Hinge

“I'm actually quite excited about the possibilities that we're now seeing because of AI, which I think will even further our ability to help people spend less time on our app and more time out on great dates. It will allow people Instead of communicating to us …”

“Well, in Hinge's day, we started originally in Washington, D.C., There was a lot of movement between, like, DC and New York, and so people in New York would start to hear about it, but we wouldn't let anyone in until, because we had such a network effects prod…”

“Yeah, and we have this principle at Hinge of kind of depth over breadth, and we always You know, it's hard to try to cover up for weakness by just like expanding more like, oh, like that market's not working. Let's just launch more markets. So thinking, thinki…”

“When we did the relaunch, you know, my first instinct was obviously to, like, go raise money. So I was talking to every VC, but no one would give me money.”

“Gen Z, 18 to 24, is the primary user of Tinder, Hinge, and our other apps.”

“There is a funny theory in behavioral science, which is that people don't make decisions in a vacuum. They make decisions through comparison. So if you have a friend who looks like you, but is slightly less attractive, then that'll make you look even more attr…”

“Guys are often lazy and they only comment on like the first picture or the first prompt on a girl's profile. So if you actually scroll down and you comment on something lower, you have a higher chance of being more original because fewer people have just ever …”

“We've actually found that the sweet spot is after three days of chatting, just say, hey, I always walk my dog at six p.m., can I give you a phone call, or do you want to FaceTime for a few minutes tonight?”

“We did do research at Hinge looking at to what are the most commonly agreed upon parts of digital body language. So one of them is that actually the double text is okay.”

“In the research that I did on this at Hinge, what we found is that 86% of people say, when it comes to rejection, I'd rather you tell me.”

“So now if you have eight conversations with [4704] Logan Ury: Where you owe somebody a response, you cannot match with anyone else until you respond to one of those people. [4709] Logan Ury: So either you close out the conversation and show that you're not int…”

“Whether it's for us or for other companies, innovation has been dramatically limited. Except for maybe Hinge, which has had a little bit more innovation kind of along the way.”

“He said, we took our last 25,000 dollars and we threw a 2500 person launch party in D.C. We set the date and we just worked backwards from that. We were just like, we've got to get everyone on at once. No one's gonna stick around if there's not a lot of people…”

“Like this is the complete opposite of Tinder, Hinge, Raya, all these dating, dating apps, literally a physical product that you pay for versus a free product, like a Tinder or something like that. And I just think it's absolutely brilliant.”

“I'm banned from Tinder and Hinge and, you know, like so many odd, you know, social medias”

“Hinge relies a lot on television ads that helps them reach the audience that is likely to use their product. Tinder relies much more on influencer marketing and event based marketing.”

“I think that, like, where you spend your resources tells a lot about someone that a Hinge profile doesn't, and so I suspect if, like, you were to say, hey, we are matching the two of you up because you spend an absurd amount of your income at this, like, weird…”

“I don't think I would have, that initial spark would have happened had the dance not been canceled, and I hadn't been walking with Brett that Wednesday afternoon to class.”

“The original name of this, by the way, was called Secret Agent Cupid, and it was this whole thing of, like, you're undercover listing your crushes.”

“Other people had had this idea, and what happens is, a lot of people join, people list their crushes, and then you find out whether you match or not, and then everyone goes away.”

“So I got together with a friend, her name was Frances, at business school. She worked at Google, and we each put in 12,000 dollars, which was obviously like a lot of money for us both, but it's what I had, and so we put in this money, and we hired a team of en…”

“I got into this little incubator in D.C. Called Fortify, and Raised, like, a little bit from my little friends and family round of maybe, like, a hundred, a 150,000 dollars.”

“If you make it easy and you make a one-click sign-on, it won't have stigma. And if it doesn't have stigma, you're going to unlock the biggest single market Which is people who are 20 to 35, when those people didn't use dating websites.”

“We took our last 25,000 dollars and we threw a 2500 person launch party in D.C.”

“Tinder was exploding, and no one could invest in Tinder, because it was owned by IAC. And so the only place that people could put their money as a competitor to Tinder at the time was basically us.”

“We raised, like, a few million dollars towards the end of 2013, and then we raised a big round of, like, 14 or fifteen million dollars at the end of 2014.”

“You know, we were very focused on our competition, and our competition released a feature, and we released a feature, and yeah, they became very, very similar in their appearance, and we were still friends of friends, and so we had this different vibe, but pra…”

“We're still the only app that asks whether you went on a date and whether it was good.”

“You know, we lose more than 20% of our users during the signup process.”

“You know, on the old version of Hinge, the biggest thing, just to give you a sense, you had to send a thousand likes in order to get to a date. And on the new version of Hinge, it was 50. So a thousand to 50. 20 times more effective at getting people out on a …”

“You know, funny enough, the way that the relationship with Match Group started is I tried to poach their head of business development to come run finance at Hinge. I mean, that's the level of audacity that I had. We had, like, three months of money in the bank…”

“Video dating, like, more than half of our users now have Gone on a video date, and so that was something that seemed like a pretty clear thing to build into the app.”

“When we talk to our users who have tried it, most of them say that they want to continue to do it even after the pandemic, because it just makes a ton of sense.”