Grindr

“Now, because Grindr is focused on LGBTQ, it was really interesting. A lot of the traditional buyers were not there in the process. There was always like someone conservative on the investment committee that was like, we can't touch that. We went to try to rais…”

“The financials are doing a hundred million of revenue and about forty five million of EBITDA, incredible margins at scale, yet the ratings are so low.”

“Grindr, we bought for six hundred million dollars, and of that six hundred million, we put two hundred million of debt. So call that roughly four terms of debt. I said they were doing about 45 of EBITDA. So about four terms of debt, which is again, pretty indu…”

“There's only five people that had equity.”

“We ended up, and we don't normally do this terminating 70% of the employees, because it just, they were C players, and we wanted at least A minus players, if not A players, right?”

“And in that last year, we were able to double the revenue to two hundred million, double the EBITDA to about ninety two million, and then take it public for two billion.”

“Jeff and I were insistent with the other PE firm that everyone is going to have stock that will, you know, it will reflect their level in the company, of course, but we wanted everyone to have stock.”

“The NYSE is, is kind of an old school organization. They had rainbow flags everywhere. I mean, they went all out for Grindr.”

“We actually went after a grinder The LGBTQ plus dating app in 2019. So the app was owned by a Chinese firm and Sifuse was forcing it to sell. It was a big bite for us at the time. We're much smaller. It would have quadrupled the company. We didn't have an equa…”

“Joel sold it for, I wanna say, two hundred and sixty million. So it was a great sale and he owned 90% of the company.”

“They give the company one year. You have one year to sell to a U.S. Ownership group. And if you do not, the government will take control of the business.”

“It came down to three buyers in the end that put in, you know, legitimate bids, and we were lucky enough to partner with the other PE firm and buy it.”

“So we bought it for about six hundred million. It was doing less than fifty million, about forty five million of EBITDA when we bought the company, so, you know, call that kind of 12, 13 X EBITDA, and the market was probably trading at more like 20, the public…”

“And this was one of the only cases ever where CFIUS had actually retroactively unwound a deal. CFIUS had denied deals with foreign buyers, but they had never, what they're trying to do with TikTok today over the years is TikTok would be the second one after Gr…”

“So the deal structure, the 600, there was about 200 of equity that went in. And, you know, some of that was our personal money, but most of it was outside money that we raised. There was two hundred million of debt. So Fortress was our debt provider. And then …”

“We took Grindr public, and we'll talk about how we got there, but we took it public for two billion on the New York Stock Exchange two and a half years after we bought the company. And as I mentioned, as part of the deal structure that earned out, the first tw…”

“We were being sued at that point by 13 attorney generals in the U.S. Over privacy and data leakage, something the company had not done, but it was everyone believed the company had done.”

“By the time Rick and I left, 70% of the hires from the, in the company were minority hires, basically. We were hiring people from the LGBTQ community, or we were hiring people that were in, in the DEI, which is not something people like to talk about anymore, …”

“And in two and a half years, we took Grindr from a hundred million of revenue to two hundred million of revenue when we took it public.”

“I mean, we're at over fourteen million Active monthly users now.”

“It's still, it's now the largest source of gay relationships in the United States. So four in 10 gay relationships start on Grindr.”

“People spend on average an hour a day in the app, which is really remarkable.”

“And we had a hundred and twenty five billion approximately messages sent in the app last year. That's about 50 messages Per person per day which is more than WhatsApp messaging in a given day per, per user.”

“It's very not common for people to hook up and then develop a friendship in the straight world. It's very common in the gay world for that to be the case.”

“The really big product we're going to be launching, you know, worldwide sometime towards the end of next year, it's now live in two markets today. It's called RightNow, which is actually making the hookup experience better and more easy for a user to access.”

“25% of Grindr users, so one in four is traveling in any given week which is a really remarkable thing to think about, given that, you know, in the U.S., average person It takes two vacations a year in a car to visit like family, 60 miles away or something.”

“A year and a half ago, we started working with the CDC to allow people to order an HIV test to be shipped to their home to get an HIV test. We've sent out about half a million tests since then, which is really incredible. And more importantly, 30% of people wh…”

“We don't make money on on HIV tests cause CDC actually sends those to people for free. And we don't make money on prep cause we don't sell prep. There are companies that do sell prep. We just do education and marketing plan.”

“I think if healthcare works it will be very large, because if you just do the math on it, right, like, a compound ED medication costs a hundred to a 130 dollars per month subscription and, you know, people, I think, average Kind of lifetime value of a user is …”

“We don't really focus on MOW Grow, frankly, at all.”

