As young people report feeling lonelier and less connected than ever, the dating app Hinge is driving its users into real human experiences. CEO Justin McLeod shares how the platform is combating digital fatigue amongst users, as well as navigating the risks and opportunities of AI in online dating. McLeod also explores Hinge’s recent collaboration with renowned psychologist Esther Perel, and offers insider tips to find that special someone in the chaos of modern romance.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
You partnered earlier this year with Esther Perel who’s a renowned psychotherapist to launch Your World prompts. Are there things from her perspective or your perspective at therapy do or don’t apply to what you’re trying to do with folks in their dating lives?
I’ve had a long-standing relationship with Esther and I think she’s been skeptical about dating apps and we’ve had our conversations about how beneficial they are in the right way to implement them, and I think over time we’ve really earned her trust as a partner because we really do approach it in a very thoughtful way that’s very human-centric and very outcome-based. And so I think she trusts us. And especially because the prompts fit so well with her brand. She has her game. Where should we begin where she writes prompts for people to have deeper conversations at places like dinner parties or at the office. I feel like a very natural fit.
I should say for the listeners, these prompts are not about building your profile, they’re about having conversation with someone to get to know them better.
Precisely. Essentially that’s what we’re trying to do on Hinge. The purpose of a prompt on Hinge is to prompt you to talk about something so that you can start interaction and a conversation, form a connection, and then move offline. And she had some great ideas for some prompts that she wanted to put on Hinge. They are very much in the spirit of inviting someone into your world. So before we go out, you should listen to X, or when I want to feel more like myself, I go do Y. And that really helps people understand a bit like what am I listening to? Where am I spending my time? And giving people a bit of a fuller picture about who you are.
We mentioned in passing earlier the rising conversation about more in-person experiences and young people choosing them or wanting that in some ways over digital interactions. Now you’re a digital service of course, but you’ve also talked about expanding into broader community building and in-person activation. I’m curious how you think about real-world iterations, how important that might be to Hinge’s future and where you’re going with it.
Well, we do millions of in-person events every month and they’re called dates and that ultimately is the purpose of what we’re doing and that really is our wheelhouse. Listen, I’m all for people spending more time meeting together in person out in real life. We have a program called One More Hour because we support groups that gather together on a regular basis. We see the decline in time spent together in person, especially among young people. And the requisite increase in anxiety and depression among that group. So the more people are spending time together out in real life and the less time on their devices the better. And that very much mirrors the ethos of Hinge where we really are trying to get you to spend less time on our app, more time out on dates and relationships so that you’ll find your person and then ultimately go tell your friends to try Hinge.
Does the brand of Hinge need to have a community in the real world . . . I don’t know, interaction for itself aside from my personal date that I might be going on?
Yeah. I think we are so precious and thoughtful about our brand and we really try to do things that are really going to have an impact and aren’t just for show. And to be able to do something at scale with quality across tens of millions of users where people can get together in real life on a regular basis and still maintain the control of the experience and the brand is not territory that I exactly know how to approach. There are lots of people out there doing real life events and I applaud it, encourage it, we fund it, we’re all for it, but it’s just not our core competency.
When you look at the competition at the other apps . . . Actually I don’t even know how much you do look at the competition. I know some of it is in-house within your parent company with Match Group, which also owns Match and Tinder and OkCupid and a bunch of others. How much do you pay attention to the competition?
We really don’t look to the competition. That’s a mistake that I’ve made the first time around, is spending way too much time thinking about the competition and what they were doing. And when I did the reboot of Hinge, I steered the team to just pay attention to our customer and our users who are out there trying to find dates and there’s so much rich territory when we just try to deeply understand our users and the problems they’re facing. And that is why I think Hinge has become so innovative. And I think a lot of other dating apps are paying attention to us because you can see how they’re all slowly introducing features that make them more and more similar to Hinge and that’s why it’s all the more important that we don’t look at them, we actually look to our users and to emerging technology and that’s how we stay at the forefront of innovation.
How much of building your business from this point is there’s a road map that you’re on that you’re implementing versus reacting and staying open and finding whatever’s next? Or do you have like no, no, no, we know where we’re going, we know exactly where we’re going next.
I think we know the big picture of where we’re going. I think we know high-level that the future and what AI is going to enable is much more personalized matching. We can collect more data that’s more nuanced and use it in a better way to create a much more efficient matching process. And we can help our users put their best foot forward by giving them the right coaching and the right nudges so that they fill out good profiles and use the app well. Those I think are the two main vectors of work that we’re focused on right now and we have to stay really curious because the market’s changing a lot, technology’s changing a lot, and so how exactly that is going to manifest, we don’t know yet and I think we can’t know because everything is changing so quickly. So that’s why it’s really important to have just a very nimble team, a very solid research organization and continue to just experiment.
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