Roses, Revenue, and Retention: Hinge’s Strategy for a $1 Billion Year

0:03In one word, how would you describe the modern dating experience? Challenging. It's really challenging. This week on Bold Names, we're talking to Jackie Jantos. She's the new CEO of Hinge, the popular dating app. We chat about what it's like to connect a new generation of daters at a time when it feels like we're all less connected. That's next. From the Wall Street Journal, I'm Tim Higgins. This is Bold Names, where you'll hear from the leaders of the bold name companies featured in the Wall Street Journal. Today we ask, how is Hinge standing out from the crowd of dating apps?

0:46Jackie, welcome to Bold Names. Thank you so much for having me. I think if you came to age at a certain time, you definitely know what Hinge is. a dating app. But for some of my audience, let's kind of break it down. How is Hinge different than some of the other players out there, like Tinder or Bumble? Sure. So Hinge is a dating app that we call designed to be deleted. Designed to be deleted. That seems optimistic. If you're a user, what does that mean? Yeah, it's a philosophy that guides how we design our product itself. So it is intended to help you get off the app and into a date. So the community of individuals who are on Hinge are highly intentioned.

1:35They are putting in the effort in order to find a deep, connected relationship. And they're hopefully not spending much time on the app, but they're oriented towards meeting someone in person. You came into the company about five years ago as the chief marketing officer. You had spent the bulk of your career in marketing, been at Spotify, Coca-Cola, some other roles elsewhere. You just became the CEO in the last few months. Yeah. What's your mandate? What's your mandate? Are you going to burn the bridges and start anew? Are you going to become something like a dating site for robots or are you going to keep into that idea of deleting the app eventually?

2:15Yeah, you know, I've spent my career at the intersection of global brands, technology, and culture. And I think one thing that grounds me every day is how you build something useful to the next generation. And for us, you know, we live in a world where people are more disconnected and feeling more isolated and alone. And so the purpose of this app was a huge reason why I came to the organization. It's a very values-driven organization. It's very aligned with my values as well. And so I have been here for four and a half years, and much of the journey has been about how we orient our product to meet the needs of culture today and the next generation of daters and solving some really acute and different challenges for them.

3:06Intention is a key part of that culture. I'm curious how you manifest that for the user experience in the app. Yeah. So one thing apps have really brought to people is a level of speed in which they can engage with others and access, you know, because everyone is... It's in your pocket. It's in your pocket, right? And what's very different about Hinge is right from the very get-go in onboarding, we have a very intentionally designed onboarding flow that takes more time and requires more effort. We require a number of photographs. We require a number of answers to what we call prompts. And what are some of those prompts?

3:51Like something you should know about me, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Or maybe like what I might be doing on a Friday night or maybe what my family might say about me. They're intended to spark a way for you to share more about yourself that could provide more context clues for someone looking to meet you. And we also have AI tooling built into this onboarding flow now. For example, if you're not quite sure what to say in your prompt or your prompt is too short, we know that the best prompts are long by design and they give more specificity. So someone else looking at your rich profile, because all this, again, is to build a rich profile, might be able to hook into a longer, more specific answer and offer a like and a suggestion.

4:42So just at a high level, the onboarding is very intentioned. It's oriented around building a rich profile of you where people can interact with components of your profile, not a wholesale yay or nay to a human that we're putting in front of them to consider. And then from that point, all the way through the experience, there is specificity built into the interactions. There is a sense of, you know, not having too many interactions. For example, we limit the number of chats you can have at any given time. And basically people from keeping been everybody on the hook for a long period of time. Well, you know, like there's only so many deep conversations you can have with individuals at one time.

5:29So we, you know, clock that number at eight. And we hope that if you're in conversation with someone and you don't intend to meet them off of the app, that you actually like respectfully bid them adieu because on the other side of that chat is another human. So literally the journey of the app is built to reinforce the goal of getting you to interact with someone and ultimately go and meet that person on a date. And every part of it is really gold against that ultimate outcome. I want to get into AI here in just a bit. But first, I just want to put a kind of a pin on this discussion about brand building.

