have a crush you either do or you don't and then everyone's done with it but the idea then started to to like percolate in my mind like what if you could actually introduce people to their
friends of friends because at the time there was there were online dating sites but no one my age used them there's a lot of stigma around it because it was like a long arduous process you did on desktop computers you answered like deep questions about yourself you paid a lot of money usually to use them and the idea of like creating something like really simple and easy that would just connect you to friends of friends suddenly just like popped in my mind and I don't know how to describe it I just like I was so excited about this idea I was convinced this going to be the future of how people were going to date and I like couldn't stop working on it and to set the scene though a little bit this is at a time which is hard to remember where there's like Okay Cupid match.com but there's not like mobile dating apps right that's exactly right there were no nothing was mobile and nothing no one really used it or if you used it you didn't really talk about it like people my age just like didn't use or talk about online dating services that was just not a thing the term dating app was not even a term yet do you think that's a because I so many people asked me the question about how to know which idea to pursue many entreprene types creatives have lots of ideas they have a Shelf full of them yeah um how do we know which one is the one worth pursuing I I can only speak to my experience like I don't know what the right what the right answer is but I will say that when I was I had other ideas that were interesting to me like intellectually like yeah like this is a good idea um but it just didn't hit me and my heart and I would I would like try to work on it but like I said it felt like it felt like doing homework like okay I'll like force myself to work on this but it just wasn't I don't know and then when the idea for hinge hit me I don't I just don't know how to describe it except to say like it it was like it like infected me and this this this service this app was like going to come out of me no no matter what and it's like I like was almost possessed to have to work on it but I think there was the the magic of me being open and like thinking about ideas and trying to work on ideas and then I was like open and then when the right idea hit it almost
didn't even feel like a choice like I just had to work on this so many people have the idea so many people feel infected by their belief in that idea but then the vast majority will be incarcerated by fear and you know loads of naysayers telling them you can't make an a dating app what the hell is that yeah you know which is exactly the feedback that I got by the way like I entered it in the business plan competition we were you know we didn't place at all we were told like this is a horrible idea I wrote a paper on it for our class they told me it was a horrible idea I um I had friends telling me it was a horrible idea I would later try to raise money and VCS would tell me it was a hor like everyone was like there was very little positive feedback I was getting on the idea for Hing I just had this thesis that if you could make a a dating service that was stigma-free if you could make something that was really fun and easy and lightweight then young people would use it I we we i' always hear that the dating Market is full it's saturated this is what VC's would tell me when I would J raise money like match.com owns this Market you'll never be able to beat them and I remember thinking to myself like it's not how could you say a market is sat like I don't I almost know no one who uses dating services like it's not saturated you just have to fix the problem why people don't use it and people don't use it because it it has stigma to it so we can't remember that yeah this generation can't remember that there was a stigma around dating on the internet in fact what's so funny is as you said the word stigma I said to myself what stigma and I thought and then I thought back to my childhood and and I remember the what I thought of people that used match.com yeah lonely weirdos totally and that was definitely that was that's how people that's how people thought about it yeah in 2011 it was just not you know the iPhone would had just come out a few years ago the App Store was relatively new yeah and people did not meet strangers on the internet to go date that was just weird so when did it go from Facebook to an app uh so we started working on it it was originally this yeah Facebook canvas app and that was
201122 and um but it was really having trouble getting people to adopt this thing I was not a good product designer not a good brander it was originally called secret agent Cupid it would uh introduce you to friends of friends but but it was really a complex user interface you would like answer questions about your friends there were like little rankings like it was try to be really social and like show you which of your friends are most in demand it had like all these different components to it it's like way over complicated people would come in and they like wouldn't understand like why I'm answering questions about my friends like what's this I'm here to date around the end of 2012 I'd raised a little bit of money from just like angels and friends and family like $100,000 or so we're running out of money not making a lot of progress I made the call around Thanksgiving I got together with my team and I was like we just need to start over from scratch let's throw this whole thing out mobile is the future that's more things are starting to come out on the app store around this time so let's redesign it for mobile and let's make it just like dead simple we'll just you connect your Facebook account we'll show you a photo you know their age like one or two lines about them and then you just say yes or no are you interested in this person we had literally like two and a half months left of cash to like tear everything down rebuild it from scratch and then take our remaining money and throw a giant launch party in Washington DC with your remaining money yeah that's it literally took our last $25,000 and threw a giant open bar party in DC and you had to download the app to get in we had submitted our app to the App Store with what we thought was like plenty of time about two weeks um and App Store review times were typically like just a couple days at that point and then a few days go by we don't hear anything back a week goes by we still haven't heard anything back uh I start trying to reach out to like the head of the App Store but no one who they don't care I'm like some random kid like with a app idea no one will return my calls it is now the night before the launch party and we still have no we don't have actually have an app to launch so I like literally have
like my last $25,000 spent on this launch party with no app I remember being literally like sitting we had a little co-working space and that night I was just like sitting on the floor like covered up my head in the in my jacket and just crying on the floor thinking like wow these last two years have been for like nothing I've worked so hard and I'm going to launch an app Tomorrow there's no app store like there's 2,000 people are coming and there's no app and then I went home that night and um woke up the next morning and somehow miraculously uh the app had been approved in the App Store and so we had the party that night 2 200 people came they all saw each other using the app the next day people we made more matches than we' made in the entire history of the app up until that point and they had to download it to get in they had to download it to get in and that helped overcome I think you had to like jump start the stigma because we had a lot of like the very like the cool people in the social scene in Washington DC coming and all downloading it in front of each other and talking about it and so the fact that it was like really really dead simple and the fact that everyone saw each other using it I think like started to like jump start and get over that stigma problem and then we had like 400 people log in the next day and we're like okay wow 400 people on their own came in I mean up until that point it was such a like literally a trickle of users coming into our like little app like I would i' remember I would like sit there and like look at the logs and people like a user would come in like oh okay like a there's a user using the app and then we like okay he just clicked this button and like then he like passed and then and then he would leave and I like okay wait for the next user to come in like sitting just like watching the logs so hundreds of people coming the next day few hundred more the next day and then it just started to like build and build and build after that was it like a snowboard effect yeah it really was and and once once we'd hit it with the with the product it started to spread through Word of Mouth then people in DC started to tell their friends in New York and then we started to build up a weight
