Hinge: Justin McLeod

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2021

⏱️ 92 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2010, Justin McLeod was in business school, still trying to get over a bad breakup that had happened years before. Determined to solve his own problem and convinced that the best way to meet people was through friends of friends, he built an app to replicate that experience. Gradually, Hinge grew into a streamlined swiping platform that yielded mixed results: good dates, bad hookups, mismatched swipes, and missed opportunities. Disappointed with this outcome and inspired by a sudden twist in his own love life, Justin redesigned Hinge as an app for finding meaningful relationships, with the tag line "designed to be deleted." Today, Hinge is owned by Match Group and is one of the most popular dating apps in the U.S.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:31.0	When we did the relaunch, you know, my first instinct was obviously to like,
0:36.0	erase money. So I was talking to every VC, but no one would give me money.
0:41.0	Wow.
0:42.0	I mean, I was begging.
0:43.0	Yeah.
0:44.0	And I had this like one investor that was really holding out for, and I remember the partner at the VC firm called me,
0:50.0	and she was like, you know, we've never seen a company that was cool and then went away,
0:58.0	and then was able to come back, and we just can't do it.
1:03.0	Wow.
1:04.0	And I was like, Timberlands?
1:07.0	From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:23.0	I'm Guy Raus, and on the show today, how the one that got away led Justin MacLeod to build the dating app Hinge,
1:33.0	and how Hinge led him to the love of his life.
1:43.0	In 2019, a very distinguished, peer-reviewed academic journal published a paper about human courtships.
1:52.0	The study, led by Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld, concluded that most romantic relationships now begin online.
2:01.0	Now, if you are, say, under 35, this may not come as a huge surprise.
	...

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