Dating is down. So why is Hinge thriving?

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Justin McLeod: Dating apps haven’t served them particularly well. When an app is really designed for engagement and retention but not necessarily dates and relationships, then it can make people feel like they’re stuck and they’re putting in a lot of effort and not getting what they want. We’re the number one dating app across 10 different markets. One out of every 10 engagements in the U.S. is from Hinge specifically, so there’s so much opportunity out there, and people are willing more than ever. Everyone needs to be doing more and better right now to help people find love and connection.

Bob Safian: That’s Justin McLeod, CEO of dating app, Hinge. As other dating apps have been faltering of late, Hinge is continuing to grow rapidly. Justin returns to Rapid Response to explain how over the past year, his app has been able to sidestep younger generations’ fatigue with digital interaction and the saturation of choices for finding love online. Justin talks about the risks and opportunities of AI in online dating, his collaboration with renowned psychologist, Esther Perel, and why we need genuine human connection offline more than ever. Whether you’re coupled up, single, or somewhere in between, get set for a lively exploration of the business of love in the 21st century. And don’t miss our lightning round at the end with tips on how to put your best foot forward when looking for a match. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Justin McLeod, CEO of dating app, Hinge. Justin, great to have you back on the show.

MCLEOD: Hey, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Copy LinkHinge’s growth despite a tough market for dating apps

SAFIAN: You were last on the show about a year ago. Hinge has been doing great since then. Revenue up 25%. But I got to say a lot of the other major dating apps are struggling. What’s the trouble in the industry? People not dating as much?

MCLEOD: I think people still want to date. When we talk to daters, we talk to Gen Z, people want connection as much as ever. I think loneliness is as big a problem as it’s ever been. Hinge is continuing to succeed. Revenue’s up 25%, but users are up 20%. We’re the number one dating app across 10 different markets. We just launched in Europe a couple of years ago. We’re the number two dating app there.

SAFIAN: And so the troubles in other places in the industry, they talk about like, oh, there’s a cultural shift, young people dating less, they’re changing their behavior.

MCLEOD: I certainly think that young people have started to turn to other methods, thinking about how do I meet people in real life or how do I meet people in other ways because I think that dating apps haven’t served them particularly well. And that has been my critique, and that’s why I rebooted Hinge back in 2013 and why I tried to create something so different. When an app is really designed for engagement and retention and matches, but not necessarily dates and relationships, then it can make people feel like they’re stuck and they’re putting in a lot of effort and not getting what they want.

Copy LinkHow Hinge is deploying AI

SAFIAN: And the driver behind your momentum, like, over the last year, what’s different than the conversation we might’ve had a year ago?

MCLEOD: So when we were here last year, we were talking about AI and the potential that AI held, and I think over the last year we’ve started to implement features that have had a really big impact on our daters. For example, personalized matching, more tuned to our daters tastes, and we’ve completely overhauled our recommendation system since then, using AI, and we’ve seen double-digit gains in both the effectiveness of our recommendation system as well as the efficiency of it. So people are getting more dates, with less effort.

SAFIAN: But this is all on the backend. The relationship that users have with your app is not necessarily based around AI specifically. I know you’ve spoken out a little bit about AI’s potential to erode connections.

MCLEOD: Yeah. Absolutely. So a lot of nuance to the question. We have implemented more visible generative AI features like prompt feedback for example, which is coaching users on how to craft better profiles. And because a lot of our users will write answers to prompts that can be one word or two words that really don’t give you a sense of who they are, and we can give them feedback and help them basically to write a better prompt. And we’ve seen really great gains from that. We’ve seen that we reduce the incidents of poor quality prompt answers by more than a third, and we tripled the incidence of high quality prompt answers by giving people that coaching. But yeah. When you talk about AI companions and actually starting to displace relationships and having people interact with AI and spending more time on their screens and less time in real life, I think that definitely is a problem and something that you’re right, I have been very outspoken against.

