From Swipe to Scale: How Tinder Became #1
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You're only as good as your ability to listen to the people are using your products. If there was a easy way to get information without me inputting a lot of information, we always pursue that. IT was really this idea that I had to be passive in magical.

If I have to do work, IT might make me feel like a little despite a lot of startups s put marketing ahead of products. If you don't have product market fit before you do that, you're not actually getting quality feedback. If I don't understand IT in five words and I can connect with IT, then you're probably not .

going to be that viral. In nineteen ninety five, just thirty years ago, two percent of couples met online through sites like match shock com, which, by the way, was one of the few dating sites that even existed prior to two thousand. Now today, that number is well over fifty percent, meaning is primary way that couples meet.

Perhaps that alone is not surprising to you, but IT was right around twenty twelve that we saw online become the primary channel, eclipsing meeting for friends, work, the bar, family school. That also happens to be the year that tinder was founded. At the begin of this episode, a sixty z general partner, Andrew, ask the audience how many people in the room have used tender? Well, count me in under, but I want you the listened to reflect on the same.

If you haven't used IT, how many of your friends have you used IT? How many couples do you know that have met through IT any marriages? Well, today you get to hear from shan brad, founder and long time C.

E. O of tender about how he created a product that changed culture. This podcast was recorded live in L A. During our A C C C games speed run program. So if you'd like to learn more about speed run, which is returning for its fourth iteration in seven, o had over to 点 com slash games slash speed around。

As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any asic sense y fund. Please note that a six senses and ezoe illiac may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a extinct 点 com slack disposals。

Show hands who has downloaded or use tinder at some point in their life. Let's alright, ready. go.

amazing. All the people, my. That is like where I wanted actually start and where we're going actually spend. Most of the conversation is the underdog story of being a foundered and entrepreneurs. So I wanted to actually to start with the shan rad origin story before tender.

Good question. I think up until the age of seventeen, I was in music. My dream was to be singer, son, writer, but also always had a passion for technology.

Something always gravitated me towards. Remember, like when I was a kid and my dad got D, S, L, which is probably no one even knows what that is. A, it's like early high speed internet.

I would rip that apart. I'd like try to hack into the system. I'd always mess IT up. So I always had a passionate technology, but I pursued music, got a job at a music management company, realized, at least at that time, musicians aren't treated that well within the industry.

And I was like, i'm not A B beholding to anyone, so decided to go make a bunch of money and then come back to music. And then that's when I started my first company in college called argue, and that was basically taking all the different ways you communicate and putting them into one interface. And then started my next company, eddy, which pioneer influencer marketing and influencer advertizing with five thousand brains and ten thousand, what you would call creators right now.

And we would broker relationships with them and track analytics sold badly. And around the time the iphone has just come out, and I sort of recognize everything is about to change, the idea of having the most powerful computer in our pockets everywhere we go was just fascinating. And I wanted to do something in mobile.

So I started, one of my investors had ugly, had created, uh, test fate. So I started working with a test flag team, and I built what is now apple analytics. Then left to pursue two ideas.

And one of them was cardiff y, which was like a local loyalty program. Still a great idea. No one is done IT. If you go to a restaurant, swipe your credit card in the APP you get points, but you don't have to open the APP do anything that was all connected to the credit or system. And the other idea was match box, which is tender.

And my thinking at the time was both of those ideas came out of this realization that, I mean, now this is pretty obvious. But back then, i'm like, all my friends are heads down in their phones when we were together. And I like, this is so weird.

And I saw very early on, you like, this device could either bring us closer together, or I could terrorist apart IT could take us out of the moment and distract us. So I started in, how can we use the phone to help me interface with the world and make my real world interactions even Better? One of those works streams was I want to interact with the places I frequent more.

And another one of those work stream was I was single and want a Better way to meet people and overcome, I would say, this kind of fear of rejection or anxiety we all feel in walking up to someone. And the root of tender was, well, what if we could take that away by introducing this, a femoral matchmaker? I don't need to tell the person I like them.

