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Justin McLeod15 February 2024

Hinge Dating App CEO: Everyone Said Hinge Was A TERRIBLE idea! The 7 Love & Dating Secrets From Hinge’s Founder! AI Will Change Love & Dating!

10Frameworks
14Insights

Frameworks in this episode

Marketing5 steps

City-By-City Liquidity Launch

Break stigma by making the cool crowd download it in front of each other, one city at a time

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Strategy4 steps

Designed To Be Deleted

Pick the one metric that means the customer succeeded — even when it costs you engagement

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Leadership4 steps

Love The Leap

Test-and-iterate optimises; conviction plus tolerated failure is what actually moves things

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Leadership4 steps

The Culture Interview

Derive hiring attributes from who actually succeeded at your company, then test for them

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Strategy5 steps

The Full Reboot

When the product contradicts your values, throw out the codebase — not the roadmap

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Strategy4 steps

The Hinge Labs Method

Study your successful and unsuccessful users, extract the patterns, then coach everyone up

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Strategy5 steps

The Idea That Infects You

If working on it feels like homework, it's the wrong idea — pursue the one you can't put down

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Leadership5 steps

The Management Algorithm Document

Write down how you decide, so people can decide without you in the room

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Communication4 steps

Vulnerability As Dating Strategy

Show the real you fast — it filters faster and gives people something to hold on to

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Mindset4 steps

Widen The Aperture

Serial daters aren't unlucky — they're matching reality against a broken model in their head

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Insights & moments

The myth-busts, hot takes, explainers, and tools worth keeping.

Myth Buster· 2

Myth Buster17:30

'The dating market is saturated' — the objection that was exactly backwards

Every VC McLeod pitched in 2011-12 told him match.com owned the market and he'd never beat them. His counter was that almost nobody his age used any dating service at all, which means the market wasn't full — it had an unfixed problem. That problem was stigma: online dating meant a long, expensive, arduous desktop process associated with 'lonely weirdos'. Bartlett notes the stigma is now so completely gone that he had to think back to childhood to remember it ever existed.

  • VCs uniformly cited match.com's ownership of the market.
  • A market almost nobody uses is broken, not saturated.
  • The thesis was stigma-free, fun, easy and lightweight for young people.
  • In 2011 people did not meet strangers on the internet to date.
  • The term 'dating app' did not yet exist.

“how could you say a market is saturated? Like I don't I almost know no one who uses dating services”

Justin McLeod · 18:00

“The term dating app was not even a term yet.”

Justin McLeod · 15:30
#market-sizing#fundraising#stigma#contrarian-thesis
Myth Buster44:30

Serial daters don't have a supply problem — they have a broken model

McLeod, who describes himself as having had a long run of two-to-six-week relationships, argues that prolific unsuccessful daters are matching reality against a template in their head. His own model was that it stays sexy and fun every time with no fighting — a happily-ever-after fantasy that nothing survived. Others hold narrow attribute filters like a height floor or a specific job type. Either way you go out hunting for a reason to say no. The fix is to widen the aperture and see things through, not go on more dates.

  • The bottleneck is the internal model, not the pool of people.
  • McLeod's model demanded permanent excitement and zero conflict.
  • Narrow filters turn dates into disqualification hunts.
  • People in successful relationships often say their partner wouldn't have made their list.
  • Widening the aperture means giving people more of a chance, not lowering standards.

“some of us have models in our head that are exceedingly narrow”

Justin McLeod · 45:30

“widen that aperture a bit and give people more of a chance”

Justin McLeod · 46:00
#dating#serial-dating#mental-models#psychology

Hot Take· 2

Hot Take36:00

Abandoning engagement metrics — and watching the user count fall

After the reboot, Hinge stopped tracking user engagement, retention and the classic metrics VCs look for in social apps, replacing them with a single question: are we getting people out on more good dates? The consequence was fewer matches, less in-app engagement and a user base that shrank from roughly 400-500k to 100-150k. McLeod calls the app dramatically more efficient and effective at producing good dates despite the worse-looking numbers, and that trade is the whole thesis.

  • Engagement and retention were deliberately dropped as guiding metrics.
  • 'Are we getting people out on good dates?' became the North Star.
  • User numbers actively declined after the new version launched.
  • Fewer matches and less engagement, but far more good dates per user.
  • Growth was expected to come from word of mouth, not optimisation.

