Dating is down. So why is Hinge thriving? with CEO Justin McLeod

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1:33We're number one dating app across 10 different markets. One out of every 10 engagements in the U.S. is from Hinge specifically. So there's so much opportunity out there and people are lonelier than ever. Everyone needs to be doing more and better right now to help people find love and connection.

1:59That's Justin McLeod, CEO of dating app Hinge. As other dating apps have been faltering of late, Hinge is continuing to grow rapidly. Justin returns to Rapid Response to explain how over the past year, his app has been able to sidestep younger generations' fatigue with digital interaction and the saturation of choices for finding love online. Justin talks about the risks and opportunities of AI in online dating, his collaboration with renowned psychologist Esther Perel, and why we need genuine human connection offline more than ever. Whether you're coupled up, single, or somewhere in between, get set for a lively exploration of the business of love in the 21st century.

2:43And don't miss our lightning round at the end with tips on how to put your best foot forward when looking for a match. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

2:58I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Justin McLeod, CEO of dating app Hinge. Justin, great to have you back on the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. You were last on the show about a year ago. Hinge has been doing great since then, revenue up 25%, But I got to say, a lot of the other major dating apps are struggling. What's the trouble in the industry? People not dating as much? I think people still want to date. I mean, when we talk to daters, we talk to Gen Z, people want connection as much as ever. I mean, I think loneliness is as big a problem as it's ever been. Hinge is continuing to succeed.

3:36Revenue is up 25%, but users are up 20%. We're number one dating app across 10 different markets. We just launched in Europe a couple of years ago, and we're the number two dating app there. And so the troubles in other places in the industry, I mean, they talk about, oh, there's a cultural shift, young people dating less, you know, they're changing their behavior. I certainly think that young people have started to turn to other methods, thinking about how do I meet people in real life or how do I meet people in other ways? Because I think that dating apps haven't served them particularly well.

4:09And that has been my critique. And that's why I rebooted Hinge back in 2015 and why I tried to create something so different. And an app is really designed for engagement and retention and matches, but not necessarily dates and relationships. Then it can make people feel like they're stuck and they're putting in a lot of effort, not getting what they want. And the driver behind your momentum, like, oh, over the last year, what's different than the conversation we might've had a year ago? So when we were here last year, we were talking about AI and the potential that AI held. And I think over the last year, we've started to implement features that have had a really big impact on our daters.

4:51For example, personalized matching, more tuned to our daters tastes. And we've completely overhauled our recommendation system since then using AI. And we've seen double digit gains in both the effectiveness of our recommendation system, as well as the efficiency of it. So people are getting more dates with less effort. But this is all like on the back end. The relationship that users have with your app is not necessarily based around AI specifically, right? I mean, I know you've sort of spoken out a little bit about AI's potential to erode connections. Yeah, absolutely. So while there's a lot of nuance to the question, we have implemented more visible generative AI features like prompt feedback, for example, which is coaching users on how to craft better profiles.

5:46And it's because a lot of our users will write answers to prompts that can be like one word or two words that really don't give you a sense of who they are. And we can give them feedback and help them basically to write a better prompt. And we've seen really great gains from that. We've seen that we reduced the incidence of poor quality prompt answers by more than a third. And we tripled the incidence of high quality prompt answers by giving people that kind of coaching. But yeah, when you talk about AI companions and actually starting to displace relationships and having people interact with AI and spending more time on their screens and less time in real life, I think that definitely is a problem and something that you're right, I have been very outspoken against.

6:27Yeah, I mean, it's tricky, right? You're sort of running this balancing act where you're using AI. AI may be ways to strengthen the creation of these relationships, but you have to do it or you want to do it in a way that doesn't displace the human-to-human experience. Precisely. I mean, AI is a technology, a very powerful technology. And just like any technology before, we can use it in a principled, thoughtful, beneficial, healthy way, and we can use it in a very unprincipled, unthoughtful, unhealthy way. One of our principles around AI is that it really should stand behind us and not between us.

7:04It can help support us so that we have richer interactions with other people on Hinge and move off the app faster. But it certainly shouldn't be something that we start engaging with as an end in itself just for entertainment or as, I would say, like artificial intimacy or artificial connection. Like, I don't think that an AI chatbot should be your friend or certainly not your boyfriend or girlfriend. But could be your dating coach? yes just like people read self-help books or coaching but like can we give people nudges in the right direction uh and i certainly think that we can we don't want to put words in their mouths which is not what we do we're really mostly it's it's just recognizing that someone's answer to a prompt could give us more detail and we usually honestly usually the the response is can you say more about that or tell a little bit more why that's true instead of writing things on their behalf, which could then introduce an idea that this is not authentic.

