Grindr

“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.”

“And I felt that if I would take venture backing I would essentially become a monkey to them, and that I would need to essentially work for them. And a lot of them were, you know, straight men who I felt like didn't understand my business, and you know, I didn'…”

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

“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 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…”

“We got hacked soon after the deal closed.”

“And it was ridiculous, right? I mean, how many Olympians are there? A few thousand. How many of them are gay? Maybe a dozen, a few dozen or a few hundred. For them to be able to crash our servers when we had, you know, hundreds of thousands of users and maybe,…”

“And, you know, for a location-based service, when you're meeting people, it's really, you know, all about, you want people nearby. And if someone's not nearby, that's not a great experience. And so we had the, you know, first mover's advantage. We had the netw…”

“Our marketing spend was essentially zero, so our cost to acquire new users was essentially zero. I mean, that's what allowed us to grow. You know, if I had to spend money acquiring users, we would not have been able to achieve what we achieved.”

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

“I think we should have had been more, a lot more involved and guiding of our users and letting them know that certain behaviors was just unacceptable.”

“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…”

“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…”

“The main feeling I had was kind of proud of myself for building something that got acceptance from Wall Street to a certain extent. I was very proud of that, and I was very proud of the queer community, that this was a successful business that, you know, serve…”

“The way I had always thought of it was, you know, you walk into a bar, and what is it that you first see is you first see that person. You walk into any situation, and so that is actually mimics real life in some ways.”

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

“It's not alleged. It happens.”

“And one of the things I realized also is that, you know, our outages actually, we had a lot of outages. And we would actually see that anytime we would have an outage, our traffic would go up afterwards. And anytime we would have a negative news article about …”

“You know, people spend an hour a day on Grindr.”

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

“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…”

“Initially, I think, you know, ads were 80% of our revenue, and, you know, the subscriptions were 20. And eventually, it would flip to the opposite, where, you know, most of the money came from subscriptions.”

“Eventually, we went on, we moved to Amazon because they became so expensive but largely because we had implemented them in not a very efficient way.”

“And I went back to my hotel room, and we got 10,000 downloads.”