I can tell the matchmaker. And if someone else tells the matchmaker, then there's an introduction. The ice is broken and we can connect right now is really like the course theses of tender.

And at the time, I mean, they'd already been a couple a large online dating products like e harmony existed and gotten to your interesting scale. There is matched outcome. When we have talked about the same past. One of the observations you made is that all those products almost felt like work the way that they had been designed.

yes. I mean, if you think about this problem that I laid out, which is rejection, those products actually were worse than the the world because I would message a bunch of people are not get a response I granted. And this is true.

I've never used enable those products still to this day because we never saw ourselves as competing within online dating. We really sellers creating a new way for people to interact and make new connections. So we didn't think about IT is online dating or even a dating product that we always thought about as an introduction platform.

And we actually banned in early days like you weren't allowed to say dating because dating products were not cool. No one felt cool being on them like, so we were social discovery APP, because also dating was a very loaded word. It's like, what does that mean among the our age group? And we talk to our friends, it's a heavy word.

And we wanted to create a more natural, real experience and more of a platform where you can define IT and make you so that everyone you can date, you can get married, you could make a friend, you could OK up, of course. I mean, whatever IT is, it's all in the user hands. you.

And I think this is like supervision oner at the time also because as a business model, I remember being in the area and investors, which just say, like, yeah, we don't fun gaming and we don't fun online dating yeah he was just like a category they didn't didn't yeah they didn't get they didn't believe in. Obviously, these days we see how people meet romantically. And I think it's now up to what seventy percent tinder.

I would say we did a study in two thousand seventeen. I think to conclude, the forty percent of U. S. Marriages met on tinder, right? I don't know that more or less .

is still the one dating up in the world. I think. I two, two, yeah, exactly.

Right, right, right. Ah, I was not really something that was perceived as a stream activity. And so that means you have to build a product that conveys trust. And you were already starting to think about this qual dating the right term. Talk a lot about how do you even even position yourself and talk about the idea given all this constraint?

I think IT all starts with product. So what is the problem you're solving being very clear on that? I think a mistake that a lot of companies make is there's product is a silo, then IT goes to design, then IT goes to engineering, then IT goes to marketing or maybe product marketing first, then IT goes to customer acquisition.

I heated this waterfall model of building a product we always saw as one cohesive narrative. If you hear about IT from a friend all the way to signing up, all the way to using the product, to experiencing the value proposition, to then telling your friends, that's one narrative, and that needs to be one unit. So I think that was unique about tender, is we really fuse together these multi disciplinary crafts, and we were able to bring together these different perspectives and build on a platform that was bring you right.

No one understood mobile. I am. I remember facebook p at well.

They tried to basically take their whole website in the time to tiny. Yes, I think .

everyone just saw that is like a different canvas, we said is a completely different way of interacting. So I think we also push the edge of mobile user experience design. And I remember the initial .

versions of tender required facebook log, and he showed metals we really believed in.

like human design and really understanding what people are already doing and accepting versus getting people to do something completely different. And if you think about meeting you, don't walk into a bar and give someone to resume. That's what every dating experience felt like. So we knew tender have to be very minimal, alister, very simple, very natural.

So if there was a easy way to get information without me inputting a lot of information, we always pursue that, whether it's a mobile phone sensors, whether it's connecting your facebook account, where we're able to pull in a lot of information about you. I was also unique at the time. I was not a lot of absolute than thinking that way about how do you properly leverage the social graph to create new experiences. So IT was really this idea that I had to be passive and magical. If I have to do work, IT might make me feel like a little desperate, like i'm going out of my way to meet someone and we never wanted intended to feel that way.

right? And one of the ways that i'm interpreting the way that you're talking about this is that because you had mobile as this new platform, there's a whole thing about like how do you serve these waves, right? And a lot of what you're talking about a sort of like creating the native product experience to that wave as opposed they are just trying to take the last thing and kind of .

copy paste onto IT. Yeah, totally. I mean, you always have remember, in these waves, IT doesn't mean that the new technology necessarily creates a new problem.