6:08You come out of the world of brands. So I'm wondering in your mind, is the differentiation between your product and the other ones out in the market, Is it a brand exercise or is it about the specific tech features that you offer? It's two things. It's one, how the product itself is built. And it's two, the goal in which the product is built to serve. The goal it's built to serve is the outcome of a dater. And the success of our daters results in the success of our business. And we're actually proving that out over time. So when more people go out on dates, more people meet partners on Hinge, they tell people where they met and how they met.

6:53And our growth is organic. So in many… Word of mouth advertising, very powerful. Yeah, I mean, and very powerful when it's, I met my partner on your app. I mean, the number of people who I meet in any audience I'm in or any like dinner, you know, that I'm at, there's always at least a couple of people who met their partners on Hinge. the mayor of New York, you know, exactly. And I think, you know, it gives us a lot of pride to be able to play that role in people's lives. Having, you know, met my own partner on a dating site, it's a pretty profound role to play. Just ahead, one way Hinge makes money is by selling digital roses to send to someone you're really interested in.

7:40But Jackie says she's aware that some users see it as a paywall blocking them from the best matches. We take users' feedback really seriously. Will the rose continue to bloom or wither?

8:03Okay, the goal is to date. So in one word, how would you describe the modern dating experience? challenging it's really challenging you know i think this generation first of all dating has never been an easy thing you're putting yourself out there um to flirt with someone or to explore relationship beyond friendship all these things this has never been comfortable easy right and i think today what we're seeing even more so is that gen z who our app is oriented to best serve What percentage of Hinge users are Gen Z at this point? Over 50. So you're focused on this younger generation. Your customer base is always shifting, though.

8:49How do you kind of adjust as they shift? Yeah, so going back to your question around how dating is and my response being challenging, we are living in a time period where we're spending less and less time in person with each other. The loneliness epidemic. The loneliness epidemic and the reality of that paired with this generation also going through the pandemic in their late teens and early 20s is that it's really hard and even more uncomfortable and less practiced of being in person with someone and experiencing kind of what we did, you know, the flirting, the the multisensory, you know, experience of meeting another person in the flesh versus meeting them, you know, via podcast.

9:36podcast, you know, or, or an app, it's a different thing, right? You miss some cues and all these things. And so it is a different world and the challenges are a little bit heavier, you know, and there's so much going on in the world that feels very heavy for this generation as well. So it becomes a more acute challenge. You know, we know a lot of people want to be in an intentional relationship and want to explore being in a romantic relationship and they just are struggling on that journey. Panja's doing pretty well. Yeah, we are. You're on track to make a billion dollars in revenue in the next year or so.

10:15What's your plan to hit that mark? Yeah, I mean, we're currently a bit of an anomaly in the category. The only large-scale dating app that's growing in the way that we are. And again, it always comes back to what the app does and how the app actually serves people because the more people who get off into dates, the more relationships we are fundamental to creating, the more our app grows, the more people want to try Hinge. And so continuing on that journey, we have a lot of product-oriented innovation that we're working on right now, and a lot of ways that we're trying to help people, whether that's through some tools to help people build better profiles leveraging AI, whether that's through the recommender where we're always exploring different models for pairing two people up to, I mean, really everything, how we're launching in new markets.

11:11We just launched in Latin America at the end of last year. So we're now available in Mexico and Brazil. One of the things I, you know, everybody wants to know is how you guys make money, right? It's it's not out of the goodness of your heart that you're connecting people. So walk us through the various levels of how you collect rents from people. The vast majority of daters on Hinge use our free product. We see that as sacred. It's really critical to have a product that serves everyone. That's part of our philosophy that everyone should be able to find a relationship. And then we have a couple of subscription tiers.

11:51And we also have some a la carte features that you can sort of pay for ad hock while you're using the experience. The roses? Roses is one, yes. And that's it. It's not an advertising funded model. There's no other brands or businesses being promoted on our app. It's strictly a subscription business. Let's talk about the roses because everybody talks about them on social media and private. How does the rose work? The rose is essentially when you are sending a like to someone. You get one of those a week? Is that the deal? Yes, and you can buy more. But we actually see a majority of people send likes.

12:34And the real way to engage with more speed is actually sending a like with a comment. Because a comment signals a deep level of intentionality and starts the conversational aspect of the interaction, which is what we're really looking for and what we're really trying to create more of in order to create more momentum. Roses can send a signal that some see as really meaningful to showing deep intent. It's another tool sort of on the app to use if you want to. I think the perception out there among some users is that Hinge makes it difficult to get matches that they are so desperate to get, right?

