It’s not about happening upon the perfect person, and then it’s all good from there.“ If you want ‘the One’, you have to choose it, and build it, and make it. It’s not like there is a test after you die, where they go, ‘oh you chose the right person, good on you, but you chose the wrong job, sorry about that.’ There is never going to be that. “I believe that life is a process of creation, not discovery.
And we had to deal with them one at a time,” McLeod says.
“When I finally got ‘The One’, the one I’d been dreaming of for eight years, we moved in together, which was amazing for like, two months, and then you know, all the problems started to surface. He favours the view that “the One” is a co-created experience. Their story even forms the basis of an episode in Amazon Prime’s Modern Love series.ĭespite his own fairly epic love story, and the obvious warmth that shines through in the couple’s off-Zoom interactions, McLeod says he doesn’t believe in a singular “the One”. It wouldn’t be this validation and outrage machine.”Īfter an eight-year hiatus, with different partners in between, the pair reunited and married. “Think how different Facebook and Instagram would look if they were designed around feelings of belonging and connection, rather than just trying to keep you on the platform. “When you’re chasing engagement and user retention, people think ‘Oh, the most engaging thing is to put outrageous things at the top of the newsfeed and get people angry’, or ‘Let’s create civil wars’,” McLeod says. He says he has seen some big tech platforms thrive from encouraging negative behaviour and wanted his company to be different. McLeod decided his team needed to play to a different set of targets, centred on actually getting its users out on enjoyable dates with people they liked.
Typical app and software world metrics such as active users, user growth month-on-month, time spent on platform and user retention might work for Facebook and TikTok, where advertisers demand longer and longer attention, but they don’t demonstrate a dating app that is successfully achieving its main aim.
To genuinely change the experience of people using the app, however, McLeod says he needed to change the way performance of the company and its employees was measured. and Hinge quickly slipped into the same model of impersonal swiping. Speaking to The Australian Financial Review via Zoom from Colorado in the United States, where McLeod is celebrating a wedding anniversary with his wife Kate and their baby Ollie, he recalls a pivotal decision to try to stand out from the online crowd and show it genuinely cares about the experience of daters.Īs Hinge was starting to gain traction, along came better-funded entrants such as the swipe-frenzy photo procession Tinder, and its female-friendly clone Bumble. Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod says he wanted the app to be different from social media that encourages negative behaviour. However, the 36-year-old, who founded Hinge in 2012, with a pitch of connecting singletons with “friends of friends”, admits it lost its way in its early days, and had to completely change its approach. In 2020, full-year revenue was up threefold and total downloads were up 63 per cent on 2019. According to App Annie data, Hinge is the fastest-growing dating app in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the founder and chief executive of a wildly successful dating app, Justin McLeod says his raison d’être is to help single people connect with one another and get them out on great dates.