SAFIAN: Yeah. It’s tricky. You’re running this balancing act where you’re using AI. AI may be a way to strengthen the creation of these relationships, but you have to do it or you want to do it in a way that doesn’t displace the human to human experience.

MCLEOD: Precisely. AI is a technology, a very powerful technology, and just like any technology before, we can use it in a principled, thoughtful, beneficial, healthy way, and we can use it in a very unprincipled, unthoughtful, unhealthy way. One of our principles around AI is that it really should stand behind us and not between us. It can help support us so that we have richer interactions with other people on Hinge and move off the app faster, but it certainly shouldn’t be something that we start engaging with as an end in itself just for entertainment or, as I would say, artificial intimacy or artificial connection. I don’t think that an AI chatbot should be your friend or certainly not your boyfriend or girlfriend.

SAFIAN: But could be your dating coach.

MCLEOD: Yes. Just like people read self-help books or coaching books, can we give people nudges in the right direction? I certainly think that we can, we don’t want to put words in their mouths, which is not what we do. Mostly it’s just recognizing that someone’s answer to a prompt could give us more detail. And honestly, usually the response is, “Can you say more about that?”, or, “Tell a little bit more why that’s true,” instead of writing things on their behalf, which could then introduce an idea that this is not authentic.

Copy LinkHinge’s collaboration with psychotherapist Esther Perel

SAFIAN: It does sound a little bit like I’m talking to an AI therapist, like an AI dating therapist. You partnered earlier this year with Esther Perel who’s a renowned psychotherapist to launch Your World prompts. Are there things from her perspective or your perspective at therapy do or don’t apply to what you’re trying to do with folks in their dating lives?

MCLEOD: I’ve had a long-standing relationship with Esther, and I think she’s been skeptical about dating apps, and we’ve had our conversations about how beneficial they are in the right way to implement them, and I think over time we’ve really earned her trust as a partner because we really do approach it in a very thoughtful way that’s very human-centric and very outcome-based. And so I think she trusts us. And especially because the prompts fit so well with her brand. She has her game, “Where Should We Begin?,” where she writes prompts for people to have deeper conversations at places like dinner parties or at the office. I feel like a very natural fit.

SAFIAN: I should say for the listeners: These prompts are not about building your profile, they’re about having conversation with someone to get to know them better.

MCLEOD: Precisely. Essentially that’s what we’re trying to do on Hinge. The purpose of a prompt on Hinge is to prompt you to talk about something so that you can start interaction and a conversation, form a connection, and then move offline. And she had some great ideas for some prompts that she wanted to put on Hinge. They are very much in the spirit of inviting someone into your world. So before we go out, you should listen to X, or when I want to feel more like myself, I go do Y. And that really helps people understand a bit like what am I listening to? Where am I spending my time? And giving people a bit of a fuller picture about who you are.

Copy LinkThe importance of IRL gatherings

SAFIAN: We mentioned in passing earlier the rising conversation about more in-person experiences and young people choosing them or wanting that in some ways over digital interactions. Now you’re a digital service of course, but you’ve also talked about expanding into broader community building and in-person activation. I’m curious how you think about real-world iterations, how important that might be to Hinge’s future, and where you’re going with it.

MCLEOD: Well, we do millions of in-person events every month, and they’re called dates, and that ultimately is the purpose of what we’re doing, and that really is our wheelhouse. Listen, I’m all for people spending more time meeting together in person out in real life. We have a program called One More Hour because we support groups that gather together on a regular basis. We see the decline in time spent together in person, especially among young people. And the requisite increase in anxiety and depression among that group. So the more people are spending time together out in real life and the less time on their devices, the better. And that very much mirrors the ethos of Hinge where we really are trying to get you to spend less time on our app, more time out on dates and relationships, so that you’ll find your person and then ultimately go tell your friends to try Hinge.

SAFIAN: Does the brand of Hinge need to have a community in the real world… I don’t know, interaction for itself aside from my personal date that I might be going on?

