Why Bumble and Tinder are suddenly scrambling to keep up with Hinge

When Spencer Rascoff took over as CEO at the struggling dating app giant Match Group in February, one of his first orders of business was to acquaint himself with all the services under his purview. Match, which owns and operates more that 45 dating apps, including Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid, and Match.com, has seen its stock price drop more than 80% from its 2021 high amid growing fatigue with online dating and a generation shift away from apps. After explosive growth during the pandemic, Match’s annual revenue has been flattening, in large part because growth at Tinder, its once-reliable cash cow, has stalled. Rascoff, the cofounder and former CEO of Zillow Group, is tasked with turning things around. 

Rascoff asked the leadership of Tinder and Hinge to each take three hours and present their apps to him. The Tinder team began by walking him through the app’s financial results and business metrics. They then got to the product road map, and finally to the people and culture. The team behind Hinge—which grew revenue by 39% last year, providing a rare bright spot in the Match Group portfolio—took an entirely different approach.

“They started with consumer insights. This is where Gen Z is at. This is where Millennials are at. This is the zeitgeist of the world. This is what they want. This is how they date. This is how they think. This is how they connect,” Rascoff recalled in May, as he told the story to the audience at the JPMorgan Global Technology, Media, and Communications Conference. “Only at the very end, did they actually share, briefly, revenue and financial metrics.” 

Rascoff’s conclusion: “If you want to understand why Hinge is winning and Tinder was losing, that’s it. That’s why.” A little more than a week later, Tinder CEO Faye Iosotaluno announced that she would step down in July, after less than two years in the role. Rascoff is taking the reins himself. Match shares rose 1.3% following the announcement.

Tinder, which accounts for more than half of Match Group’s revenue, has had a difficult run. It grew revenue only 1% last year and has been shedding users: It’s lost more than 1.2 million paying subscribers since the start of 2024. (When Match Group reported its Q1 earnings in May, it also announced it was laying off 13% of its workforce.) 

Tinder’s not alone: In January, rival dating app Bumble announced that founder Whitney Wolfe Herd would return as CEO, replacing Lidiane Jones, who had been in the role for all of a year. In 2024, Bumble app grew its paying users by 11% to 2.8 million. But in the first quarter of this year, its revenue decreased 6.5% year over year, to $201.8 million, and it shed nearly 100,000 paying users since the end of 2024. Meanwhile, the average revenue per user has dropped 15% since 2021. Bumble has signaled in earnings that it has had difficulty retaining younger users, particularly Gen Z. Its stock is down more than 40%, year over year, and off 90% from its post-IPO high in 2021. (Match and Bumble both declined to make executives available for interviews for this story.)

Rascoff and Wolfe Herd are now embarking on ambitious turnaround plans that have them rethinking what users want from Tinder and Bumble—and how the dating apps’ underlying user experiences can deliver it. “This generation doesn’t want more matches. They want better ones,” Rascoff said in a recent Instagram post.  

And though their target audiences may be different, it’s a lesson both can learn from Match Group’s emerging darling, Hinge. 

Hinging on connection

Led by CEO and founder Justin McLeod, Hinge launched in 2012—the same year as Tinder and two years ahead of Bumble. But while Tinder became a pop-culture staple, thanks to its addictive swipe-right UX, Hinge remained fairly under-the-radar. Its motto is “designed to be deleted,” and McLeod has focused on creating a user experience that optimizes for lasting connections. Customers logging off the app for good rather than swiping forever is considered a success. 

That ethos is paying off. In 2024, Hinge took in $550 million in revenue, driven by a 23% rise in paying users. In October, it leap-frogged over Bumble to become the second most downloaded dating app in the U.S. for the first time ever (Tinder retained its no. 1 status).

To guide this kind of user behavior, Hinge has deployed a counterintuitive product strategy. Most apps try to reduce friction to make the user experience easy and addictive: Think of the simplicity and elegance of swiping through unlimited options on Tinder, without any pressure to message potential matches. 

In September, Hinge bucked that trend and deliberately inserted a stumbling block for users with a feature called Your Turn Limits. The feature solves one of the biggest challenges users face when trying to secure a date: unanswered messages from people who ghost their matches. Now, Hinge users with too many unanswered messages are required to send a reply or end the conversation before being allowed to connect with other users. 

“Our north star metric is whether users are getting out on great dates or not,” McLeod told Fast Company in an interview in February. After Your Turn Limits was released, the app saw fewer matches and likes, but more people going on dates. “There are all of these kinds of techniques that can be really engaging and keep people sending lots of likes, but don’t necessarily lead to more dates,” McLeod explained. “So we do things differently.”

Hinge has a longer sign-up process than Tinder and Bumble. It asks users to submit at least six photos and answer a minimum of three prompts. On Tinder, users simply fill out basic information like their name, birthday, and sexual orientation, and add at least one photo; Bumble’s sign-up process is similar. 

Hinge also takes a different approach to its premium offerings than Tinder. Tinder’s premium tiers focus on giving users access to more swipes or a profile boost to put them in front of more people, which helps with engagement but doesn’t necessarily lead to quality matches. Hinge’s premium subscriptions have similar features but they also prioritize optimizing for better matches. Premium subscribers are able to filter profiles for characteristics like political affiliation, education level, family plans, or whether someone smokes. Subscribers can also get ‘enhanced recommendations,’ where the app’s algorithm surfaces profiles based on users’ recent activity. Perhaps taking inspiration from Hinge’s playbook, Tinder recently started letting users filter profiles by height.

The new rules of dating

Rascoff and Wolfe Herd diagnose the problems with Tinder and Bumble differently, but the result is the same: a decline in quality of matches. 