You still have to solve the problem. Now the new technology gives you new ways to solve that problem. But I think you always seen some of these ways.

Is you of startups that are like i'm doing something in A I or am doing something in mobile. But what does that really mean, right? Like mobile or A I is a way to deliver an experience as a tool.

It's not actually a problem or a solution. So I think going back to this like human center way of building business, like who's your customer, what is their problem and how are you solving IT? A I might be part of that narrative and might not be part of that narrative, but I think definitely the technologies give you new ways to solve problems.

And then sometimes you have these distortions between how people are accessing information and what's being provided to them. In our case is, is a shift to mobile and is like even if you had the same exact product, tinder, but on the web, right, that's a very different product when it's on mobile because the behavior is different and that's something facebook didn't understand. In the early days, they saw mobile as like mobile web. They see IT is a new behavior, a new way of .

interacting, right? Let's go to a process of launching the product and tell what what the team look like at the point where you getting started and then how did you get your first users?

So in the beginning was, trust me. So I designed IT myself, very few, you know this, but i'm a product to x designer. And to me this is however great idea starts.

It's like get IT on paper so you can actually show IT to people you need that to recruit and inspire others to join you. But also it's like the first product market fit test. And then I think we recruiting a team to build IT.

But I was very important to me to bring people on the right who really believed in our vision and have that passion because I think a new very early on that. Passionate in experience person will still be more effective than a this passionate experience, much I so like cash on to us, was like the number one currency of joining the team. And that started with me being able to articulate the vision else. How can anyone else get passionate about?

We had this whole group earlier this week. Actually, everybody gave like a elevator pitch. But I always love because you put so much effort into simplifying the message to where everybody can understand IT. And IT takes effort to make IT.

simper or not. So the complex that was actually core principal attender was simplicity as genes. There's a great Albert inside quote that if something isn't simple enough, it's because you don't understand IT truly get to the essence of something. IT requires deep exploration and thought. The python is a great example of that, right, removing buttons and simplifying and subtracting versus adding, right.

So I think the same thing applies your pitch, right? If I don't understand IT and five words and I can connect with IT, then you're probably not going to be that viral because how I can explain that to someone else, i'm going to say to my friend he, can I give you this picture about this new APP? It's more like check this out.

Five words yeah. A little bit like the M. P. S. Question is like how likely would you be able to recommend this friend? The subquestion that I always love there is okay. Now tell me how you would recommend IT to a like literally described IT what words do you use? And it's always completely different than whatever the creator of the product links yeah and it's very, very educational because IT tells you like o being compared to these things yeah maybe you like.

maybe you don't. It's a very important signal. Your only as good as your ability to listen to the people using your products.

And many times, these products take a life of their own. They're taking you somewhere that you didn't even think about going. So one of the nice things about gingerous that we were in L A.

And we were in west hollywood and nobody was in the tech business there. So like when we go to restaurants and we show the APP, we get feedback. We were getting some pretty honest reactions. IT was more about reaching the populist. And what they think then are other technical friends who might give that explanation .

very differently. I totally agree, because if you can tell your story, not only is that may be unclear in your own mind, but also, yeah, maybe you can recruit, maybe you can fund, right? Maybe your product is actually less viral.

So getting that right, that is so key solution. So you have the v one of tinder in your head, you write IT, you start recruiting the people. And then famously, you eventually get into this motion of going college to college, to college.

Well, I had the benefit of a tender of coming off of badly, where I sort of really understood how social media marketing, let's call IT vue, worked, at least in digital environment, also a real environment. But like the first thing we did, we had the APP and we launched the APP we were all playing with that gave us a few friends we ve loved IT.

And like, what the fuck do we do? How do we get this out there? The first thing we did was I told everyone in the team, take out your phones, text a hundred of your friends I like, we text three hundred people.

And to our shock, IT was, like, three days later, we had five hundred users. What the fuck did anyone else text? Anyone else? What is going on here? And part of that was really, we're finding what was that pitch IT was like, we were drilling people.