MCLEOD: Yeah. I think we are so precious and thoughtful about our brand, and we really try to do things that are really going to have an impact and aren’t just for show. And to be able to do something at scale with quality across tens of millions of users where people can get together in real life on a regular basis and still maintain the control of the experience and the brand is not territory that I exactly know how to approach. There are lots of people out there doing real life events and I applaud it, encourage it, we fund it, we’re all for it, but it’s just not our core competency.

Copy LinkHinge CEO on competing with other dating apps

SAFIAN: When you look at the competition at the other apps… Actually I don’t even know how much you do look at the competition. I know some of it is in-house within your parent company with Match Group, which also owns Match and Tinder and OkCupid and a bunch of others. How much do you pay attention to the competition?

MCLEOD: We really don’t look to the competition. That’s a mistake that I’ve made the first time around, is spending way too much time thinking about the competition and what they were doing. And when I did the reboot of Hinge, I steered the team to just pay attention to our customer and our users who are out there trying to find dates, and there’s so much rich territory when we just try to deeply understand our users and the problems they’re facing. And that is why I think Hinge has become so innovative. And I think a lot of other dating apps are paying attention to us because you can see how they’re all slowly introducing features that make them more and more similar to Hinge, and that’s why it’s all the more important that we don’t look at them. We actually look to our users and to emerging technology, and that’s how we stay at the forefront of innovation.

SAFIAN: How much of building your business from this point is there’s a roadmap that you’re on that you’re implementing versus reacting and staying open and finding whatever’s next? Or do you have like no, no, no, we know where we’re going, we know exactly where we’re going next.

MCLEOD: I think we know the big picture of where we’re going. I think we know high-level that the future and what AI is going to enable is much more personalized matching. We can collect more data that’s more nuanced and use it in a better way to create a much more efficient matching process. And we can help our users put their best foot forward by giving them the right coaching and the right nudges so that they fill out good profiles and use the app well. Those I think are the two main vectors of work that we’re focused on right now, and we have to stay really curious because the market’s changing a lot, technology’s changing a lot, and so how exactly that is going to manifest, we don’t know yet, and I think we can’t know because everything is changing so quickly. So that’s why it’s really important to have just a very nimble team, a very solid research organization and continue to just experiment.

SAFIAN: Justin’s focus on the rapid pace of change echoes what I’m hearing from leaders across all industries. And his efforts to balance where and how to best use AI. Well, that’s everywhere too. So what’s the role of old school tactics in this environment? Things like word of mouth marketing. And how has the critique of DEI impacted Hinge’s hiring practices? We’ll talk about that plus a lightning round on the green and red flags in online dating profiles after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break Hinge’s CEO Justin McLeod talked about how his dating app is managing to grow while competitors stagnate. Now he takes us inside hinges unconventional approach to marketing, its commitment to DEI, and a lightning round on the do’s and don’ts in dating profiles. Let’s jump back in. 

Copy LinkMeasuring word-of-mouth vs traditional marketing efforts

You said that your best marketing is word of mouth where real couples share how they met on Hinge. I have to shout out one of our producers, Masha, who could share a success story of her own. She’s a Hinge user and very happily in a partnership now. How do you measure word of mouth against more traditional marketing and ad campaigns? Are there metrics that you track? How do you know?

MCLEOD: First and foremost, we’re making sure that our users on the app are actually getting out on dates and those dates are good, so that’s the most leading metric, but we can do attribution surveys to understand what percentage of our users show up because they heard about it through an ad versus heard about it through a friend. Still the majority for us is, people are hearing about Hinge through friends and friends having success stories. But on top of that, it’s helpful to be able to tell our story through our marketing and make sure that people understand that Hinge is the app that’s designed to be deleted for people who are really thoughtful and want to find their person. It’s especially useful as we launched new markets. Just a couple of years ago we launched into Europe. We’ve already become the number two, vying for the number one spot in Europe. We just launched Mexico this week. We’re launching Brazil in the fourth quarter. And so marketing obviously plays a huge role as we go into those markets.

