The Ledger
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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: 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: Egyptian authorities actively use Grindr to track and arrest gay men
“It's not alleged. It happens.”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”
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: 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 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 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.”
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: 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: 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 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: Grindr Users Spent an Hour a Day on the App
“You know, people spend an hour a day on Grindr.”
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…”
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.”