And I think the message we sent was download this APP and think me later. We didn't to say what the APP was, what? So he also understood that has to be an element of mystery and curiosity and how things go viral.

Then one of our insurance was in college at the time, and his friend SHE was very popular on campus, was having a massive birthday, forty two thousand people. And we went and we said, hey, why don't we throw the party for you? We ended up doing IT at just in my co fur's house, and we literally shuttle all these USA students to his parents house. And we kind of trust the house. But worth that.

Yeah, worth IT and what we did was we're like, okay, you can't get into this party unless you download APP called tender and literally the bouncer was checking, cannot get in the door and lets you down the APP and the next day, bunch of hungover colled students here that was that APP I downloaded and we realized, like wo we just created a little echo chAmber within USA and it's starting to go viral. And we are a local product, which I think introduced more complex in how we grow. We were a social product that needs a network of extra that's hard enough social, local product compounds even more.

So we realized, wow, that's like a way to reach a bunch of people who are within an ecosystem, have connections to each other. And it's another way to stress test this species that we had, which was we're not for people who are busy professionals who go to match 到 com because they don't have time。 And how many people walking on a college campus might see someone but not have the courage to go talk to them? Can we make more of those connections? And he was working.

So then we're like, okay, how do we can eat USA even more? And we realize that every thursday night for chinese authorities have like chapter dinners where other other ferries authorities would come in and give a presentation of what they're doing that week. So we have literally pose this college students and would go to the furious and thirties and just talk about the APP and that worked.

And then we're like, okay, well, that just got us five thousand users. I think at the time we were like, right? If we do this in every college, it's all going to add up.

So we hire a bunch of college students across all campuses in the U. S. And we just started pounding the pavement. We would throw parties. We would go into greek life, introduce the APP. But again, like none of this would have mattered if we didn't have a product works like I think this is like so fucking important. A lot of startups put marketing ahead of product. If you don't have product market fit before you do that, you're not actually getting quality feedback you're doing yourself at the service, have one chance to introduce your products, people that one chance has to count. So I would say he was systematic of a great product, but also really focusing customer acquisition on the right people, creating a bubble around groups of people, rather than like spring and praying and going wide.

Did you guys worry at the beginning where if you had certain kinds of VS that were involved or something like that, they would have probably told you something like, oh, good to market. Be a college is great and everything we are only getting a couple hundred users. It's not scalable. It's not repeatable. Why do IT and obviously ended up yeah ultimate.

And this is actually very important lesson that we learn, especially when you building a network product like the engagement you get from every user or matters. So if I see something on a billboard, I download IT. The fact is very different than if my friend tells me about a product.

And we had opportunities, many opportunities to actually do mass market. Actually in the early days, kim cardi an wanted to promote the product again, going back to my ugly days. And we didn't want to do that because we're like weight.

If we just get a bunch of random users all over the world and we're not creating the density and the organic reality, then the network effect will be very weak. So that was our answer. Whether this question came up with investors was like, hold on, this isn't because we can't go and do bigger marketing.

This is because you have to understand the nature of the product and how to actually create effective network effects. And I think once we would explain that way, they like while these people really know what the fuck knows. And he was about consistently sort of widening the tent, but taking every step on the way and not trying to take shortcuts.

Shortcuts don't always work. Yeah, amazing. I know tinder went through lots of really interesting up and down. And one thing I always admired was you guys were always launching a new countries or there there is like different new product lines. Remember one time we are chatting and you were like working on something where there is going to be tabs on top of tender, is going to be able to meet friends and maybe professional network and talk a about this culture of just being OK with fAiling and be willing to try stuff versus I can also imagine a version when you're working on a product that's kind of working, you're kind of like, okay, don't change anything and you're trying not to light off the boat.

Well, okay. So two things. So one is you all know starting a company is very hard. It's emotionally like you're kind of like a mental athlete.

