Mateen wanted to build buzz not through traditional advertising but by getting the app into the hands of “social influencers” who could spread Tinder by word of mouth. He personally tracked down and signed up the kind of people who didn’t need to date online—models, sorority girls, fraternity presidents, and the like. Mateen and Tinder’s then vice president of marketing, Whitney Wolfe, went door to door through the schools’ Greek system, preaching the gospel of smartphone hookups. After Tinder’s launch in September 2012—celebrated with a raging party at USC—the app took off and spread like wildfire across campuses. Within weeks, thousands of users had signed up, and 90 percent of them were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.
For a while Tinder was treated as the solution to a long-standing dilemma facing the online dating industry: How do we make a straight version of Grindr?
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Grindr was a revolutionary app that took the male gay community by storm after its release in 2009, attracting more than one million daily users within a few years. A precursor to Tinder, it was the first major dating site that was primarily a mobile app that used GPS and a basic profile with a photo to match people.
Years before I heard of Tinder, I once sat with a gay friend in a sushi restaurant and was floored when he turned on his Grindr app and showed me a profile of a handsome guy. “It says he’s fifteen feet away. Oh, shit. Look, he’s right over there,” he said, pointing to a guy sitting at the sushi bar.
It was mind-blowing, but companies struggled to replicate it for the straight world. The conventional wisdom was that straight women would never use a Grindr-type app, for reasons ranging from safety concerns to lack of such strong interest in casual sex with strangers. The Grindr team attempted it with an app called Blendr, but it didn’t catch on.
But Tinder added a key feature that Grindr—and Blendr, for that matter—didn’t have: the mutual-interest requirement. This is the term I just made up to describe how, on Tinder, you can’t engage with another user unless you both have swiped right, indicating interest in each other.
After our previous discussions of online dating, the appeal seems obvious. Take Arpan. No longer does he have to worry about writing a long message only to get dismissed based on his looks. The only people he can message are people who have already indicated interest in him. On the reverse side, for women, a dude can’t bother you unless you have swiped right on him. Women were no longer getting harassed by an infinite user base of bozos; they were engaging only with people they chose to engage. This change alone was enough of an improvement that, in October 2013, New York magazine proclaimed that Tinder had solved online dating for women.14
Also, the stress of weeding through profiles, à la our friend Derek, is gone too. You are just swiping on faces. It’s like a game. This aspect of Tinder’s user experience is huge.
Even the fact that signing up is so easy is a game changer. I remember signing up for a dummy OkCupid account, just to see what the site was like. It took forever. There were so many questions that I eventually just had an assistant answer them. It felt like a chore. Meanwhile, when researching Tinder, I was in the back of a cab and I quickly signed in through a Facebook account. Within seconds, I was swiping and enjoying the app with a friend. After each photo, my friend and I debated our thoughts on a particular person or checked to see if they had more pictures. Sometimes a user would come up with mutual friends, and that would spark a dialogue.
There was no denying it. There was something weirdly entertaining and gamelike about Tinder. When the app first started popping up, people in all our focus groups described signing up for amusement or as a joke and swiping profiles with friends in a group setting. They said using the app was actually fun and social, which was simply unheard of in all our conversations about other online dating sites.
At the same time, though, people’s attitude toward Tinder was strange. When we first started asking people about it in late 2013, they wouldn’t say they were on it looking for dates or even sex. They would say that they had signed up on a lark. They treated it like a party game. Anyone who was a serious user was basically using it as a hookup app for sex.
Here are a few exemplary quotes from a focus group we held in December 2013:
Hi, I’m Rena. I’m twenty-three and I signed up for Tinder, like, three months ago, just because I was drunk and with a friend.
Hi, I’m Jane. I’m twenty-four and I have a similar experience with Tinder where I was, like, at a party with friends and they were like, “This is the funnest game ever. Let’s play this.” And I downloaded it. And then, like, started seeing way too many people I knew. So I deleted it.
Those who did acknowledge that they’d actually used Tinder felt a little self-conscious about it. “I’m not gonna marry a guy from Tinder,” one woman said. “Yeah, Tinder’s very, like, hookup,” added another.
What, we asked, would you do if you met someone you actually liked on Tinder? One woman said she’d be embarrassed to tell people she’d met someone on Tinder, whereas another site, like JDate, would have been fine.