8:04It does sound a little bit like I'm talking to an AI therapist, like an AI dating therapist. You partnered earlier this year with Esther Perel, who's a renowned psychotherapist, to launch your world prompts. Are there things that, from her perspective or your perspective about therapy, do or don't apply to what you're trying to do with folks in their dating lives? I've had a longstanding relationship with Astaire. And, you know, I think she's been skeptical about dating apps. And we've had our conversations about whether they're like how beneficial they are and the right way to implement them.

8:39And 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 trusted us and especially because the prompts fit so well with her brand. And, you know, 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. Right. And 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.

9:14Precisely. Essentially, that's what we're trying to do on Hinge. I mean, that's the purpose of a prompt on Hinge is to prompt you to talk about something so that you can start interaction and 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, you know, 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?

9:48And giving people a bit of a fuller picture about who you are. We mentioned in passing earlier this sort of rising conversation about more in-person experiences and young people sort of choosing them or wanting that in some ways over digital interaction. 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 sort of real world iterations, how important that might beta hinges future and where you're going with it? Well, we do millions of in-person events every month and they're called dates.

10:27And 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.

11:12Does the brand of Hinge need to sort of have a community, real world, I don't know, iteration for itself? Aside from, you know, 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 in 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.

11:59When 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. Like, how much do you pay attention to the competition? We really don't look to the competition. That's a mistake that I 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.

12:35And 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 like there's a roadmap that you're on, that you're implementing versus sort of like reacting and staying open and kind of finding whatever's next?

13:17Or 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 big picture 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.

13:55And 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 this experiment. Justin's focus on the rapid pace of change echoes what I'm hearing from leaders across all industries. And his efforts to balance where and how to best use AI, well, that's everywhere too. So what's the role of old school tactics in this environment?

14:34Things like word of mouth marketing. And how has the critique of DEI impacted Hinge's hiring practices? We'll talk about that plus a lightning round on the green and red flags in online dating profiles after the break. Stay with us.

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16:40Before the break, Hinge CEO Justin McLeod talked about how his dating app is managing to grow while competitors stagnate. Now he takes us inside Hinge's unconventional approach to marketing, its commitment to DEI, and a lightning round on the do's and don'ts in dating profiles. Let's jump back in.

17:03You said that your best marketing is word of mouth, where real couples sort of share how they met on Hinge. I have to shout out one of our producers, Masha, who could share a success story of her own. She's a Hinge user and very happily in a partnership now. How do you measure sort of word of mouth against more traditional like marketing and ad campaigns? Are there metrics that you track? Like, how do you know? I mean, first and foremost, we're making sure that our users on the app are actually getting out on dates and those dates are good. So that's the kind of most leading metric. But we can do attribution surveys to understand what percentage of our users show up because they heard about it through an ad versus heard about it through a friend.

17:50Still, the majority for us is people are hearing about Hinge through friends and friends having success stories. But on top of that, it's helpful to be able to tell our story through our marketing and make sure that people understand that Hinge is the app that's designed to be deleted for people who are really thoughtful and want to find their person. It's especially useful as we launch new markets. Just a couple of years ago, we launched into Europe. We've already become the number two, vying for number one spot in Europe. We just launched Mexico this week. We're launching Brazil in the fourth quarter.

18:22And so marketing obviously plays a huge role as we go into those markets. Talking about marketing, I was thinking, I keep seeing Hinge, No Ordinary Love stories in the New York City subway where I am, which in some ways are like traditional ads that are about word of mouth. They're these sort of short accounts of the two different sides of how a Hinge couple meets. But one of the things I noticed, they're not sort of classic rom-com, like, meet cute tales. There's usually some kind of a snafu or something. Like, what do you hope people take away from the campaign, from that idea? I think something that Hinge pushes back against is this idea of stylized love, like this idea that there's one form of love.

19:05It's this like rom-com, meet cute, perfectly linear story of love. And the fact is that true love stories are messier and have more twists and turns and fits and starts. And we want to bring that to reality. So The No Ordinary Love, we had writers write the love stories of our Hinge users. We'll have a campaign coming out very shortly, which is version two of It's Funny We Met on Hinge, which is something that I've always wanted to do since I started Hinge, which was to redo those kind of cheesy 1990s eHarmony ads where you had the couple standing on the white background telling their cheesy story.

19:43And we have incredibly diverse couples telling just their raw stories about how they could have met somewhere, but they ended up meeting on Hinge. Again, just showing you the story of meeting on Hinge is different for everyone and is unique and is ultimately, in a weird way, kind of like a meet cute in its own way. A funny trend I've read about on Hinge, some women using Hinge to get their furniture built for free by their matches. Does your team endorse this activity? I mean, it's funny to see how Hinge shows up in culture. that is like not an actual trend, but it's a funny story that showed up in the New York Post or whatever.