“We have a 95 plus percent name recognition in the US.”

“Our pair penetration is about a little over seven percent.”

“We don't need to be at anywhere near Tinder's pay penetration to hit our, say, three-year financial targets.”

“We don't spend any money on marketing, and the reason is, is we don't do any acquisition marketing. So our marketing is focused on, on brand building, and we do a lot of stuff in social, narrow casting to, again, gay and bi men. But it's a lot of storytelling …”

“Grindr has less than a 150 full time employees. We are very, very efficient. You know, our revenue per head is very high. It's over two million bucks per full time employee.”

“Because we're a public company and all the costs that public companies have, we still have to have, and we'll have them at 300 plus million and we'll have them at a billion in revenue. And they're mostly going to be the same. Like the accounting team is not go…”

“We're going to launch a bunch of new stuff this year, but a lot of it's going to be done through partnerships with one or two people working on those things.”

“So I give people like very long written documents that are like really detailed that I give examples, et cetera. And then I like send it to them in advance and then I sit down with them and go through them, which is not the, maybe necessarily the best thing fo…”

“You know, when I was taking this job, I actually told the big shareholders. At this point, Grant was still private, so they're kind of the owners, like, look, I'm a conservative guy. I'm Republican. I'm also gay. I'm very social like, on on these social issues…”

“We are really devoted to marriage equality around the world, and we spend money on that, and we will always be very comfortable saying things about that topic.”

“Broader political topics actually don't make statements on right now because it is not my job. My job is to be the best CEO I can be for Grindr, and things I might say that distract me from being Doing that job and providing my users with the most awesome expe…”

“We shouldn't be just comped to dating apps when they talk about kind of what the multiple on the stock should be. That we should be comped as much as to social network products and comps as much as we're comped to dating products.”

“Ads are about 15% of our revenue in, in total, but obviously on a margin basis, they're even higher percentage, because it's a very profitable part of the business, and we don't have to pay the Apple and Google taxes on that revenue.”

“I showed up in October and we're going public in November.”

“So one thing I can say is very clearly, we're not going to hoard cash for acquisitions. If there are acquisitions that are interesting at some point that we want to do, We'll, we'll deal with that at that point, but I don't think it's the right thing to do to …”

“We have debt. We're paying down that debt. We want to get down to 1.5 to two X. EBITDA on, on the debt. We'll get there soon, but not yet.”

“And so they forced the divestiture and was like the first CFIUS forced divestiture and definitely the most prominent one that had ever happened.”

“And even more crazy, the entire engineering team, which was at this point was in Taiwan, quit when the transaction happened.”

“Building out these new use cases, the, what we call Gaberhood expansion use cases, like healthcare and wellness, like travel. I think there are others that we are thinking about. I think networking and jobs is another really big opportunity for us as well, kin…”

“The ones I remembered were some mapping apps. This was, again, before any Apple Maps or Google Maps. And so I reached out to each of those developers, and I said, hey I'd like to develop an app myself, and I was wondering, you know, would like to hire you to b…”

“And I remember, you know, one day looking at my photo album on my phone, And I said, hey, wouldn't it be great if these were the guys around me? And so that was really the inspiration for the user interface of Grindr, and it still remains today, is it's a grid…”

“I think we, it's only spent a few thousand dollars.”

“Had you offered me the 200,000 dollars that you had paid for this study of yours, I would have taken your offer.”

“So we didn't even require an email address no phone number, nothing. It was just we had used the device ID. You could log on, and you didn't have to even create an account, which later became a problem, but initially, you could just log on, and photos were not…”

“And so we got probably about a thousand downloads a day.”

“Yeah, I got a loan, about a 100,000 dollars from my parents You know, fortunately, I wasn't paying Scott. He was working for Equity. Morton was getting, eventually what would, the deal I had with Morton was a rev share on the ads that would come in.”

“Maybe a few thousand dollars the first month, and imagine the first year we probably made a few 100,000 dollars in in ads.”

“I remember people always telling me, you know, hey, Joel nobody pays for apps. Apps are all free. And no one's gonna ever pay for an app, and I said, I'm actually not an app. I'm a, essentially, a dating business, and people have been paying for dating for cen…”

“Yeah, our app store ratings were, you know, one star. We had Horrible reviews, and .”

“And so I had another friend, a childhood friend, Yvette Pasqua, who worked at a consulting firm down in Costa Rica. And so eventually I turned to her, I don't know exactly what, I can't remember exactly what year that was, but it was fairly early on, and throu…”