“are we getting people out on more good dates or not? And that's going to be our North Star metric”

Justin McLeod · 36:30

“It was actually way more efficient and effective at getting people out on good dates.”

Justin McLeod · 36:30
#metrics#north-star-metric#product-strategy#growth
Hot Take1:15:30

AI in dating isn't sex robots — it's the matchmaker model

McLeod dismisses the pessimistic sex-robot framing of AI and relationships outright. The near-term use is coaching: helping people build better profiles, choose better photos and move conversations toward an actual date. The bigger leap is moving away from the create-a-profile, match, chat, arrange-a-date funnel toward something resembling a human matchmaker — an interview that learns who you are, matched against interviews with others, dates set up directly, and follow-up feedback afterwards. He notes the reboot already cut a thousand swipes per date down to about 50 likes.

  • Sex robots are explicitly not what Hinge is working on.
  • First-order use of AI is profile and conversation coaching.
  • The bigger leap is a matchmaker model that goes straight to setting up dates.
  • It removes the burden of writing a personal advertisement for yourself.
  • The old model took ~1,000 swipes per date; the reboot cut it to ~50 likes.

“that's certainly not going to be what Hinge is working on”

Justin McLeod · 1:15:30

“it used to take a thousand swipes in order to get on a date, and then the new Hinge it took about 50 likes”

Justin McLeod · 1:11:30
#ai#matchmaking#product-roadmap#dating-apps

Story· 3

Story20:00

The last $25,000, a launch party, and no app in the App Store

With two and a half months of cash left at the end of 2012, McLeod's team tore down the Facebook app, rebuilt for mobile, and spent their final $25,000 on an open-bar party in Washington D.C. that required downloading Hinge to get in. The App Store hadn't approved the app with a day to go; McLeod describes sitting on the floor of the co-working space with his jacket over his head, crying, expecting 2,000 people to a launch with nothing to launch. It was approved the next morning, 2,500 people came, and the following day produced more matches than the app's entire prior history.

  • Two and a half months of runway funded a total rebuild for mobile.
  • The final $25,000 went on one open-bar party with a download-to-enter gate.
  • App Store review ran past two weeks against a normal couple of days.
  • 2,500 attendees, then 400 organic logins the next day.
  • Public simultaneous adoption by the local social scene broke the stigma.

“Literally took our last $25,000 and threw a giant open bar party in D.C.”

Justin McLeod · 20:30

“the fact that everyone saw each other using it, I think like started to like jump-start and get over that stigma problem”

Justin McLeod · 22:30
#cold-start#launch#stigma#founder-story
Story27:30

The flight to Zurich that changed how Hinge was designed

After a journalist named Deborah turned off her tape recorder and told him he could still be with 'the one' if he did something dramatic, McLeod flew to Zurich to see Kate — an ex he hadn't seen in eight years, who was a month from marrying someone else. They talked in a cafe for seven or eight straight hours without getting up. She called off the wedding and moved into his 300-square-foot West Village apartment. The lesson wasn't romantic: when the honeymoon ended and it got hard, he realised he would have run — and that he and everyone else must be skating past viable people constantly.

  • Deborah had matched with the first person Hinge ever suggested to her.
  • McLeod flew to Zurich on the strength of one message.
  • Seven or eight hours of conversation ended with Kate calling off her wedding.
  • The honeymoon lasted at most three months before real work began.
  • He would have ended it had she not given up her whole life to be there.

“we sat and we we talked for like 7 or 8 straight hours in this cafe. Never even got up to get a coffee.”

Justin McLeod · 31:30

“that's when I think the real work of the relationship started and like real intimacy and vulnerability and like love started to form”

Justin McLeod · 33:00
#founder-story#relationships#vulnerability#product-insight
Story03:30

The broken steering wheel — getting sober on graduation day

McLeod went to a drug and alcohol counsellor voluntarily in his first year of college after realising he hadn't been to bed sober a single night since school began, ignored her diagnosis, and ended up spending the summer in rehab to be allowed back for sophomore year. He stopped drinking on the day he graduated, having woken up after a party with the sense that the steering wheel of his life was broken — he'd missed the job he wanted, lost Kate, and had been telling himself for years that tomorrow he'd start putting his life together. He didn't know what the point of living without drinking was, but decided to find out.