list there and then people in New York told their friends in San Francisco and they would like build a weit list up there and then we would start opening cities one at a time once we like we had enough liquidity and how would you openin those cities was it the same we'd throw another launch party like literally my life was just like throwing launch parties in cities like we would we would you know from Boston and San Francisco and um New York and La we were just like I remember 2012 well and there was that was kind of the golden age of apps in a way I remember because we worked a quite a lot on um on apps back then and uh there wasn't many apps the apps store was was grow felt like it was growing very quickly I was you know people were discovering lots of new apps all the time feel like people are discovering less apps at the moment I don't know if that's true or not but I just felt like that was kind of the app boom moment so things like a launch party I you know I can see how those things would work then but I I question whether people listening to this right now that have got an app and aunch party and like that's that's what's going to solve their problems probably not yeah so interesting and then Tinder around that time starts to emerge bit bit further on right yeah right about that time so right around the time we threw that launch party I think Tinder had launched just a couple months prior W out in La so almost the exact same time we had a very similar model they took off hugely and we started to grow as well in fact their growth helped our growth because it like the category was emerging and now people were like um seeing Tinder and Tinder was a was an app that was all about location and ours was all about friends of friends and that was really the the main difference but as a result people viewed hinge as like the sort of like more serious intent dating app because it was friends of friends people you meet at a house party or dinner or wedding whereas like the other one was a bit more of like a casual reputation and like meeting at a club and as a result all of a sudden the VCS who were telling me there's no way this Market's totally saturated now I was no longer begging for money I was like Turning Away there people are
trying to send like like trying to raise around at that point um we went from like you know begging for CS to like raising almost a $20 million round where I was turning away money because I just couldn't take anymore so it really that changed the game and was it a straight line up from there uh no definitely not so we had some good success in 2013 2014 2015 growth started to level out um Tinder had definitely gotten successful beat us at the game of like overcoming stigma like that it was cool use it was was it was quick it was easy it was fun ours was just like a tender copy that was friends of friends but we weren't we were like the growth just like wasn't there and um and more importantly though around that time there was an article that came out in Vanity Fair called like the dawn of the dating apocalypse and it was all about how dating apps had destroyed dating culture and romance and and hinge was featured like pretty heavily in that article and I was remember thinking like gosh this is not what I like I built this because I like wanted a girlfriend like this is just not what I what I wanted to build from like a values perspective I I remember going out with my my head of marketing at that time her name was Katie and I was I was about to head home for Thanksgiving and we sat at a little cafe in New York and I I just was telling her like gosh I I like I wish I could just start over from scratch like this is not the company I want to build this is not what I want to do and she's like well I mean you're the CEO like what's stopping you I went home and I thought about that and you know nothing was stop like what was stopping me we just raised a big round we had resources and so uh I decided to reboot the company again so we first reboot 2012 uh this reboot let go of half the company and then threw out the old code base and built something new from scratch that would be about really helping people who wanted to find their person like a long-term relationship brand and totally change the user interface and the profiles and the whole flow and design it for people who actually like really want to find their person if you hadn't have had that interview with Deborah from cafe.com before right yeah do you think
you would have made that decision tell me about that interview with Deborah from cafe.com and how it changed change things for you so in 2014 someone reached out to me her name was Deborah and she had downloaded hinge she lived in New York and the very first person that she that like we suggested to her she liked and matched with and then fallen in love with and so she had reached out and was like how did you like I want to learn more about you I want to learn about your company we were just you know we were getting popular in New York but not hugely popular so we met up for an interview one day in Madison Square Park near my office and um and I you know I didn't have like it was dumb luck like I don't know it's like the first person that happened to show up on her app like we didn't we didn't it was just we were lucky but as we chatted um you know kind of a standard interview at the very end of the interview we were getting up and she's like you know one last question have you ever been in love and I was like well once a long time ago but I you know I just didn't realize it until it was too late and Deborah turns off the tape recorder and she's like listen I have to tell you a story and she tells me the story of of how actually she sort of had this misconnection moment she wasn't with someone that she had met much younger and they had found each other all these years later and realized they should have been together and she was like you know you don't have to make the same mistake I did like you can still be with the one you just have to do something dramatic you have to just go over there and like pour your heart out and like put yourself on the line and I was like listen lady like you know it's been almost eight years since I've even seen her it's it's kind of over there's there's no way that said I was about to head over to the um launch party for hinge in London and I thought okay like I'll just shoot her one last note and so I reached out to her and I said hey I'm going to be in London would love 15 minutes just say hi and goodbye it's just weird to think that we're never going to see each other again and she wrote back and she was like uh for the first time so and now another four years
and uh she was like listen I don't live in London anymore I live in Switzerland but um I'll be around this weekend and um happy to hop on the phone so I like got that message I went to the airport I got the I got a ticket to Switzerland I got on a plane to Zurich and um and she reached out the next day she's like hey I'm around if you want to chat I'm like great cuz I'm going through customs in Zurich right now and she agreed to meet me at a little cafe and uh we sat down with each other and I I think at that time i' you know part of me thought like I really want the girl back like this is it and part of me thought like it's been eight years like I've changed so much as a person like I'm sober now I'm like running this company like she's with someone else now and by the way was literally like a month away from getting married at that point she was she had a fil she had a fiance yeah and and to be married in a month like uh so like on the verge of getting married so I thought we'd see each other and kind of just like laugh it off and glad we saw each other and and you know I just I honestly didn't know it was going to happen it's like it felt but there was this hope in me that like wow maybe she really is the one maybe we'll like realize it and we sat down at this little cafe and um and it was just like uh I think we both felt like an incredible amount of that connection that we'd always had and we sat and we we talked for like seven or eight straight hours in this Cafe never even got up to get a coffee and at the end of that conversation she's like I think I'm calling off the wedding and um and so uh about a week later she moved out of zerk and moved from um back into back to New York into my like 300t apartment in the West Village and and my and this is a long way of getting back to your question which is like how does this relate to hinge and would I have done the reboot because here I am and I've like gotten the person like this is the person that I've always want like wanted like I finally got her back and it was totally amazing for like a month or two or three months maybe Max and then the honeymoon period
