Jul 17, 2023 · 1h 9m · how-i-built-this
Grindr: Joel Simkhai
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of How I Built This, host Guy Raz interviews Grindr founder Joel Simkhai about creating the world's first mainstream geolocation dating app, bootstrapping the business to global ubiquity, and navigating technical, cultural, and ethical hurdles.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 36.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 2.0 Guest teaching 1.1 Guest disagreement 0.3 Guy pushing back 0.1
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 53:18 Rebuttal on government entrapment
Joel immediately cuts through Guy's hesitant framing of Egyptian state surveillance as alleged, flatly stating it is concrete reality.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 1:02:27 Guy challenges Joel's grievance over his exitGuy directly challenges Joel by asking who cares about being ousted in a contentious way when walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 55:40 Explaining the fundamental UX failure of BlenderJoel educates Guy on why Blender failed where Tinder succeeded, explaining how open messaging and proximity metrics disregarded the unique safety and spam dynamics women face.
Guy holds their own ▶ 57:40 Guy details the Kunlun acquisition termsGuy demonstrates deep factual mastery of Grindr's business timeline, laying out the precise financial numbers, valuations, and corporate actors involved in the Kunlun buyout.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cross-Promotion for The Great Creators Podcast | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Guy Raz sets up the episode with an introductory overview of Grindr's revolutionary use of geolocation in 2009 and introduces Joel Simkhai's background. | |
| Childhood Struggles, Bullying, and Online Exploration | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Joel candidly discusses his early childhood, athletic shortcomings, high school bullying, and finding gay community through early internet chat rooms. | |
| Early Career and the Button-Selling Mindset | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Guy asks about Joel's post-college career, and Joel explains his father's entrepreneurial philosophy about selling shirt buttons. | |
| Running the Magazine Subscription Arbitrage Business | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Joel explains his magazine subscription arbitrage business and his realization upon Steve Jobs announcing the second-generation iPhone with GPS. | |
| Finding a Developer on Jailbroken Cydia | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Joel details how he recruited a Danish developer from the jailbroken Cydia app store despite having no coding background. | |
| Designing the Grid Interface and Grindr Brand | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Joel shares how looking at the iPhone photo album inspired Grindr's proximity grid interface. | |
| The Race to Launch Against Market Doubts | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Joel explains the naming choices between Blender and Grindr and the race to launch before competitors arrived. | |
| Launching Grindr and Rejecting Manhunt's Offer | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Joel recounts turning down a low acquisition offer from incumbent Manhunt on the exact day Grindr launched. | |
| Frictionless Onboarding and Viral Word-of-Mouth | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Joel describes designing an account-free, frictionless onboarding process and marketing via pride events. | |
| Bootstrapping with Family Support and Overcoming Skepticism | 2 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Joel explains how early skeptics doubted location services before Uber existed, noting his primary skill is resourcefulness. | |
| Freemium Subscriptions and Grassroots PR Strategy | 2 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Joel explains why he rejected the conventional wisdom that nobody pays for apps by reframing Grindr as a traditional matchmaking service. | |
| Technical Bottlenecks and Outsource Engineering to Costa Rica | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Joel discusses severe crashing issues and one-star reviews leading to outsourcing development to Costa Rica. | |
| Stephen Fry Endorsement and Content Moderation Guidelines | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Joel recounts Stephen Fry giving Grindr a viral shoutout on Top Gear and describes public vs private moderation rules. | |
| Infrastructure Costs, Network Moats, and Mental Fatigue | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Joel describes Google App Engine price hikes, network effects as Grindr's sole moat, and coping with severe loneliness. | |
| The London Olympics Outage and Viral Press Dynamics | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Joel explains the 2012 London Olympics crash myth and how bad press drove surges in app downloads. | |
| Mid-Roll Intermission: Emerging Privacy and Spam Threats | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Joel explains resisting VC funding to avoid answering to straight corporate America, followed by the crisis of rampant bot spam. | |
| State Surveillance Risks and the Blender Experiment | 2 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Joel corrects Guy's framing that state entrapment was alleged, explaining concrete safety measures taken and why straight spin-off Blender failed. | |
| Addressing Platform Toxicity and Discriminatory Behavior | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Joel reflects on community racism, the $93M sale of a 60% stake to Kunlun, post-deal hacking, and clashes over Chinese expansion. | |
| Life After Grindr, Marriage, and the IPO | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | Guy questions why Joel cared about the contentious buyout given his massive payout, and Joel details the emotional toll and meeting his husband. | |
| Founding Motto and Reflections on Luck versus Execution | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Joel explains his new app Motto and pushes back against attributing success to pure luck, emphasizing execution over raw ideas. |
Statements from this episode (32)
Simkhai: Unglamorous Niche Businesses Can Create Significant Wealth
“There's millionaires who made their wealth by selling buttons. And it might not be glamorous, but it's a great business for a bunch of people.”
Simkhai: Magazine publishers discount subscriptions to inflate their advertising base
“The mechanics of the business is these magazines are eager for subscribers because that's how they get their advertising base, and so they often would sell it the subscription at a discount just to get the subscriber.”
Simkhai: Every queer person wonders who in a room is like them
“I think every queer person walks into a room and, you know, wonders who else is just like them in the room.”
Simkhai decided to build Grindr instantly upon iPhone 3G GPS announcement
“It wasn't almost immediately. It was immediately. You know, the second he said this, I said, I need to build an app that lets me meet guys on it.”
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…”
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…”
Grindr launched spending only a few thousand dollars initially
“I think we, it's only spent a few thousand dollars.”
Simkhai: Grindr would have sold to Manhunt for $200,000 at launch
“Had you offered me the 200,000 dollars that you had paid for this study of yours, I would have taken your offer.”
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…”
Grindr averaged around 1,000 downloads per day during early promotion
“And so we got probably about a thousand downloads a day.”
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.”
Grindr made several hundred thousand dollars in ad revenue its first year
“Maybe a few thousand dollars the first month, and imagine the first year we probably made a few 100,000 dollars in in ads.”
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…”
Simkhai: Grindr's early App Store reviews averaged one star
“Yeah, our app store ratings were, you know, one star. We had Horrible reviews, and .”
Simkhai: Grindr outsourced early app and backend engineering to Costa Rica
“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…”
Simkhai: Grindr got 10,000 downloads following Stephen Fry Top Gear mention
“And I went back to my hotel room, and we got 10,000 downloads.”
Simkhai: Focusing on appearance in dating apps mimics real-life interaction
“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.”
Simkhai: Grindr moved from Google App Engine to AWS over costs
“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.”
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.”
Simkhai: Grindr's revenue shifted from 80% ads to predominantly subscriptions
“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.”
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…”
Simkhai: London Olympic athletes did not cause the 2012 Grindr outage
“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,…”
Simkhai: Grindr traffic and downloads increased after outages and negative press
“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 …”
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'…”
Simkhai: Startup valuations and headcount are vanity metrics
“And I think one of the ways that founders get caught up in validation is with Valuations.
Valuations, headcount.
And to me, those were vanity metrics.
Those were not metrics that were important.
The only metric that was really important to me was my daily acti…”
Simkhai: Egyptian authorities actively use Grindr to track and arrest gay men
“It's not alleged. It happens.”
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…”
Simkhai: Grindr Users Spent an Hour a Day on the App
“You know, people spend an hour a day on Grindr.”
Simkhai: Grindr Should Have Actively Moderated Toxic User Behavior
“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.”
Grindr founder: App was hacked shortly after Kunlun acquisition
“We got hacked soon after the deal closed.”
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…”