20:25I mean, I'm sure there are some people who are out there doing it, but it's not a like significant trend, but a funny use of pinch. No planning for a collaboration with TaskRabbit then. That's not in that. Not as far as I know, but maybe I'll talk. That's a good idea. Maybe I'll talk to our marketing team. When the world feels overwhelming, like it has through much of 2025. Do users interact with your app any differently? I mean, do economics and politics and geopolitics impact our dating posture? We see some evidence of heightened tension. We see some evidence of people thinking more about politics and what their politics are and what their partner's politics are.

21:10So we see it in that way, but not in a major way. I mean, I know historically, Hinge has sought to reflect its user base in employee diversity. And as DEI has come under fire this year, is diversity still something the company wants to uphold? Is the way you talk about it or deal with it adjusted at all? It's an absolute business priority for us because it's no coincidence that our employee base matches our user base, which matches the kind of broader environment that we're in, whether you cut it by looking at LGBTQIA or whether you look at it by race or gender. and getting the diverse employee base preceded us having a diverse user base.

22:00And it's precisely because we had the people in the house and we're in-house and that we are actually building with, not for our market. That, again, has been a real key to our success. And you're not worried about being critiqued for not providing enough opportunities to straight white men? I think that we provide opportunities to everybody and we're going to continue to do that. What's at stake for Hinge right now? Well, I mean, I think that we are in a, you know, as you said, the larger narrative right now is on the category as we're facing headwinds and that there's lack of innovation and all that.

22:43And I just, we're continuing to really tell the story that it's just not the case at Hinge, that Hinge is continuing to grow significantly, that we're continuing to resonate with the next generation, that we're continuing to lead on innovation. There is that, you know, that idea of like, would you rather be a growing part of a shrinking or stagnant pie or, you know, whatever, a smaller part of a growing pie? Obviously, you want to be a growing part of a growing pie. I'd rather be a growing part of a growing pie, personally. And I'm excited to see we have new leadership at Match Group. And I hope that the rest of the category, there's so much opportunity out there.

23:24And people are lonelier than ever. And I don't wish ill upon any of my competitors. I think that everyone needs to be doing more and better right now to help people find love and connection. And if they're borrowing some of that and copying some from what Hinge is doing, that's okay? Or that's to be expected? Listen, it wouldn't be my business strategy, personally. I think copying makes sense when you're the bigger player and the leader. Then maybe you want to stop someone, you know, an up-and-comer. But if you're behind and you're copying the leader, then that's going to be a hard game to win.

24:00But now, of course, you're the leader. So does that mean that you're, you know, looking at what others are doing or you haven't seen much there that you that you want? Yeah, I'm paying attention less to the major other dating apps and thinking about little startups that are starting to use AI in more innovative ways. And I am paying a bit more attention to that. All right. How do you feel about doing a quick lightning round? Are you game? Yeah, yeah, that's fine. What is the dating app myth that you most wish you could bust once and for all? That meeting on an app isn't romantic. Because I think it's, you know, everything that comes, you know, how you meet is just such a tiny sliver of everything that comes after when it comes to a relationship.

24:46And that's all the stuff that builds the romance. It's not necessarily the the meet you. So I wish people weren't so obsessed with how they meet versus who they meet. Yeah, you need to update the You've Got Mail movie to be about Hinge, right? It's got to be another way to do it. Yes. Hollywood is not giving you that seminal film yet, huh? Not yet, but I'll say, you know, I feel like it's becoming more ingrained in culture over time as the accepted way that people meet. Because the fact is, it just is the way most people are meeting. Actually, I saw a stat recently that now one out of every 10 engagements in the U.S.

25:23is from Hinge specifically. That's pretty exciting. All right, let me give you another one. One green flag that you would look for on a profile. Well, I've been married for quite a while, so I don't think of my green flags as much. Maybe other folks who are dating or putting profiles together? What would be something green to look for? I know, I know. I just think that someone who is willing to, who's putting in the effort and being vulnerable on our profile and gives you a way to actually start a conversation, I think those people are always going to be the more interesting, intentional, thoughtful people.

26:07All right. And what about the other end of the spectrum? One red flag that should be like an instant swipe left? I don't believe, first of all, an instant swipe left. I think everyone's a human being who deserves a moment of consideration. But again, it's almost the opposite of that, which is that someone who's not willing to put themselves out there yet, who has one word answer to prompts and photos that don't really show who they are, it's just not necessarily a red flag, but it's just hard to engage with someone who's not doing enough to let someone in enough to start a conversation. If you could add one outrageous, just for fun feature to hinge for 24 hours, what would it be?