ended and were two people living in this little tiny apartment together in New York who haven't seen each other in eight years and we've got to like start figuring each other out and it wasn't perfect and the part of me like I would have if I were just dating this person I would have run right I would have like cut it off and been like okay like not the right person like it's not it's not perfect like I imagined it was going to be but she' called off this life she'd like you know she'd left a her person she'd left um her whole existence over there so I couldn't just like break up of there and that's when I think the real work of the relationship started and like real intimacy and vulnerability and like love started to form and I realized like I would have just passed over this person and I think it just totally changed my my mentality of how a dating app should be designed because I think up until that point I thought you know it's a it's a numbers game you just got to like get through people and once you find your person then it's then it's kind of happily ever after after that and realizing that like how many people you know we all must just skate right past because we don't because we're not vulnerable because they're not vulnerable and we fail to like make that connection and so I wanted to like rebuild an app if it were really for relationships um you just it would be a very different kind of app you would have to like have people slow down you would have to have people be more more vulnerable you'd have to people share about themselves and put themselves on the line a bit more in order to form that initial connection and so that was the foundation and sort of like the design principles for what we wanted to build with a new hinge fairy tale endings are made for movies because there's a lot of work that happens when the credits after the credits roll totally yeah we were just getting started I had no idea and you also when you talk about this new vision for hinge it's quite idealistic you know this idea of just being able to create an app where people slow down and they give more information and they're more vulnerable tends to be the case that your ideal scenario for how humans
behave isn't actually how they want to behave right especially these days because we're all we all believe things should be like quick and easy MH and it's not quick and easy you get you get out what you put in and so we were always fighting this balance of like what people are willing to do and what they should do you know and and we were trying to to like we could of course build an app that's just like makes it like what people think that they want was like quick and easy and fun but you have to slow people down get them to put in a little bit more effort and it's a real it's a real balance of of like getting people to be vulnerable as much as at least they can tolerate and because the more that they are the more effective their experience is the better chance that they have of finding their person how is that received when you come up with this new vision for hinge which is going to be slower much more meaningful and much more deeper and really based on forming long-term connections how is that received by people uh I think in theory it was it was celebrated right in theory I think people were like yes the world needs this kind of this kind of new thing like we definitely want something that's like a little bit less like fast food and more like you know a nice nutritious meal when it comes to dating you know it was it was still hard to really get people like they like it in theory but and they're like wait I have to fill out like three prompts like wait I don't just swipe on people I have to like like something about them um wait if I like someone they're just going to see it like you're just going to tell them I have to add a comment and like say something about them so it was like a lot to get people's head around who are used to something that was quite different but it was effective and that's What mattered the most and you know the that was a it was such a huge mindset and shift for us to stop thinking about user engagement and user retention and all these like classic metrics that you know VCS look for when they look at like social media apps and to just think are we getting people out on more good dates or not and that's going to be our Northstar metric and we'll grow through word of mouth because people are actually going to go on good
dates and they're going to tell their friends about it and so that was our Northstar and so we didn't worry so much about like all those engagement metrics and you know we didn't there weren't as many matches and there wasn't as much whatever engagement on the app it was actually way more efficient and effective of getting people out on good dates and so we launched this new thing our user numbers actually started to decline initially from the old version of the app what about money yeah and so right about that time we're starting to we've burned through all that cash in order to build this new app and we're starting to run out and so I went out to start fundraising again and telling the story of like look at these like we we're way more effective now people love the product but on the other hand we used to have I don't know at the time 400 500,000 users and now we're down to like 100,000 150,000 users and that's a pretty tough story to tell to venture capitalists and but you're shrinking yeah we're shrinking but but we're gonna grow because look at how amazing these and no one like really bought that story and I was flying around everywhere talking to every VC and I could talk to you know at that point Hing has gotten popular enough that any VC would like take my meeting and talk to me but it was just I probably had 50 or 60 VC meetings and like not a single not a single yes but at right on that time we also started talking to um match group they saw they could see what I saw they saw wow this is actually something that's different it's differentiated and it has real promise and so when we were down to like once again like days of cash probably like a week or two left of cash we negotiated a deal for like an initial investment from them that would set the stage for them to eventually acquire the and between 2016 and 2019 when they acquired the company what was growth like uh it was slow at first 2016 2017 we were kind of still figuring out the it was a completely new model and so we were figuring out how to really make that new model work and we were like you know um tuning it and around 2018 we felt like okay we've really started to like now people are really starting to love this app it's starting to really
grow through word of mouth and and and then we started to like pour on marketing money and at that point it was showing like how much that could accelerate the growth and that's when match group invested hinge Labs what is hinge Labs I don't believe any other dating apps have something like hinge laabs yeah and it's all part of this idea that we want to build like we're just focused on user Effectiveness and does this actually get people out on good dates and a huge piece of the you know a dating app is is relatively unique it's not just a piece of technology it's you know what what it's the people that are on there and how they're behaving and the technology like that's your experience as a user it's not just like we no matter how good we get at product and product design or whatever like we have to control for the behaviors of other people and making sure that we have the right people on who are behaving the right way you know we can only guide them so much with um you know ux we also have to like kind of Coach people and guide people and teach people how to become better daters and so Hing X or sorry Hing Labs was developed to sort of study daters who are successful study daters who are not successful figure out what are the patterns what do we see and how can we help level up everyone to become better and more successful daters and so Hing Labs really does you know deep dive research studies on just what is what makes data successful um and and gives us the fuel to be able to um build better product or build user guides things like that so what makes data successful makes dating successful yeah like you know I've Got Friends that seem to be successful at dating and friends that are just those prolific serial datas that go on 100 dates a year and never seem to make any progress yeah and also are there like categories of datas that you talk about you must have got like categories like the serial data that's never going to be successful they're just doing it for the fun of it and they're like one hit wonder we we definitely have different profiles but we anytime we try to like just put people into discreet categories it never works because people are complex and they have different everyone's story is kind of unique and so it's hard to put
