Hinge

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 …”

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”