In interviews and earnings calls, Rascoff has said that Tinder suffers, first and foremost, from a perception problem as a hookup app—a message that doesn’t resonate with Gen Z users. Instead, he wants to help Gen Z users create casual, spontaneous connections without the pressure of hooking up. “We’re aiming to introduce new ways to meet new people in lower-pressure environments. That’s really what Gen Z wants.” Rascoff said at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference in late May. He signaled that even the app’s core user experience—the profile swipe—can be problematic. “The high-pressure kind of product offering of looking at a photo and judging it, that is cringey for a lot of Gen Z people,” he said. “It makes them feel bad about themselves to look at photo and say ‘thumbs up, thumbs down.’” (Rascoff went even further, writing on Instagram last week that “The next era of dating won’t be built on swipes alone,” but he has since edited that line out of his post.)

To create more casual dating experiences, Tinder is testing a new Double Date feature that allows users to pair up with a friend and swipe on other pairs of friends—and ultimately go on group dates. Currently available in Europe and rolling out in the U.S. later this year, the feature appeals to younger users: On Match’s Q1 earnings call, Rascoff reported that nearly 90% of Double Date users are under 29 years old. The feature is also helping the company grow its user base, as users invite friends to join (or reactivate) the app to take part in Double Date.  

Just as Hinge incorporates speed bumps in its user experience, forcing users to send messages to prospects before getting more swipes, Tinder also seems to be experimenting with adding a bit more friction into its own UX. To encourage good behavior on the app, the company recently introduced Are You Sure?, a feature that asks users to reconsider sending a message if it contains anything that could be considered distasteful.

Rascoff has also announced plans to attract younger users by focusing less on making money from them through premium subscriptions. He told the crowd at the J.P. Morgan conference in May to think about Tinder as a bar for singles to meet. “We’ve had two or three years of declining attendance at our bar. And the solution, to date, has been to increase the price of the drinks at the bar, and then occasionally come up with slightly different drinks or maybe sell food to an ever decreasing number of people at the bar. We must increase the number of people at the bar.” 

According to Wolfe Herd, Bumble’s problem isn’t a lack of people at the bar—in some ways, it’s the opposite. During Bumble’s Q1 earnings call, she noted that the company pulled in a lot of new users during the pandemic, “but we now know they weren’t always the right fit,” which led to fewer and lower-quality matches on the platform. “As match quality dropped, some members got discouraged, found fewer successful matches and dates, and fewer people recommended the app to others,” she said. “The solution for Bumble is simple: Showing members people they want to see, getting them quality matches, quality chats, and closer to love.” 

She has said that the company is pausing its efforts around monetization and growth marketing to instead focus on improving its matching algorithm and driving user engagement ahead of an app update this summer. And although she hasn’t revealed too many specifics around how the app will change, she used her Q1 earnings call to highlight the importance of helping users create better profiles, giving them ‘dating coaches’ to assist them through the process, and refining the app’s ability to anticipate quality matches.

She also signaled that it’s less about what new products Bumble will launch. “We want you to see great people in great simple ways, efficient ways, but this is not about more features.” Instead, “the metrics that matter here are the quality of the engagement that people have on our product.” In other words, she’s orienting the app towards a north star that sounds very similar to Hinge’s. 

Incorporating AI

Hinge’s recommendations algorithm has been a big draw for users. While Tinder relies heavily on a user’s location, age preferences, and swiping behavior to surface a user’s profile, Hinge generates matches primarily based on how a user answers prompts. Once it detects a pattern in the profiles a user is drawn to, it shows them more of that type of user towards you.

In March, Hinge tweaked its algorithm to give users more targeted AI-powered recommendations. That update led to a 15% increase in matches and contact exchanges according to Match Group’s Q1 earnings. “We really have an understanding of your inclination to like someone and their inclination to like you back. We have more and more information about you and we have more information about your taste and your preferences, we can much more strongly predict that match,” Mcleod told Fast Company, explaining that the more time a user spends on the app, the better the algorithm gets to know them. Now, Tinder and Bumble seem to be following its lead.

Introducing himself to investors on Match Group’s Q4 earnings call, Rascoff stressed that AI can help with user engagement and retention on dating apps, just as it has for social media apps like TikTok and Snapchat. Tinder is currently rolling out a Hinge-like AI-powered matching, which generates more personalized connections based on user data and activity in select markets. Meanwhile, in a May interview with The New York Times, Wolfe Herd said that she wants to use AI to make Bumble “the world’s smartest matchmaker” over the next two years. “The AI can now select the best people and start showing the best people the best people and start getting you to a match quicker, more efficiently, more thoughtfully,” she said.

All three apps are also harnessing AI to help users optimize their profiles to get better matches. On Hinge and Tinder, if a user says they are afraid of snakes, for example, an AI prompt might counsel them to write a couple of sentences about why to make their profile more engaging. Wolfe Herd has said that the company plans on introducing a coaching hub, powered by humans and AI, that will help users improve their profiles and dating skills. In a somewhat bleak turn, Tinder is using AI to teach users how to behave on dates.  Rascoff also mentioned a voice-based AI coach that Tinder rolled out for the month of April in Match’s Q1 earnings call. “[It] let users practice flirting with an artificial intelligence date to learn to break the ice through humor, storytelling, and playful interaction.”

Ultimately though, Bumble and Tinder’s success may hinge on whether or not they’re able to incorporate Hinge’s secret sauce into their apps: features that attract high quality, intentional users who engage with the app and find a great match. To a large extent, the companies need to go back to their original strategies, before monetization and a growth at all costs mindset ruined their user experiences.

As Wolfe Herd said in Bumble’s latest earnings call, “There has been this mindset that has been pervasive in the dating industry that more features equal better outcomes. And let’s just launch something new. But some of the greatest consumer products have not changed all that much in the last decade if you think about it.”

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