people just like into buckets um and there I think some general principles that I've learned and we've learned through hinge labs and you know again you had Logan here relatively recently and if if people are interested they should definitely go listen to her podcast because with you because it's like a master class and how to become successful in dating yeah but I would say like the more that you are willing to be honest and vulnerable and real like the quicker you can find those connections and the higher Quality Connections that you're going to get I think that's the kind of upshot and the way that we really try to design hinge to help people maximize their success on that front why does that matter at a human level being honest and vulnerable uh I think two reasons one is that you get to an accurate assessment more quickly of someone right like if you're trying to be pretend to be someone you're not or just trying to be cool or get a lot of likes or whatever people aren't seeing the real you and they're going to eventually see the real You So the faster that you can just put like be clear about who you are and what you're looking for and what you want and what's not perfect about you then I think the faster you're going to find someone who's like yes this is the type of person that I want to be and you're going to avoid all those people that were attracted to the kind of veneer that you'd put up but then they get to know the real you and then that's not and then I'd say the second piece is that it gives people like hooks to grab on to like there's just nothing to talk about with someone who's perfect and inv and invulnerable and Invincible like what do you like what do you have to say like we connect over the the cracks of and the little imperfections and that's how we connect and relate to one another and so you'll form a much better and deeper and quicker bond with someone when you open up like that versus try to impress okay what about this then so if I wanted to be the world's worst data if I wanted to be the world's worst um most unsuccessful hinge user or dating app user more generally what would I have to do uh so I've got your first point which
is about be really inauthentic pretend I'm perfect and use fake photos or you just portray myself in a way yeah a lot of like filtered photos with you and sunglasses or hanging out with a lot of friends one-word answers to your prompts you know just like everyone or no one or wait for likes to come to you I think like that that's the kind of mentality they're trying to get people out of we want to we want people to like fill out deeper like that's so much of our work is like helping people select better photos that Shore more their personality help people answer prompts which are these short questions designed to get you into a conversation and answer them thoughtfully uh to uh be really thoughtful with your life because the more thoughtful you are with your likes the better our algorithm gets because we actually understand who you like and who you don't like so don't just like you know no because then we can't we can't learn your taste right and we're not going to get closer and closer to the type of person that you like okay interesting and what about these um these serial datas because I've got some friends that are like those serial datas literally 100 dates a year and I'll sit with them and we'll chat and they'll tell me oh yeah I want three dates this week etc for those people I'd love to be able to get offer them advice thinking of one one of my friends in particular who I know was is going to watch this yeah I mean I was one of those people right I mean I was a person who um uh you know constantly was I wouldn't necessarily just go on a whole lot of first dates but I would go on a whole I'd had a whole lot of two to six week relationships and um and then as soon as I would find something quote unquote wrong or I wouldn't feel good in the relationship then I was like well this doesn't work like this is wrong cuz I think I had such a I had such a fantasy about what a good relationship looked like I like my model was totally broken and I think for so many of us we're like we're trying to fit like a model in our head with the real with the reality that we're trying to like match this reality to like some model in our head about what a good relationship is or should look like and
I think my model was like you know it stays sexy fun every single time we're together um we don't fight there's never any you know there's like I I think I just had this like very happily ever after moment in my mind and so I skipped over and passed over so much because it just didn't fit this like model on had of my head and I think some of us have models in our head that are exceedingly narrow they have to be like over six foot and they need to work in this type of job and they need to be like this and so you go out and you're just looking for some reason to say no because it doesn't fit your model and I think the biggest thing is for us to um like change the model in our head that we that like of like what we're trying to look for and like widen that aperture a bit and give people more of a chance and like see things through a bit more people have to um this he height thing you mentioned the six-foot thing seems to be a lot of conversation because I think the vast majority majority of people the vast majority of women I imagine would want someone that's more than six foot is that correct uh no I don't I don't know if that's actually true but people like someone taller than them tter than them okay yeah um that's just one example I mean I don't know about the height but I think it's just the point is like we have very specific and narrow models and I think a lot of people who end up in successful relationships say this isn't you know if I were making a shopping list and like you know writing down all my like little features that I'm looking for in a partner like this person didn't necessarily that like I would have I would have missed this person there's a website isn't there I can't remember the name of it but you go on there and you say what you're looking for in a partner and it shows you your statistical probability of finding that person okay yeah I don't know about that but yeah I think if people saw that it's horrifying yeah be pretty horrifying like how you're cutting out 98% of people um based on your criteria the salary the height the weight um the race you put on there and then it shows you it goes like you have a 0.0% chance of finding this
person right um and you obviously you want them to be single as well as another criteria um which I find interesting one of the things people say about dating apps and like dating app companies and Founders and CEOs is they want people to stay single because then you've got more customers and surely if every if you have this metric where people are becoming um are getting married you're losing customers yeah so our belief on that which has always been um we like our motto our our tagline is designed to be deleted and that came from by the way we were working with a branding agency and they were like what's hinges stick you know like what makes you different like you're Tinder but what and I was like I don't there's no gimmick like there's no like oh we're Tinder but like X or Tinder but y like every single part part of the app is like designed to be different and like designed to help get people out on great dates and that's kind of where this like designed to be deleted which by the way was like there's so much debate internally about that because it's so it sounds so technical like design like in your own tagline like designed to be like and it people won't understand it but we kind of went with it because it's the only thing that really represented what makes hinge um really different what do that mean and it means that do we get people out on great dates or not and that's what's Driven every design decision and why hinge looks different than all the other apps is like that optimization function and so in terms of a business model the belief is that like we will grow through Word of Mouth which is the most effective and efficient and cost- effective way to grow if we just create more great dates and more relationships and the thesis is like as long as there are single people in the world which I'm pretty sure there are plenty of single people left in the world that they'll want to use h which feels more like a utility that's truly effective versus like perhaps something that feels like a little bit more like a game since the company started have you seen any changes in the dating environment the dating landscape dating culture yeah gen Z for lack of a better term has different dating patterns I think in some sense like when I started
hinge people were there was a lot of stigma around dating apps because um uh people just didn't use them at all then I feel like everyone started started to use them and it became sort of the default way to meet people and I think this is why we've actually like hing's growth has accelerated so much even recently is that there actually is a desire to move away from the sort of like quick kit superficial swipe swipe swipe yeah yeah and moving to something that's people are willing to share more about themselves and be more like I think like genz is generally willing to like you know it's like the Tik Tok instead of the Instagram kind of feel of being vulnerable putting yourself out there you don't have to look so polished and so perfect and that's actually great for for uh dating because that's exactly the kind of ethos that we actually need for people to be successful and hinge as I was reading is got these sort of five first principles what is the um current company mission statement well so the we want to Foster intimate connection to create a less lonely world and a lot of social we'll call them like social networks they started social networks were also I think had a similar Mission like you wanted to get you connected to the people who matter most to you and they've all kind of like f like they all became social media companies instead because it turns out that like Brands and influencers and outrageous people are just more interesting than your friends and it's easier to get you to spend more time in app and more time looking at ads if we like show you much more sensation content than than like you know real um like creating real moments of connection with the people who matter most to you and that's what I wanted to drive home like really clearly in our mission is that like hinge at its core even if we were expanded in new business lines or do something in the future like we are a company about intimate connection about onetoone deep connections between people and we don't ever want to deviate from that as our core because it's really what the world needs right now first principle two radical trust so you've got designed to be deleted number two is radical trust