  • He self-referred at 19 and dismissed the counsellor's diagnosis.
  • Rehab was a condition of returning for sophomore year.
  • He quit on graduation day, not after a single dramatic incident.
  • The trigger was the gap between his intended life and his daily behaviour.
  • 12-step programmes became a major part of recovery afterwards.

“the steering wheel of my life was broken”

Justin McLeod · 06:00

“I don't know what the point of living is if if like without drinking. But I'm going to try to find out.”

Justin McLeod · 06:30
#addiction#recovery#founder-story#sobriety

contrarian· 2

contrarian47:30

Designed to be deleted — a tagline the team thought nobody would understand

McLeod explains Hinge's founding positioning, which came out of a branding agency asking what the gimmick was — 'you're Tinder, but what?' There was no gimmick; every part of the app was built differently to get people on great dates, and 'designed to be deleted' was the only line that captured it. Internally it was heavily debated as too technical for a consumer tagline, but it shipped because nothing else was honest. He answers the obvious business objection head-on: as long as there are single people, Hinge has customers.

  • The tagline emerged from having no gimmick to offer a branding agency.
  • It was contested internally as too technical for people to understand.
  • It drives every design decision as an optimisation function.
  • The market refills forever, so solving the customer's problem doesn't kill the business.
  • Hinge is framed as a utility, not a game.

“our tagline is designed to be deleted”

Justin McLeod · 48:00

“as long as there are single people in the world, which I'm pretty sure there are plenty of single people left in the world, that…”

Justin McLeod · 49:00
#positioning#north-star-metric#product-strategy#branding
contrarian1:03:30

Walking back Radical Trust — the principle that stopped working at 300 people

Radical Trust was one of Hinge's founding cultural principles: push decision-making down to the front lines and give people the transparency they need to solve problems. At 300-plus people McLeod says it pained him to describe it, because it no longer holds. Pushed too far it produces silos and micro-optimisations. He also realised the original version worked partly by accident — at 100 people he knew everyone and was informally coaching junior engineers and designers all day, so executive influence was present but invisible. The correction is to pull decision-making in and coordinate, while keeping the decision-makers close to the work.

  • Radical Trust was written when Hinge was 50-100 people.
  • Over-delegation at scale produces silos and micro-optimisations.
  • The early version worked because the founder was informally everywhere.
  • The correction is pulling decisions in and generating conversation, not centralising.
  • Principles have to be revised as company size changes.

“I've learned that's like not right for a company this big anymore”

Justin McLeod · 1:04:00

“you can't just like push decision-making down and like hope for the best. You have to like pull it people in and coordinate.”

Justin McLeod · 1:05:30
#company-culture#decision-making#scaling#leadership

tactic· 2

tactic43:00

How to be the world's worst dating app user

Asked by Bartlett how to be maximally unsuccessful on a dating app, McLeod gives a precise inverted checklist: be inauthentic, use filtered photos in sunglasses or surrounded by friends, give one-word answers to prompts, and either like everyone or nobody while waiting for likes to arrive. Each item maps to a Hinge intervention — photo selection help, prompts designed to start conversations, and encouragement to be deliberate with likes. The last one is mechanical rather than moral: indiscriminate liking gives the matching algorithm no signal about your actual taste, so it never gets closer to the kind of person you want.

  • Filtered, sunglasses and group photos hide who you actually are.
  • One-word prompt answers give the other person nothing to reply to.
  • Prompts exist specifically to get you into a conversation.
  • Indiscriminate liking teaches the algorithm nothing about your taste.
  • Passively waiting for likes is its own failure mode.

“filtered photos with you in sunglasses or hanging out with a lot of friends, one-word answers to your prompts”

Justin McLeod · 43:00

“the more thoughtful you are with your likes, the better our algorithm gets”

Justin McLeod · 43:30
#dating-apps#profile-optimisation#hinge#user-behaviour
tactic52:00

A culture book written entirely as a list of mistakes

Hinge's culture originated as an open Google Doc where McLeod wrote down his own management algorithm — how he made decisions and prioritised — so nobody could attribute a call to his personal taste and so the company could hold him accountable. Past 100 employees it became a book called 'How We Do Things', deliberately framed as the story of everything they got wrong and what it taught them. That framing is the mechanism: it gives people permission to be works in progress, and it models the failure tolerance the 'Love the Leap' principle demands.