13:18That they are then willing to pay more and more for these upgrades, which may or may not work. And in turn, Hinge makes more money. And then you've got these 30-somethings out there bitter on social media talking about how the algorithm is stacked against them. I think of kind of an infamous article from last year talking about all the hacks out there to get out of so-called Rose Jail, how to find those better matches. You hear those criticisms? How do you address them? How do you think about how to pivot from them? Yeah, I mean, I'll say the team here is very grounded in what we learn from actual users on Hinge.

13:59We have a really strong team of PhD researchers. And obviously, we are paying very close attention to where people are struggling with the experience and how do we provide a solution to some of those struggles. You know, the rose was really intended to provide an element of like an additional cue of deep interest. And, you know, the algorithm and the recommender, you know, this is really built to put an individual in front of someone who may be likely to be interested in them while also doing the inverse. You know, someone who you may be likely to be interested in. And the one thing that's unique about Hinge is because of the onboarding that I described earlier, we have actually incredibly rich information that you've shared about yourself in terms of what you're looking for and who you are.

14:54And we also have all the signals of interest that you've shown in every engagement you've had on the app in terms of who you've liked, who you've started conversations with. So we're using all of this data and we're using this data in a world today where AI allows us to experiment much faster in how we model things like algorithms in order to be more successful. But we take users' feedback really seriously and we learn a lot from it too. You know, that's one great thing about social media. And when people are talking about your product in it is you get incredible signal of how people are feeling and what they're experiencing.

15:35And you also see lots of comments that you can learn from, you know, so going through all of that is really important. We have probably all the same conversations inside of the building that are being had outside of the building because we want to resolve them. Are you considering abandoning the rose? The rose also has a lot of love. And one of the things that we hear quite often from people who have met and started relationships on Hinge is that the rose was the thing that influenced someone to take another look at a person because it is this signal of deep intentionality. Right. And that intentionality, there's something there, right?

16:22As I look at your finances, Hinge's revenue per payer consistently hovers around$32 to$33, significantly higher than your corporate sister Tinder's average of$17 to$18. What does that signal to you about what your users are thinking? Or what does that signal to you? Yeah. You know, one thing it signals to me is that people recognize that this is an app filled with a set of daters who have deep intentionality. and they're willing to spend because they too are looking for something. And when you sort of think about dating apps at their highest altitude and arguably the most intention-oriented dating app, people are looking for a life partner.

17:07And this is probably the most important thing to most of us in our lives. It's certainly the most important choice I ever made. And I think people are looking for that deep connection and anything that can offer you support in finding it is of value. Coming up, over half of Hinge's users are Gen Z. What is Jackie learning about what this generation is searching for? They're looking for connection. They're struggling to find it, but they're looking for this experience that feels true and honest. Stay with us.

17:54Okay, so we've established a big chunk of your users are Gen Z. They are coming to you for something that's very personal, very kind of primal, if you will, that gives you some incredible insight into what is going on in the culture, right? Culture is created by the next generation. The next generation is coming up. What should we know about Gen Z? Yeah, I'll tell you what we learn in the relationship space. If you kind of believe that relationships underpin everything like we do, it's a generation that is looking for deep relationships. They are looking for community. They're looking for connection.

18:38They're struggling to find it. They're struggling to experience it. all the places where they would have experienced it historically, be it affordable third spaces or safe areas to convene. You know, these things have kind of gone away in many, many ways over the years. But they're looking for this experience that feels true and honest. How much of that is shaped by the pandemic, their experiences being locked down for some of those kind of key developmental years? Yeah, some of it is shaped by the pandemic. A lot of it is shaped by social media and their use of cell phones with how little time we're spending with other people, how much time we're spending roped into these experiences that, you know, by the way, are incentivized by advertising revenue.

19:29So they're looking for engagement within the technology, within the app. That's what they're gold and oriented to produce, right? So a lot of it has to do with their experience of the world, how much time they're spending on technology. And, you know, the second thing I would say, coming back to your original question, is that this generation is redefining relationships. They continue to redefine gender, sexual orientation. there's a fluidity. When you look at the LGBTQIA plus spectrum of which a larger group of every next generation defines, the largest growing subset in that umbrella are individuals identifying as bisexual and primarily young women identifying as bisexual.