yeah which means so radical trust Is our commitment to and so these cultural principles that you're reading off came from this book um called how we do things and so when I when we rebooted the company in 2015 at the end of 2015 beginning of 2016 we um at that point I didn't think about company culture kind of at all it was just like just we bunch of people in a room trying to solve problems like that's and we were only 30 people so culture just kind of emerges naturally among that group of people it really rotates around the founder but I didn't think consciously about it when we did that reboot we we let go of half the company we took the remaining half and we went and did an offsite and we did a a breakdown and a really had like some really honest at times tearful conversations about like what had gone wrong what did we do right what what didn't we do right right what do we wish we had done better um and a a lot of them were of course like product decisions like oh we focus too much on the competition and copying the competition and not focusing enough on our customer but a lot of it was like how we operated as a company and coming out of that we actually started a like open-source Google doc that listed our kind of what we believed and how we think things should should get done around hinge and originally it was just like a long dock of just all kinds of principles it was me just trying to like put my management algorithm like down and on a piece of paper so that everyone was very clear about how I made decisions and how we should all make decisions and how we should prioritize and what we should do so then eventually as Hing got a little bit bigger and we started to you know have more than 100 employees that model didn't make as much sense anymore and we put it in this book called How we do things which was at that point just a list of all our lesson it's really about it's a story of our lessons learned it's like we did it all the wrong ways and that led us to learn to do it the right way and so that's where just to give the context on where these principles came from so designed to be deleted was like we used to focus on the competition and focusing on like what features our competitors had when
we did the reboot we just focused on you know making our one metric getting people out on great dates and I like prohibited people from looking at the competition I didn't want any of their apps on my phone like I just just focus on novel inovation in service of our customer radical trust was about a lot of the decision making was like very top down and um and I think people felt disempowered they felt a lot of Whiplash and radical trust was about how do you push decision- making down to the front lines and how do you Empower people with the information that they need so I have a lot of transparency from the top down about like where we are as a business what our needs are what our problems are so that people on the front lines can go solve it love the leap love the leap is this idea that small incremental optimizations can be can be great but real uh the the things that matter require like a level of um a much bigger Innovation leaps and we have to not be afraid of failure because when you make those much bigger Innovation leaps a lot of them like won't of course land or you have to I think even more importantly trudge through a whole lot of failure to finally get to success I think there's a culture of like that comes from people especially who have worked in tech companies and much larger tech companies of like oh you just test and iterate like you test this thing and then if it works great and then if it doesn't then you just like move on and try try the next thing I I think the difference between that and then the way that like often a Founder an entrepreneur will think is like I believe in this thesis and I'm going to get there no matter what and if I had like I mean think about how many iterations of hinge I had to eventually get to the successful hinge if I just been like oh I'm thinking about building a dating app I'll throw something out there and see if people use it oh gosh they're not really using it I guess the dating app's not a good idea I'll go like build a you know whatever uh a car hailing app you have to like trudge through that so that's love the leap is like you have to suffer through a lot of failure to make like the big innovation leaps do you see a variance and even your team members but other people you work with they're biased towards failure they're at
they're different failure appetites yeah and it gets harder and harder as you get bigger and and bigger and you're fighting against the larger cultural inertia like and it's is very Human by the way to like not make mistakes and not um look bad and that's why by the way this whole book is written is like here's all the mistakes that we made and how we did it all wrong just to give people the permission to know like we're all works in process we're all trying to learn um so you are overcoming like a much larger cultural inertia to get people to take risks and and make mistakes how'd you do that uh you exhibit failure from the top like you admit I think when you've when like when you've made mistakes like when I've made mistakes or even talking about you know my development plan or things that I'm working on I just think it like you almost all of these cultural attributes have to be modeled from the very top Super interesting because most people are just incentivized to just do their job so when you bring along a new idea or a new innovation you know incentive structures mean listen I'm not getting paid to take that [ __ ] risk and then be be made to look stupid yeah so I'm not doing that yeah I think that's right and that's why I think we're and we're continuing to evolve these principles and and and refine them in fact we're going through a process right now it's kind of ironic because we're walking through these and I'm about to release a new version of these to the company and there has been a bit of a refinement and we're actually kind of changing this one and combining it with the first one to call it love the problem because so much of about what we're really trying to get across through this is that you have to go like really deep and develop a deep thesis on a problem and that's what you do I think at this stage of a company you don't take like wild leaps based on the intuition of a Founder anymore you like do deep research on a problem you get conviction around it and then you're not afraid to like fail again and again trying to solve that problem because you are convinced that it's a real problem and you understand a lot about it and you're making a very informed decision you're taking a very thoughtful approach
to solving it number four was and it currently is on my iPad here Guided by principles and that one's definitely staying and that's one of the biggest um uh my own personal journey and I would say like this journey it just it's sort of what I talked about when I talked about how this got created in the first place is that if you keep making the same mistakes over and over again and you're not having an honest self assessment about where you are and how things are working you won't get better and so both of my own personal journey and this has happened through you know recovery through alcohol and addiction and getting better and better as entrepreneurs like I was always self-reflecting and thinking about like okay like seeking feedback like what didn't go well there what did go well there how can I do that better next time and it became like I said too arduous for me to even to track all these things in my mind so I started putting them in that Google doc so that everyone at the company could hold me accountable to this like management algorithm I was developing and what I wanted us is to do as a company is always make decisions based on principles like what's the underlying reason like if I'm making a decision no one should ever think well that's just because Justin likes it that way or that's just because some other leader at the company that's just what they want so let's just do it their way we want people to think like to understand like how am I making those decisions what's underneath that what principles do I believe in that made me to choose this over that because if you make that really explicit and clear then you gain trust people understand like why you're making the decisions and two they can start making decisions on their own without you needing to be in the room and start developing their own principles for how they make decisions and so so many of our meetings start off with like well here are the principles that we sort of aligned on as we started to make you know think about this body of work and it just aligns everyone on the um what's the what what was like the core set of assumptions and beliefs and values that we have before we get into the details of the work and that kind of counteracts the whole CEO because I said
