5 Genius Things Tinder Did To Achieve Explosive Growth

Much of this information is taken from the chapter, ‘Tinder Cracks The Code,’ in my new Best Seller Business Book , Explosive Growth , which you can purchase on   Amazon .

As soon as I saw Tinder, I knew it was going to crush the competition. Unfortunately, I was included in that competition.

How did I know Tinder would succeed? Tinder found the Holy Grail — the one thing all online dating services (mine included) had been trying to find to no avail:

A way to stimulate word-of-mouth referrals.

Before Tinder, there was a serious stigma around online dating. You only told your friends you were dating online after you’d successfully met your match — and even then, it wasn’t information you went around broadcasting.

That made it extremely difficult to build up any word-of-mouth momentum. At one point, my company actually spent $50,000 on a single Spring Break promotion to try and stir some word-of-mouth excitement — and earned ourselves a whopping 0 new signups.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip : Learn how to validate an idea with as little time and financial investment as possible.

The only silver lining was that every dating service experienced this same frustration, meaning we weren’t alone in our struggle.

And then Tinder happened.

Tinder did five genius things to get people talking about their service, and their results speak for themselves. I’ve broken down all five of their masterstrokes below, starting with…

1. Tinder Took The Shame Out of Online Dating

When I first saw Tinder, I was at a bar in Manhattan.

I was sitting next to a group of young women who were enamored by some app they were all simultaneously playing with. I assumed it was a new game, and went about my business.

After 30 minutes of them continuing to look at each other’s phones and say, “Left!” or “Right!” I was curious enough to ask them what the game was.

That’s when they showed me Tinder.

After one of the women explained it to me, I asked her, “Oh, so it’s a dating service?”

She responded, “No, it’s a game.”

We went on to have a strangely animated debate back and forth about whether Tinder was a dating site, a game, or an online retail store with an inventory of available men.

Finally, one of the girls got really frustrated and defensive, and she shouted, “No! We’re not online dating! It’s like we’re shopping, but for men, get it?”

That’s when it occurred to me — Tinder was going to change the entire landscape of online dating. They’d cracked the code. For the first time, people weren’t afraid to talk about online dating in public — because it wasn’t “dating,” it was a game.

Even Tinder’s copy underscored this message. In other online dating apps, when you matched or sent a message, you’d get a message that said something like, “There are more singles waiting to meet you!”

Tinder said, “Keep playing.”

Tinder had made a game out of dating, and what do you do when you find a fun game?

You invite other people to play.

2. Tinder Was Literally 10x Better

If you’re a new app trying to compete in a market with giant incumbents, as Tinder was, your product can’t be marginally better. It needs to be 10x better at least.

Tinder created a user experience that was just that, and they did it in some pretty amazing ways:

Instant Access: Dating services like mine were constantly trying to reduce user friction, and making signups simpler was a big part of that. We had our signups down to a couple of clicks, which was great — but Tinder made signing up as easy as a single click.Hyper Local Geo Targeting: Dating services typically used your location to find you dates in a 50 miles or so radius. That way, you could set up a date sometime that week. Tinder showed you people within 1 mile of you, so that you could go on a date in 15 minutes.Highly Optimized Algorithms: Having a big user base is critical to a dating service’s success, but it can also mean creating a huge pile of profiles for users to sift through. Tinder algorithmically identified very attractive people, and showed you them first.

Even the features Tinder didn’t pioneer, they did better. Other apps had a swiping-esque feature, but Tinder made it simpler and quicker than anyone else.

My Tinder Experiment

To quantify how much better Tinder was, I ran an experiment with several of my friends — guys and gals — to verify that Tinder was really ten times better than other online dating sites at meeting someone quickly.

It was important for me to quantify Tinder’s superiority in order to fully gauge how serious of a threat they would be to me.

You see, if a product is marginally better, or just a little different, it’s unlikely to succeed. Changing services is a pain for users, and so a service needs to be 10x better to justify the switch.

So, I asked my friends to try a variety of online dating apps to see how quickly they could get a date on each one.

With zero exceptions, all of them came back with the same result: Tinder allowed them to meet someone more quickly than any other site.

Most of them met someone on Tinder within one hour, as opposed to two or more days on the other websites. In other words, Tinder’s ability to deliver on the core user objective, a date, was literally ten times faster than other dating sites. Game, set, match to Tinder.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Great products are at least 10x better than the competition at delivering on its core value. Can you quantify how much superior your core product offering is than the competition? Is it 10X better?

3. Tinder Made Women Priority #1

Ben Thompson, the genius behind the tech strategy blog Stratechery, explained the dynamics behind Uber’s success like this:

“As (Uber) acquires users (and as users increases their usage) Uber attracts more drivers, which makes the service better, which makes it easier to acquire marginal users (not by lowering the price but rather by offering a better service for the same price).”