20:18So there is a fluidity in relationships more generally that is happening. And that is a really big shift from a relationship perspective as well. You had a recent report, Gen Z date report, that really dug into this kind of what's going on with these folks. What was most surprising? I think the level of connection that they are looking for and the gap in how they're willing to either put themselves out there in order to find that, there's a big gap there. So for example, folks want to be in relationship with someone who's curious to learn more about them by, for example, asking questions, but they're also not asking questions themselves.

21:14So there's these gaps in what people want and what they're getting, what behaviors they expect and what behaviors they're showcasing themselves. You're trying to bridge that communication gap, right, that you're seeing with your users, especially among the different genders, if you will. When I was reading through it, it seemed like the female users were frustrated that the guys they were on dates weren't asking questions and the guys were afraid that if they shared too much, it would be cringe. I think it gets at this idea of a group, a cohort of people who grew up on social media who feel like they're always going to be dissected and kind of studied, that they're the center of kind of some big conversation.

22:01And that makes them nervous, right? If you are a regular audience member of Bold Names, you know, we're not afraid of being cringe here. So what is the, how do you overcome cringe? Yeah, I'm not afraid of being cringe either. I think there's, And the disservice that social media has done for young people, it's done some positive things and it's done some negative things and everything in between, is making this space feel really performative, right? And this is a generation that doesn't want to be as performative anymore. The performance is quite exhausting. And having to sort of put that layer around every piece of content you put into the world and think through the implications of it and people's reactions to it, that is exhausting over time.

22:49Um, you know, and so, uh, it's, uh, you know, our challenge is to encourage people to be earnest, um, to encourage people to just like be true, uh, to put their personality out there. We actually know that when they put that specificity out about themselves, that feels authentic and true. Uh, their journey on our app, uh, is simpler, you know? So I, I often tell people to be earnest and be honest and put in the effort in trying to just express who you are and be yourself in these interactions and sort of trust yourself. So, I mean, we've just talked about how we have this generation that's looking for authenticity, but is struggling to kind of bridge the communication gap, raised in social media, feeling like they're always having to perform.

23:43It's a struggle, right? It's a challenge out there. You know what's not a challenge? talking to AI companions. Is that really the biggest threat to your business? Is that somebody is going to go off and fall in love with ChatGPT? No, I don't think so. We talk a lot with young people in every market we go, and absolutely this comes up in conversation. But the companion world is valuable in some ways, but it does a real disservice to this desire to have a relationship that has depth, that helps you grow as a human. Relationships we all know have conflict. It requires you to listen and be listened to.

24:32There's all this friction in the lives of two humans coming together. And this AI companion space is very smooth, very affirming. And so there's a role for this over here, but it's not replacing the role for the friendships and the romantic relationships in your lives. We've talked a lot about Gen Z, but we're only a few years away from Gen Alpha turning 18. That's right. And they can get on the app. As you start to look ahead, how are you planning to make their hinge experience the go-to experience for dating? Yeah. I mean, I think we're staying focused, right? Then we're continuously learning and listening.

25:17I also, you know, I have a couple of alpha children myself. And it's really fascinating to see where there are some similarities and where there are some differences. And And absolutely, I see the relational challenges in their lives as well. So, you know, spoiler alert, we're not spending less time on technology than we were before. We're going to continue spending more time on technology. Technology is playing a deeper and richer role in many of our lives and adding really positive impact. But it's also pulling us away from each other as humans. And I think if you work in an organization like this one and you have sort of the values that we share as a culture, you're kind of going to believe in a steadfast way that we need other humans in our lives and we need relationships.

26:12And this is not going to change. So great to talk to you. I really appreciate the time. Yeah, likewise. We reached out to Bumble for comment. They did not respond. And that's bold names for this week. Our producer is Danny Lewis. Our video producer is Alexis Moore. And our fact checker is Aparna Nathan. Michael LaValle is our sound designer. Jessica Fenton wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Katie Ferguson. Additional thanks to Jana Heron. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. And Chris Sinsley is the deputy editor for audio at the Wall Street Journal. For even more, check out my column on wsj.com.

26:54We've linked it in the show notes. I'm Tim Higgins. Thanks for listening.