so you know Vibe which might get I guess um might get compliance but it probably won't deliver upon whatever someone calls leadership yeah it's not scalable and maybe some CEOs always know the right thing to do but I don't always know the right thing to do do I I think my job once we got past 20 or 30 people which by the way I didn't know the right thing to do even when we were that small but I thought I did um but as we got much bigger like I can't be close enough to the to the information to like make really great decisions and so my job primarily is is building and fostering the culture that makes good decisions I've been thinking a lot about comedy culture and I threw this at Brian chesky when he was here this idea of how you create company culture like how do you decide I think some people think especially post pandemic which caused all of these companies and businesses to start thinking about what their company culture was in a new way MH you'd see CEOs and managers almost like brainstorming a principlist culture and it was more like how what days do you want people to come in Mondays and Wednesdays should we say two days a week one day a week should we you know um and that just doesn't feel right it doesn't feel like it's based on anything so I said to Brian I said one of the things I'm thinking about is maybe cult is already there and you just kind of have to reverse engineer from the problem you're trying to solve in the world which means for example if we want to be the best dating app in the world then there's a set of behaviors we're going to have to exhibit to get there which is going to require a set of values and then with those values we're going to use those values to create systems processes and hire the people that we need and so you can almost reverse engineer your mission as a company um backwards to figure out what your culture is you said something about like you're just describing the culture that already exists and I think that's kind of true especially if you do it early enough where it's not out of control yet um when it's like relatively close around the founder you've only got like 30 or 40 or 50 people then you definitely have some sort of culture and at that point though I think you want to start
defining defining it so that everyone's clear on what it is because it will start you'll start losing is it starts expanding and people start it's a game of telephone right and it will like it will get lost over time so you want to get really clear on like what it is I think it's the the best of what is as well right because I think you're you're trying to like articulate when we're at our best this is how we're acting and when we're at our worst this is how we're acting because both are always happening within a company like and you don't want to you want to constantly prune away the stuff that's not that's sort of not great and start having more on people replicate what is great so it's that it's more like a pruning process and not just like a here's our culture like describe it and put it out the door but you on the other hand you can't just like throw it up on a wall and invent it from scratch like once an organization is Big you can't just say like our culture suddenly is going to be X Y and Z it'll be so inauthentic to what's actually going on on the ground that no one would ever follow it I almost think about like parenting in a way like you can tell a kid a rule or tell a kid like a but you always have to be watching and like giving those little guidances like here and there you always have to be giving those little nudges when you when you see people acting with in accordance with the culture and praising it or not in accordance with the culture and giving them constructed feedback because it's such it's this living breathing thing like defining it is just like one one step but a very important step and as the company grows and scales I was thinking about this idea of um the best of what is is it possible that the best of what is when there's 10 of you and you're potentially sleeping under a table like The Stereotype goes is not going to be the right culture for when there is like 200 of you yeah totally and you know the the book you're reading from right now is when we were you know 50 to 100 people and and now we're 300 and something people and and we're evolving them and we're actually changing some of them because I've learned things over time that like no longer work at a company this big I'll give you an example one is that idea of radical
trust which we just talked about which actually kind of pained me to talk about because that's not I've learned that's like not right for a company this big anymore you want to push decision-making down somewhat but if you do it too much especially in a larger organization you start getting like a lot of silos and everyone just doing micro optimizations and there's there's you actually want to be there needs to be much more of a conversation and actually watch the the the Brian interview and he talks about pulling decision- making in and that actually is I think more in line with where you have to to be if you want to stay Innovative and still think like a startup even at a big scale so there's things that I took for granted because when we were a 100 people that was happening already but I didn't see it because I just had I knew everyone's name we were all in the same room and so there was a lot of CEO and executive team influence on the team that that was kind of hidden because it just happened naturally so we thought we were pushing decision- making down however I was I was in conversation with Junior developers and Junior engineers and Junior designers all the time giving like little nuggets of feed like I was like I was involved just not officially and I think as we got much bigger we realized like oh gosh you can't just like push decision- making down and like hope for the best you have to like pull it people in and coordinate and there are people at the top that have a view across what's going on across the whole company that need to actually be making decisions we can't just like push it down just to be super clear on that for someone who is you know in their first month of business um pulling decision- making in in that regard is empowering people to make decisions but those decisions coming again through the central lens of the company's Mission when you're really small it's it's it's happening already right if you're if you're a team of 10 people or 12 people like you're all aware of what each other are doing you're talking and you're being conscious about if I'm the marketing person and and the product person over here working on this product feature I I'll think like oh I should
probably Market that product feature like I there's just this like understanding of what's going on so you are making you're like kind of a hive mind you just take that for granted and as you get much bigger you can either make you know I think the extremes are you you just have like a Founder who makes all the decisions everything just gets brought into them which I think makes a lot of people feel disempowered but in the other hand you push decision- making completely down you say you all just handle it I'll just articulate the high level vision and strategy and you but then you usually don't make great sort of uh interdisciplinary or major cohesive leaps that are that feel cohesive everything starts like so it's this balance of having just like a constant conversation opportunity for feedback I still ultimately the decision makers of the people who are close to the work however we are like pulling it in and articulating strategy and and generating conversation I'm in the room with more Junior people a lot now than I frankly more now that I used to be so that we can continually um bring people along what the strategy is what are the big leaps we're making and what are all the little ways that we keep this cohesive it's interesting because in the age of the internet um and the age of dating apps and all these other tools and Technologies even though we have better internet connections the stats continue to show that we're getting lonelier and lonelier yeah which is a word you used central to your mission the word loneliness 52% of Americans report to feeling lonely and 57% of Americans report to eating their meals alone Etc so something's clearly failing isn't it something's clearly not working in this pursuit of connection and social connection and social media Etc yeah and I think so loneliness has been a problem that I think has been creeping up on us for a while but it's really started to accelerate in the last few years and if you look at you know I've seen charts that show like time spent together in real life with friends and time spent consuming media uh consuming like digital media on apps and it's like over