And if you are not doing IT for the right reasons, if you don't have that drive, that passion, that motivation of love, then I think when shake gets hard, you're going to give up. So I think resiliency starts with passion. The more passionate you are, the more reasoning you're going to be.

And that, I think, leads the second thing, which is when it's from the heart, we can be honest and critical of each other and we're all fighting towards one mission. And its not about me, it's not about you to about the mission when it's out of ego. Well then maybe we're not being honest for playing politics.

And we had a culture that was extremely honest and open and that kept making these products Better. And part of that open and honest culture was also recognizing that if something doesn't work and we made a mistake, that we have to be able to look at each other and say that didn't work and not be afraid of that, and take that as a lesson and leverage IT into something greater. Companies grow through and air and learning.

You have a favorite project for other days that there are many about where where you feel like you really learn from.

There were a lot, I would give a good example of how we institutional ze. Some of this is like our all hands, all about the product and design team in every team presenting to the company. We're small started doing this at ten people like we present to the team.

And I would encourage everyone to say what you like or don't like and ripped apart. And that mattered because people learn, oh, if I actually say something sucks, i'm not get in trouble. And every time that would happen, that would lead to a Better result.

And then we also embodied, I mean, the amount of debates I had with john. We would have lovers corals over product openly in the floor because I wanted everyone to hear that, that is okay for you to debate. And that builds Better products, getting all those perspectives.

And there is only in result in a Better product. And then there's many things that we killed that didn't work. Match maker was one of them.

We had a product where we were like, sure was gonna, where you can pick two of your friends and force a match so you could play that. I was like certain that that was gonna, and we ended up killing IT. Remember when we killed that?

The team was really sad because the'd work really hard on, but the way I presented IT was like if we don't kill IT, then we don't have room to do something new. But if a team is afraid to do that because, oh gosh, we work so hard on something and you're not really being honest or intellect honest or in IT for the greater good of the company. So you have to check the ego at the door, right?

I remember the very first couple times I was hearing about tender IT was often so this is sort of a question about press and controversy and all that other stuff. You know, obviously many remember the point where I was like, oh, it's a hook up. Do you think that was ultimately helpful because I just created heat. And I asked the sort of knowing that there are so many folks are working in A I right now and A I itself, as you can, to play into that.

I I think in the early days, we've lined into IT because we didn't give a fuck. We just wanted more users. We believed in what we were doing and we didn't care what the press was saying.

At a certain point, we started caring, and I think IT became a huge distraction. And then he started comparing by your competitors, and that becomes a huge distraction. We let you go at a certain point in that unlocked a lot of creativity because really what matters is your relationship with your users.

Here are the people you should really listen to and care about. Your students matter too, right? Because maybe they have great feedback for you.

And there many times, like press would say something like, no, that's actually a good criticism. We got ta look into that. But also, at least in our case, IT would never make a difference in metrics.

Yep, IT was a fraction of the horse power of our users being our advocates and telling their friends, and that's really what we try to focus on. You also ignore in the competition because it's like they have a different set of circumstances. They're doing a different thing. Were focused on our users, and that was always where we would get alignment and peace.

And we had a very similar experience at uber as well because there was famously a weaker two in france where all the taxi drivers came out and did like a mega anti uber protest, and politicians saying all the IT was sort of like in all the news headlines, absolutely crushed downloads. That entire mountain .

was like record everything, the controversy. Ls, one point of view, as long as they're saying your name, your rabb's name, then great is a win. Especially nowadays, most people don't remember what they read in the press, but they remember maybe if you're lucky, they'll take away the name of the product, right? And then maybe that generates curiosity to go download IT. And then if you have a really good product despite whatever anyone saying, then you'll .

earn that users trust. All right, that is over today. If you did make IT as far, first of all, thank you.

We put a lot of thought into each of these episodes, whether it's guess the calendar touches cycles with amazing at a Tommy until music is just right. So if you like, what we've put together consider dropping is online. I read this post com splash asic season and let us know what your favorite service is. It'll make my day, and i'm sure Thomas to will catch you on the flip side.