SAFIAN: Talking about marketing, I was thinking I keep seeing Hinge’s No Ordinary Love stories in the New York City subway where I am, which in some ways are traditional ads that are about word of mouth. They’re these short accounts of the two different sides of how a Hinge couple meets. But one of the things I noticed, they’re not classic rom-com meet cute tales. There’s usually some snafu or something.

MCLEOD: Yeah.

SAFIAN: What do you hope people take away from the campaign, from that idea?

MCLEOD: I think something that Hinge pushes back against is this idea of stylized love, this idea that there’s one form of love, it’s this rom-com meet cute, perfectly linear story of love, and the fact is that true love stories are messier and have more twists and turns and fits and starts. And we want to bring that to reality. So, the No Ordinary Love where we had writers write the love stories of our Hinge users. We’ll have a campaign coming out very shortly, which is version two of It’s Funny, We Met on Hinge, which is something that I’ve always wanted to do since I started Hinge, which was to redo those cheesy 1990s eHarmony ads where you had couples sitting on the white background telling their cheesy story. And we have incredibly diverse couples telling just their raw stories about how they could have met somewhere, but they ended up meeting on Hinge. Again, just showing you the story of meeting on Hinge is just different for everyone and is unique and is ultimately in a weird way, like a meet cute in its own way.

SAFIAN: A funny trend I’ve read about on Hinge, some women using Hinge to get their furniture built for free by their matches. Does your team endorse this activity?

MCLEOD: It’s funny to see how Hinge shows up in culture. That is not an actual trend, but it’s a funny story that showed up in the New York Post or whatever. I’m sure there are some people who are out there doing it, but it’s not a significant trend, but a funny use of Hinge.

SAFIAN: No planning for a collaboration with TaskRabbit then. That’s not a business future.

MCLEOD: No as far as I know, but that’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll talk to our marketing team.

SAFIAN: When the world feels overwhelming like it has through much of 2025, do users with your app act differently? Do economics and politics and geopolitics impact our dating posture?

MCLEOD: We see some evidence of heightened tension. We see some evidence of people thinking more about politics and what their politics are and what their partner’s politics are. So we see it in that way, but not in a major way.

Copy LinkWhy DEI is a business priority for Hinge

SAFIAN: I know historically Hinge has sought to reflect its user base in employee diversity. And as DEI has come under fire this year, is diversity still something the company wants to uphold? Is the way you talk about it or deal with it adjusted at all?

MCLEOD: It’s an absolute business priority for us because it’s no coincidence that our employee base matches our user base, which matches the broader environment that we’re in, whether you cut it by looking at LGBTQIA, or whether you look at it by race or gender. And getting the diverse employee base preceded us having a diverse user base, and it’s precisely because we had the people in house and that we are actually building with, not for, our market. That again, has been a real key to our success.

SAFIAN: And you’re not worried about being critiqued for not providing enough opportunities to straight white men?

MCLEOD: I think that we provide opportunities to everybody, and we’re going to continue to do that.

Copy LinkWhat’s at stake for Hinge right now?

SAFIAN: What’s at stake for Hinge right now?

MCLEOD: Well, I think, as you said, the little larger narrative right now is we’re facing headwinds, and that there’s a lack of innovation and all that.  And we’re continuing to really tell the story that it’s just not the case at Hinge. That Hinge is continuing to grow significantly, that we’re continuing to resonate with the next generation, that we’re continuing to lead on innovation.

SAFIAN: There is that idea of, would you rather be a growing part of a shrinking or stagnant pie or whatever, a smaller part of a growing pie. Obviously you want to be a growing part of a growing pie.

MCLEOD: Yeah. I’d rather be a growing part of a growing pie personally. And I’m excited to see… We have new leadership at Match Group and I hope that the rest of the category… There’s so much opportunity out there and people are lonelier than ever and I don’t wish ill upon any of my competitors. I think that everyone needs to be doing more and better right now to help people find love and connection.