the last like 20 years the one has almost completely displaced the other we used to spend hours a day with friends in real life on average um and make like having genuine connections seeing and being seen and now people are virtually almost always consuming some form of digital media or they're working so even when you're at the gym you're probably like listening to you know a uh like whatever like a music or a podcast or you are nothing wrong with that Justin nothing wrong with that listen get rid of M we're not designed to be deleted fine because you're because because you're conscious I mean so and I'm not saying all media consumption is bad I'm saying that like when you are but when you're pulled in all day and it's completely displaced like you're no longer talking with friends because you're just like Doom scrolling on social media platform X Y or Z you've you've really we've really lost something and I think it's that I think more than anything has led to this like Crisis level acceleration in in loneliness I'm so interested in the disparity between men and women in dating we've had lots of conversations over the years on this podcast about this but even in your app you see a big disparity between like the bottom 50% of men or the bottom group of men on dating apps and like the top one or two% of men on dating apps I'm going to be completely honest much of the reason why I never use dating apps is is I had no success I would get like no good matches I was a 18 19 20 year-old kid that had nothing was super scruffy had no money I had no chance on these apps and I had this best friend called Logan who looks like he comes out of like a Calvin Klein ad we were both broke yeah yeah but he could go on those apps and he would he would clean up and I look over at him I Think Jesus Christ like what's left for me I genuinely believe and people might find this quite shocking in my life I've been on five dates in my entire life my strategy is I go all in so the minute my current girlfriend said she wanted to go on a date with me I pulled up an Excel document and it was a three-day like itinerary I just went all in I've only been on five dates in my life but I but I emphasize with men that really struggle with dating apps and have become disillusioned in fact when we had
I think it was Whitney wolf Herdon from Bumble um I was really surprised because those men showed up in the comment section and they felt like they've been forgotten about so uh it's a big I mean it's a big Focus for us and we I mean part of this is like larger cultural forces that I think are at work but um part of it are things that we can really address I think within dating apps and some people are just good at dating apps and some people I think are quite datable but they're just not good at dating apps and it's I think the question is like how do we help really make it a much more focused quality over quantity experience how do we help the people that are struggling this is where I actually think a lot of the promise of of what's being unlocked through Ai and generative AI is going to like really help us coach people who aren't finding success and help them find better success and create matches that a much more like quality over quantity I mean that when we rebooted h you want to make it more quality over quantity and we went from a world where people used to like it used to take a thousand swipes in order to get on a date and in the new hinge it took about 50 likes so we made a big leap back then in terms of helping people get on on good dates I think now with AI I think there's like a whole other leap of focus in terms of learning about you learning about who's out there helping match people up in a in like a really nice onetoone way and you don't feel like you're in this like very owed room where you know some all the attractions you know or all the attentions going to just a certain group of people and so I think there is a like I think the future is getting brighter for us to be able to solve that problem what are the what is that disparity I read and this might not be accurate um a 2021 study by hinch found that the top 1% of men on the app receed more than 16% of all of the likes while the top 1% of women receive just over 11% this indicates a significant disparity in the level of attention men and women receive on dating apps and similar things from Bumble um a 2022 study by Bumble found that men send an average of 13 messages per day on the app while women only send roughly three
messages per day this suggests that men are putting in significantly more effort to initiate conversations on dating apps and then more broadly from that we've had people on this podcast like Scott Galloway that talks about how the very top 10 10% or the top group of men are having all the sex and basically there's this kind of like disillusion disenfranchised group at the bottom of men who are having no sex and are aren't finding relationships and aren't having intimate connection and it's that group of men that he says are the most dangerous of all because they're like lonely broke disillusioned young men we still have work to do to there's like a major opportunity to help those people that are struggling to find their person by helping them zero in better on the person that they like and and the person who will like them back helping them put their best foot forward and make sure that they are not shooting eles in the foot by like choosing the wrong photos or like putting getting one word answered on prompts or any of those types of things so that I think is the the key is like so like a big effort at at hinge right now internally we're calling it flat in the power curve but it's it's it's essentially that it's like how do you help the people who aren't getting to success how do you level them up to get to success and then how do you focus the people so that um there's not that kind of like power curve Behavior on in society and on dating apps we think we can actually correct what's going on more largely in society through dating apps and so I'm clear we do that by coaching people to be better at dating apps basically like picking better pictures understanding better ways to reply we do that by helping them match with people that are more suitable to them and that are more likely to yeah and I think giving like better more warm introductions so that people have a people have more focus and more of a chance and you also limit like what's going on in terms of um people sending too many likes or matching too much and getting them to focus on the people that they actually really want so that you don't over engage the rest of the user base is there a challenge in getting people to go from the app to the real
world because I was I would always be super scared of that yeah I mean there's uh that's the whole point of our app and that's very much what we're like pushing people towards um but yeah I mean the whole the whole funnel is a challenge in terms of of getting you know getting people to sign up getting people to like create profiles getting people to match getting people to like move from a match to conversation and conversation to date you mentioned AI big topic of conversation this year of course um generative Ai and how that might be able to help people find their person I mean the conversation around Ai and relationships and dating has always been quite pessimistic because people are thinking about sex robots and stuff yeah yeah that that's not the that's certainly not going to be what Hing is working on how how can you use AI to you mentioned it briefly there but I want to make sure I'm clear how specifically you can give me feedback kind of like whoop does they have their they've released their I think one level of it is like just thinking like how do you make the the dating app experience better how do you help people build better profiles how do you help coach people through the conversation process and help them move off to a date so you can certainly like coach people be like hey you should choose these types of photos or whatever like all that is possible with AI what I think like the bigger leap though is to move much closer to what feels like a Matchmaker model and that I think starts to solve some of the problems that that what you were just talking about where it's less like you're just sitting there evaluating and that that whole idea of like creating a profile matching trying to chat trying to move it off to a date like when you work with a Matchmaker you just have an interview and they learn Who You Are they go out and interview other people and they say hey we think you all should meet we'll set up the date and then after the date I'm going to follow up to see how it went and provide some feedback interesting I think we can get closer and closer to that model where we're like going almost straight to setting up dates that are with a much higher likelihood of success than sort of
