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Tinder CEO Sean Rad spoke to a full house at General Assembly last night in Santa Monica, detailing how the company, though it is barely a year old, has grown explosively. Rad said Tinder has become one of the hottest mobile apps, initiating 3.5 million matches and 350 million swipes per day.
In just the month of January, Tinder’s number of users soared from 25,000 to 350,000, which set a pace that has not quit and that Rad said is “adding more users than Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram did at this point.” This rapid growth has been accomplished purely by word of mouth. Rad said: “Behaviors are learned and they are passed from friend to friend to friend” creating engagement.
Though early on, Rad admitted the Tinder team employed some creative tactics to jump-start the process, like when Rad required all attendees of a friend’s 250-person birthday bash to download Tinder before entering. Or their trip to USC…
“We went to sororities and fraternities and pitched Tinder at their open Monday night dinners,” Rad said. “We told the sororities, ‘All the frat guys joined Tinder and are waiting to look at you.’ And we told the fraternities, ‘All the sorority girls joined Tinder and are waiting to look at you.”
And once the ball was rolling Tinder gained a lot of momentum - so much so that Rad said his biggest problem right now is scaling to meet demand, not monetization.
“There are only so many things you can prioritize in a day,” Rad said. “When we have scalability issues then it’s stupid to focus on monetization. Whatever value you are adding now will not mean anything when people get bored and leave in six months. I’m not even sure we are going to put ads on Tinder.”
Despite scaling headaches, Tinder is still set to roll out some new features like a post-match graph, which will help users manage their matches: “Think of it as people-you-want-to-know-graph: the graph will help prioritize people.”
Beyond the post-match graph, Rad hinted at new applications for the double opt-in feature, which is Tinder-speak for the simple concept of mutual attraction. This may mean changing Tinder’s ideal client from “anyone who is single” to “anyone who wants to meet someone new.”
The double opt-in feature may be a great first step to any sort of networking, not just dating because it allows for a natural process of connection. Rad said he has a vision for using the double opt-in to smooth all kinds of new social interactions, a vision which makes perfect sense considering the original problem Tinder set out to address.
“We noticed a lot of people had trouble making new relationships,” Rad said. “I started Tinder because I wanted to solve this problem.”
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