Assertion Partly supported
McLeod: Screen time replaced 70% of time spent with friends
“If you look at the loneliness epidemic, and you actually look over the last 20 years at the amount of time people spend on their screens, we've almost completely displaced in real life time spent with our friends with time spent looking at screens. About 70% o…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McLeod: AI will replace swiping with natural language preference matching
“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 …”
Insight
McLeod: Companies should win one market at a time over broad expansion
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McLeod: Breakout dating startups were all incubated inside corporate holding companies
“And then there's a reason, I think, you know, you see that The startups that have really taken off and grown in the dating space were all started in-house.”
Insight
McLeod: Frictionless sign-on removed online dating stigma and unlocked millennials
“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.”
Disclosure
McLeod: Hinge spent its final $25,000 on a massive D.C. launch party
“We took our last 25,000 dollars and we threw a 2500 person launch party in D.C.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McLeod: IAC owning Tinder made Hinge the only viable dating startup investment
“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.”
Opinion
McLeod: Hinge became practically identical to Tinder through feature copying
“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…”
Assertion Supported
McLeod: Hinge is the only dating app tracking post-date user satisfaction
“We're still the only app that asks whether you went on a date and whether it was good.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McLeod: Redesigning Hinge reduced likes needed per date from 1,000 to 50
“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 …”
Disclosure
McLeod: Match acquisition began after Hinge tried poaching their BD head
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McLeod: Most Hinge users who try video dating plan to continue post-pandemic
“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.”
Disclosure
McLeod: Hinge launched new cities using waitlists and single-event tipping points
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McLeod: No VC would invest in Hinge during its product relaunch
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McLeod: Startups were not a popular career path at Harvard Business School
“No, because startups wasn't really a thing.”
What-if
McLeod: Hinge was inspired by a canceled Harvard Business School dance
“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.”
Assertion Supported
McLeod: Hinge was originally named Secret Agent Cupid
“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.”
Insight
McLeod: Crush-matching apps suffer massive churn immediately after matches are revealed
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McLeod: Hinge was bootstrapped with $24k to hire Argentine developers
“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…”
Disclosure
McLeod: Hinge raised a few million in late 2013, $14M-$15M in 2014
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McLeod: Hinge loses over 20% of users during signup
“You know, we lose more than 20% of our users during the signup process.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McLeod: Over half of Hinge users have gone on video dates
“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.”
Disclosure
McLeod: Achieved sobriety after college graduation through twelve-step programs
“And I just vowed that morning to, like, stop. And I did. You know, I participated in twelve-step programs, and I, like, really threw myself into work, and that was that.”
Assertion Supported
McLeod: Hinge raised $100k-$150k from friends and family via Fortify incubator
“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.”