leaving it on the user to create a personal advertisement for thems and you know do all the work to sort of find through people that are going to like them that are going to that will like them back EX ET the word Company by definition means group of people um you talk about hiring in your principles quite often and just generally in this book principle number five here is people with heart hire people who embody the core values I I've come to learn longer I've been in business that hiring is really Central to everything um culture being the thing that binds those group of people together but what have you learned about hiring and what would your message be to maybe your younger self that is 20 12 when you relaunching the new hinge what would you say to that guy that you know now about hiring we made a whole lot of hiring mistakes in the beginning and um and it was still we sort of did it like we did the principles which is we looked at okay who are the people who have succeeded at hinge what are their attributes who are the people who have not succeeded at hinge and like what are their attributes and then we started to just create attributes for like who like who succeeds and who doesn't and then we started to design an interview which we call the culture interview which still everyone goes through it hinge which is enally like assesses for those attributes and um that led to a dramatic increase in success making sure that we you know when people came they didn't quit or weren't fired within their first year and um now we have extraordinarily low attrition at hinge especially voluntary attrition um and I think it's because we focus so much on making sure we get people in who have those values and then once you have people in who have those values and they're all around other people who have those values that it's like a place they want to stay because it feels it they feel so aligned with the people that they work with and if there was if you had to get rid of every value but keep one when it comes to hiring a hinge person which one would you keep our Three core values are authenticity and courage and empathy that's like and and they are a bit of a trifecta because one without another is like is very imbalanced I think so um
you want people to be authentic you don't want them to like be so authentic and so blunt that they like are rude and mean to people right there's that level of empathy but I think like those two values especially that like authenticity showing up being who you are saying what's on your mind and that level of empathy is ultimately what builds trust and I think trust like within an organization is really the lifeblood of the organization and those two values I think build more trust than anything else they're like the two ingredients of a great relationship 10 years from now we sit here and we have another convers ation we talk about what hinge is the impact it's had on the world what you tell me I think the the next level impact that we can have in terms of shaping dating culture and coaching and teaching people to become not just better daters but like we become it's better better people really and coaching people how to like have more harmonious relationships form better relationships like I think there's so much opportunity to guide people on that process and and so the idea that 10 years from now we like really shaped dating culture in a way that just made everyone more successful that I think is like the vision for where where we're headed as you know whoop are a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company and last month I had the chance to sit down with Kristen Holmes she's the VP of performance at whooop and I learned so much from our conversation about circadian rhythms and things like sleep studies show that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt that you acrew that your decision-making ability will drop by up to 10% and when you're chronically underslept you'll only be a fraction of the person the fraction of the boss partner friend manager that you can be that's why I'm obsessed with whoop which not just tracks but coaches you on how to get better at sleep so you can bring your best to everything that you choose to do if you're not convinced you can try whoop for 30 days completely risk-free with zero commitment just by going to join. whoop.com CEO that's join. whoop.com CEO and let me know how you get on if you don't like it there's no commitment
join. whoop.com CEO we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave at 4 and the question that's been left for you is if you could go back in time and give one piece of advice to your 10-year-old self what would it be oh what comes to mind if I could have impressed on myself that like uh you are I mean impressed on myself that idea of intrinsic worth if I could have like let myself know that I was worthy no matter what regardless of like who dumped me or who ostracized me um that's what I wish in some sense I wish I could have understood and in the other sense it's like shaped my entire life and is the reason that I have hinge and the reason that I have Kate so I think maybe the advice I would give is just buckle up because it's gonna be a really wild ride and it it uh it um you know does have a way of working out in the end thank you so much thank you thank you so much pleasure you've built a really incredible company uh you've built a different business and that's that's so evident in the product that is hinge in a market where there's a lot of people doing the same obvious thing going for the lwh hanging fruit it was so clear to me from a very long distance that at some point someone was being Guided by first principles because you went an an obvious route which has turned in your favor as Society has evolved and we've got sick of surface level things and people are dissatisfied with not actually the promise of these apps not being realized which was you told me you were going to help me find love yeah and I'm still using and swiping on this app three or four years later and feeling despair maybe even feeling worse than I did when I started but hinge took a different route and when you describe hinge to someone you say it's an app that cares more about meaning that cares more about fostering deep connections and that as you say in your own words slows things down a little bit so you can take the time to find a much more um real
authentic potentially successful Bond than the rest of the dating market and that's why hinge has always been I think has always represented the future because at the end of the day people are coming on these apps to find love and it's clear to me this whole design to be deleted thing that and from everybody that I've met at hinge that that is a promise you are genuinely trying to deliver upon yeah I mean it's totally true and that idea of first principles is exactly right I think you have to just like rethink from the ground up like how would I build this and stop thinking like oh other apps do this we'll do this with this twist and that I think is what initially you don't find success during that path because everyone's like well this is different this is weird there's no blueprint right and um but over time that like the the compound interest that comes from actually building an effective product that grows through word of mouth is is you just and now today Hing is you know the fastest growing major dating app or the number one app in the UK and Australia and and um quickly growing in in Europe to become like a top dating app in Europe so it's it pays off eventually you have to be very patient I see that in great Founders you know I see saw it in the [ __ ] founder these unobvious decisions that they made because they're so Guided by their first principles usually based on the Founder's personal experience and that's what I see in hinge so thank you for creating an app that I consider to be a really great one and a really important one and being someone who's driven to end loneliness ultimately um and bring people together because it's never been more important than it is now thank you Justus thank you quick one from one of our sponsors a lot of you have asked me the question about hu over the years about where he fits into your life is it the most healthy choice one can make when they're thinking about what their nutrition and here's what I would say to all of those people I think in an Ideal World I would be able to sit down and cook and prepare all of my meals I think that would be my ideal option but it because of the nature of my life because I'm moving around often what used to happen before hu was I'd end up making bad choices I'd
end up snacking I'd have junk food options on the go because I was busy and my nutrition would come second to whatever my professional priority was what hu allows you to do is to have a healthier option on the go that is convenient that contains a lot of the nutrients that you need to have a complete diet and that's exactly where it fits in my life they've now expanded the range if you haven't yet checked out the hu RTD I highly recommend you do go to your local Tesco boots or Saints spres or onine online and you can grab and try one there do you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below I know you'll enjoy [Music] it