Joel Simkhai
19 statements across 1 episodes · 6 bullish · 3 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Jul 17, 2023 by Joel Simkhai · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Joel Simkhai's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Joel Simkhai, oldest first
Jul 17, 2023
Simkhai: Grindr was funded with a $100,000 parental loan and rev share
“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.”
Jul 17, 2023 negative
Simkhai: Grindr avoided VC to not answer to straight corporate investors
“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'…”
Jul 17, 2023 neutral
Joel Simkhai recruited Grindr's developer from jailbroken Cydia mapping projects
“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…”
Jul 17, 2023 positive
Jul 17, 2023
Jul 17, 2023 positive
Simkhai: Local network density is the core moat for location-based apps
“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…”
Jul 17, 2023 positive
Simkhai: Grindr's customer acquisition cost was essentially zero
“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.”
Jul 17, 2023
Jul 17, 2023 negative
Jul 17, 2023 positive
Simkhai: Users will pay for dating apps because matchmaking was always paid
“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…”
Jul 17, 2023 neutral
Grindr launched with zero-friction onboarding requiring no email, account, or photo
“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…”
Jul 17, 2023 positive
Simkhai: Grindr Was a Queer Success Story Accepted by Wall Street
“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…”
Jul 17, 2023 positive
Jul 17, 2023
Jul 17, 2023
Jul 17, 2023
Jul 17, 2023
Simkhai: Grindr's grid interface was inspired by the iPhone photo album
“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…”
Jul 17, 2023
Jul 17, 2023 negative
Simkhai: Blendr failed because product architecture misunderstood women's needs
“Our failure was in the architecture of what we did. And so, you know, if there was a woman, she would get hundreds and hundreds of messages. We also allowed people to exchange photos, and so women would get unsolicited nudes. That, you know, that was a problem…”