SAFIAN: And if they’re borrowing some of that and copying some from what Hinge is doing, that’s okay, or that’s to be expected?

MCLEOD: Listen, it wouldn’t be my business strategy personally. I think copying makes sense when you’re the bigger player and the leader, then maybe you want to stop someone, an up-and-comer. But if you’re behind and you’re copying the leader, then that’s going to be a hard game to win.

SAFIAN: But now of course you’re the leader, so does that mean that you’re looking at what others are doing or you haven’t seen much there that you want?

MCLEOD: I’m paying attention less to the major other dating apps and thinking about little startups that are starting to use AI in more innovative ways and I am paying a bit more attention to that.

Copy LinkLightning Round with Justin McLeod

SAFIAN: All right. How do you feel about doing a quick lightning round? Are you game?

MCLEOD: Yeah. Yeah, that’s fine.

SAFIAN: What is the dating app myth that you most wish you could bust once and for all?

MCLEOD: That meeting on an app isn’t romantic because I think everything that comes… How you meet is just such a tiny sliver of everything that comes after when it comes to a relationship, and that’s all the stuff that builds the romance. It’s not necessarily the meet cute. So I wish people weren’t so obsessed with how they meet versus who they meet.

SAFIAN: You need to update the You’ve Got Mail movie to be about Hinge, right? There’s got to be another way to do it. Hollywood is not giving you that seminal film yet, huh?

MCLEOD: Not yet, but I’ll say I feel like it’s becoming more ingrained in culture over time, is the accepted way that people meet. Because the fact is it just is the way most people are meeting. Actually I saw a stat recently that now one out of every 10 engagements in the US is from Hinge specifically.

SAFIAN: That’s pretty exciting. All right. Let me give you another one. One green flag that you would look for on a profile?

MCLEOD: Well, I’ve been married for quite a while, so I don’t think of my green flags as much.

SAFIAN: Maybe other folks who are dating or putting profiles together, what would be something green to look for?

MCLEOD: To look for? I know, I know. I just think that someone who is willing to, who’s putting in the effort and being vulnerable on our profile and gives you a way to actually start a conversation, I think those people are always going to be the more interesting, intentional, thoughtful people.

SAFIAN: All right, and what about the other end of the spectrum? One red flag that should be an instant swipe left.

MCLEOD: I don’t believe, first of all, an instant swipe left. I think everyone should take, everyone’s a human being who deserves a moment of consideration. But again, it’s almost the opposite of that, which is that someone who’s not willing to put themselves out there yet who has one word answer to prompts and photos that don’t really show who they are. It’s just necessarily a red flag, but it’s just hard to engage with someone who’s not doing enough to let someone in enough to start a conversation.

SAFIAN: If you could add one outrageous, just-for-fun feature to Hinge for 24 hours, what would it be? This is like making you look at all the things you said no from your team over the years.

MCLEOD: Right. It’s pretty interesting, and this has been an experiment that other apps have run, which I wish worked better, which is that you remove all the photos from the app and let people just match on people’s prompts and the conversations and you do get a lot more activity and people are a lot more open-minded, a fun experiment to run.

SAFIAN: But it does matter to people what people look like.

MCLEOD: It does ultimately matter what people look like. Yeah, it’s all part of chemistry and what people are looking for, and I’m not here to judge one way or the other that people take looks into account alongside a whole host of other things that matter.

SAFIAN: Well, Justin, great as always to match and chat with you about this stuff. Thanks so much for doing it.

MCLEOD: Thanks a lot, Bob. It’s really good to see you.

SAFIAN: It’s fascinating to dive into the world of online dating with Justin. It underscores more than just our human desire for connection, but how technology now mediates both matters of the heart and strategies for growth. I’m struck by Justin’s conviction that you need a team as diverse as the customers you’re trying to reach. After all, the wonderful thing about online dating is you might meet someone you wouldn’t run into in your usual circles. It’s a way to bring together people from very different backgrounds, and these days we could all use more of that in our love lives and our everyday lives. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.