In other words, Uber gets more riders, meaning more drivers are attracted to the platform. The fact that they have more drivers in each area makes for a better user experience (quicker pickup times), meaning even more users sign up, meaning more drivers, and on and on.

This process is called a virtuous cycle, and it works because Uber understands that only one group of people matters in this equation: The riders.

Now, what does Uber have to do with Tinder?

Tinder made a similar observation to Uber. For Tinder, only one group of people matter, and that’s the women who use Tinder.

If you create an amazing experience for women in online dating, they will use your platform. If every woman uses your platform, men will have no choice but to flock it.

By implementing a double-blind match system in which men could only contact women who liked them back, Tinder cut out the non-stop, unsolicited messages women on other dating apps would get. In other words, every time a woman received a new message, it was a ‘beautiful’ experience.

Now, things have changed since Tinder’s early days. As with any app, when you scale to such incredible size, your user base is going to include some people you wish it didn’t — in this case, creepy guys who spam the women they match against with uncomfortable messages.

As one can imagine, some of these ‘messages’ can lead to a less than ‘beautiful’ experience for women, however, compared to the services that predated Tinder, the difference was still night and day.

4. Tinder Tapped Coeds

One of Tinder’s first marketing efforts was a stroke of genius.

If you had never used an online dating service, what would make you try it out?

In the past, dating services had tried things like sending prospective users advertisements and messages like this:

“See who has a crush on you!”

Tinder did the opposite. Tinder figured that the thing that would motivate you to try out their service wasn’t the knowledge that other people had a crush on you, it was by telling you that your crush was using Tinder.

Tinder went to college campuses and threw parties, inviting all of the most popular, attractive students and requiring them to download the Tinder app to get into the party.

I can just picture the marketing meeting to plan that event. “Here’s an idea: What if we throw parties at a bunch of different college campuses around the country? We invite the sororities with the hottest college girls we can find, and have the frat guys show up.

Then, tell everyone to download our app to get into the party. After that, they can swipe left or right all night. By the next morning, the entire campus will have our app, and they’ll be telling everyone about it!”

It worked to perfection.

The strategy had three main benefits:

For people who weren’t cool enough to be invited to the party, this meant that the person you had a crush on was on a ‘dating’ app looking for dates, and you could be on it too.For anyone downloading the app for the first time, it was already seeded with the most attractive, popular people in your network, creating a beautiful initial experienceFor anyone nervous about online dating, it instilled a massive fear of missing out — after all, the person you were interested was probably on Tinder talking to other people.

The idea worked like magic, initiating massive word-of-mouth growth and Tinder spread like wildfire.

5. Tinder Never Made You Pay For Core Features

One of the keys to my company growing revenue from $3m to more than $19m in just 2 years was this simple formula:

We acquired a lot of users by giving our unique service away for free.When our user base was full of committed users, we started charging them.

We made a ton of money right away when we turned on the subscription model, but we drew a lot of ire and lost a lot of passionate users who were crucial in spreading the word. Even worse, these users expressed their displeasure en masse by giving us negative 1-star reviews in the app store, which negatively impacted our user acquisition efforts.

Tinder took a completely different approach.

To this day, none of Tinder’s original core features cost money. You can sign up today, and spend the rest of your Tinder-life swiping for free (you just can’t swipe too much in one day, that’ll cost you).

To make money, Tinder has rolled out a series of non-essential, but hugely valuable upgrades, including boosting the number of people who see your profile, going back if you swipe too fast (rewind), changing your location (passport), or unlocking unlimited swipes.

All of that has lead to Tinder’s paying-member count exceeding 2 million last quarter, with a valuation likely in the billions.

It’s nothing short of brilliant execution by Tinder’s management. To be able to monetize a previously free app so lucratively, and not suffer any hiccups in user growth, is extraordinary.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Never start charging for something that users are used to receiving for free. They will revolt and cause irrevocable damage with bad reviews. Come up with new features to monetize.

You Can’t Control Timing, But Everything Else Is On You

Tinder definitely benefited from some perfect timing:

Online dating was finally familiar enough for an app like Tinder to break the social stigma.People were finally comfortable sharing their personal information, specifically your location, with an online dating app. Previously, there was significant pushback about apps that tracked user location and would reveal users nearby.The iOS ecosystem was a uniquely powerful platform for spreading Tinder, whereas incumbents had either built stand-alone sites or built off platforms like Facebook.

However, none of that timing can take away from the brilliance of Tinder’s strategy. To be sure, there are plenty of companies with brilliant ideas that fail because the timing is wrong — but for the most part, timing is not what keeps startups from growing.

There are countless factors that make or break most startups’ growth, but having a remarkable product, constant a/b testing, and having a talented team to execute on a brilliant growth strategy are necessities, and completely within your control. However, the right timing can make all the difference in the world.

Two books that I highly recommend about how to ignite viral growth are Pyromarketing by Greg Stielstra and Contagious By Jonah Berger, which are on my list of the best books for entrepreneurs.

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