  • It started as an open doc capturing the founder's decision-making.
  • The stated purpose was accountability, not documentation.
  • It became 'How We Do Things' past 100 employees.
  • Written as mistakes made and lessons learned, on purpose.
  • Meetings now open by stating the aligned principles before the detail.

“I started putting them in that Google Doc so that everyone at the company could hold me accountable to this like management algorithm I was…”

Justin McLeod · 59:00

“no one should ever think well, that's just cuz Justin likes it that way”

Justin McLeod · 59:00
#company-culture#principles#leadership#documentation

insight· 3

insight41:30

Why vulnerability is a filtering mechanism, not a virtue

McLeod gives two mechanical reasons honesty and vulnerability produce better dating outcomes. First, they get you to an accurate assessment faster — a veneer attracts people drawn to the veneer, who will meet the real you eventually anyway. Second, they create connection surface: there is nothing to say to someone who presents as perfect and invincible, because we connect over the cracks and small imperfections. Being open forms a deeper bond faster than trying to impress.

  • Clarity about who you are speeds up accurate mutual assessment.
  • A veneer recruits people who leave once they meet the real you.
  • Imperfections function as conversational hooks.
  • There is nothing to discuss with someone who seems flawless.
  • Opening up beats impressing on both speed and depth.

“the more that you are willing to be honest and vulnerable and real, like the quicker you can find those connections”

Justin McLeod · 41:30

“we connect over the the cracks of and the little imperfections”

Justin McLeod · 42:30
#vulnerability#dating#psychology#authenticity
insight1:09:30

Flatten the power curve — Hinge's effort to fix the bottom of the distribution

Bartlett cites a 2021 Hinge study finding the top 1% of men receive over 16% of all likes versus just over 11% for the top 1% of women, and Scott Galloway's warning about the disenfranchised group of young men at the bottom. McLeod's response is that some people are quite datable but simply bad at dating apps, and that Hinge has an internal initiative called 'flatten the power curve' aimed at levelling them up — better photo and reply coaching, warmer introductions, and limits on how many likes and matches users can accumulate so the rest of the base isn't over-engaged. McLeod's claim is unusually ambitious: he believes the concentration can be corrected on dating apps and, through them, in society more broadly.

  • Top 1% of men take over 16% of likes; top 1% of women just over 11%.
  • Being datable and being good at dating apps are different skills.
  • The internal effort is named 'flatten the power curve'.
  • Interventions include coaching, warmer introductions and better targeting.
  • Hinge deliberately caps likes and matches to spread attention.

“we're calling it flatten the power curve”

Justin McLeod · 1:14:00

“the top 1% of men on the app receive more than 16% of all of the likes”

Steven Bartlett · 1:12:30
#dating-apps#marketplace-design#loneliness#product-strategy
insight1:07:30

Loneliness as displacement — digital media ate the hours we spent with friends

Bartlett cites that 52% of Americans report feeling lonely and 57% eat their meals alone. McLeod's read is that over roughly twenty years, time spent consuming digital media has almost completely displaced time spent with friends in real life. He is careful not to condemn all media consumption — he notes the irony of a podcast host raising it — but argues that when you're pulled in all day and doomscrolling has replaced talking to friends, something real is lost. He also contrasts Hinge with social networks that started with connection missions and became media companies, because brands, influencers and outrageous people hold attention better than your friends do.

  • 52% of Americans report feeling lonely; 57% eat meals alone.
  • Time with friends and time on digital media have swapped over ~20 years.
  • The problem is displacement, not media consumption itself.
  • Social networks became social media because sensational content outperforms friends.
  • Hinge's mission is fixed on one-to-one intimate connection to avoid that drift.

“we want to foster intimate connection to create a less lonely world”

Justin McLeod · 50:30

“it turns out that like brands and influencers and outrageous people are just more interesting than your friends”

Justin McLeod · 51:00
#loneliness#social-media#mission#society