Hinge CEO Justin McLeod on AI, monetization, and the future of online dating Canada reviews

Today, I’m talking with Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod. Hinge is one of the biggest dating apps in the United States — it’s rivaled only by Tinder, and both are owned by the massive conglomerate Match Group, which has consolidated a huge chunk of the online dating ecosystem.

A fair warning here: I’ve never actually used a dating app — the algorithm that matched my wife and I was the university housing lottery, which put us in adjacent dorm rooms in the fall of 2000. And my wife is now a divorce lawyer, so playing around with these apps seems a little bit risky. So I always end up approaching conversations about dating apps a little bit removed.

I asked Justin what it’s like to be the married CEO of a dating app company who doesn’t use his own product anymore, especially as his own personal romantic journey is very intertwined with Hinge. The entire idea of the company and how it has evolved over the years connects to Justin’s own life and his decision to reconnect with his college girlfriend, just a month before she was supposed to marry someone else. The story is so unbelievable that it was turned into an episode of Netflix’s Modern Love.

You’ll hear Justin explain how that experience connects to the company’s values, culture, and his vision of what Hinge is really for — and how all of that is geared toward helping people find lasting connections. Hinge bills itself as the app that’s “designed to be deleted,” and that, of course, is in deep tension with how mobile apps and services grow users and revenue.

Then there is the AI of it all. Hinge, as part of Match Group, is using AI both internally and within its product, just as Tinder and other competitors are. There’s AI coaching features to help you improve your profile, pick better photos, and even catch an inappropriate message before it gets sent.

But pull the string on all these ideas, and you get to a place where people might be talking to AI all the time, even falling in love with it, or having AI agents dating each other before meeting in person. Justin had some pretty strong feelings about the importance of centering real human connection and encouraging people to put their phones down and go out on dates in the real world. Justin also called the idea of AI companionship “playing with fire” and compares those relationships to junk food.

There’s a lot more in this conversation. We got on the topic of the Trump administration and how seriously Hinge takes the privacy of its users’ data during an unprecedented crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights. We talked briefly about Apple and its App Store restrictions, now that companies like Epic Games and Match Group are free to send people to the web to process in-app purchases. Hinge has some plans that you’ll hear Justin get into near the end. There’s a lot going on in this one; you might even fall in love.

Okay: Hinge CEO Justin McLeod. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Justin McLeod, you’re the founder and CEO of Hinge. Welcome to Decoder.

I’m excited to talk to you. I’ve got to tell you, this is one where I feel like Jane Goodall or a sociologist of some kind. I’m old. I’m married to a divorce lawyer. I can’t even download this app. It’s too risky. I’m watching through the looking glass here. I asked my younger staff for their Hinge feature requests. Don’t worry, I’ve got a million of those.

Great. Excited to hear those.

When TaskRabbit comes on Decoder, I’m like, “I booked a TaskRabbit.” This is very different. When was the last time you actually used Hinge as a user?

What’s that like? What’s it like trying to run this team? Is it all just data driven for you, because there’s a real element of dogfooding here.

Yes, definitely. We have a lot of single people on our team at Hinge, so there’s a lot of internal dogfooding for sure, and a lot of opinions. I think that the relationship is different. So, I started the company in 2011, and I was single at the time, and I was single for the first four years of Hinge, and then, long story: I got back together with my college girlfriend, and we’ve been together for the last 10 years, married with kids and all.

Did you get back together on Hinge?

We were together. I tried to get her back. She said no. I started Hinge in response to that. And then someone whom I met on Hinge inspired me to go back. She was about to get married to someone else. She was living in Switzerland. I flew over a month before the wedding. She called off her wedding and moved back to New York, which led to the whole reboot of Hinge. The whole story is very interconnected.

I feel like I should throw out my questions. We should just do an episode of Call Her Daddy or something like that. That sounds very complicated.

Yeah, it’s been a ride. An incredible ride, and very intertwined with Hinge. But back to your question, I think that we can overweight our own personal experience a bit, especially as the CEO of the company. What I found over time is that people have a wide array of very diverse experiences, and to some extent, I think it actually helps that I’m not in there overweighting my own niche feature requests that would matter to me but not to the whole population. So the app has evolved. It’s more about helping others than it is about helping myself, which was probably the original idea of Hinge.

How do you think about the connection between what the data is telling you, the data about what Gen Z daters are doing versus millennial daters, which is the cohort you started with, versus the very emotional experiences people have on this platform, which are out of your control? Eventually, you’ve got to take the meat sack to the bar and look at the other person and not fuck it up, right? Hinge can’t solve that problem, but that’s the heart of the whole enterprise. How do you connect those two in your brain?

This is a very complex, nuanced industry. I think sometimes people look at their Hinge feed and they’re like, “Why doesn’t this understand my taste as well as my TikTok feed does?” People don’t quite understand that people aren’t products; they’re not infinite copies of everyone.They don’t always behave the same. Your videos on TikTok don’t have to like you back. There’s just a lot of nuance to getting this right.

And you’re right. A fair amount of this comes down to the people on the platform. So what we’re trying to do is to [not only] build a great product but also an environment and a community where people are encouraged to be intentional and authentic, and attract users who are looking to find their person. So that’s definitely the art and the nuance of trying to build a dating app like ours.

One of my big criticisms of social media apps right now in 2025 is they’ve all become marketing platforms in some way. At the end of the rainbow, Mr. Beast is trying to sell you an energy bar. That’s what they’re for. And smaller creators are trying to get their first-brand deals or whatever. But there’s a real organization around just marketing. And the platforms try to encourage people to create content for a whole number of reasons, but their reason for being is advertising spend, and then a lot of the content creation on the platform happens for marketing purposes. You can just see how it goes.

Hinge and other dating apps are different. You’re trying to incentivize content creation. You’re trying to get people to talk about themselves, to talk to each other. The goal is to market yourself. How do you divorce that from the actual thing you’re trying to do, which is to have people fall in love and get into stable relationships?

Well, it’s very much about what you’re optimizing for. And you’re right; social media is ultimately optimizing for engagement, retention, and time in app. That is the lifeblood of any of these companies. How long can they keep you sucked in? That is their objective, and so everything is built around that. And we’ve seen what the consequences of that are. They’re pretty dire.

I think Hinge is almost the polar opposite of that. We’re trying to get you to spend less time on your phone and more time out in real life on dates. It’s interesting. When I started Hinge back in 2011, as venture capitalists looked at our business they asked those questions around engagement and retention. They were looking at social media, and they’re like, “What’s your daily over monthly? How much time are people spending in the app? How many sessions per day?” We were optimizing for those things, because that’s what VCs were asking about. That’s how we were raising money.

Then Hinge did a pretty big pivot in 2015, when I let go of half the company and we rebooted from scratch, because we felt as if we’d really lost our way. We’d become more of a piece of entertainment that was just about getting people more matches and more activity, and getting them back every day. We’d lost sight of what we were trying to do, which was to have people come to us to find a relationship. We weren’t really optimized around that anymore.

When we did that pivot in 2015, the biggest change we made was to stop focusing on the competition. We started focusing on the customer, and we made our North Star metric actual great dates. We introduced the “We Met” survey, where we asked people we suspected had gone on a date if they did in fact go on that date and whether it was good. Everything became oriented toward optimizing for that. That ended up creating a very, very different experience.

That actually became the primary differentiator of Hinge. A lot of the other apps in the industry were based on engagement and retention and just getting people back; they were more like entertainment platforms. Hinge became a utility. We started growing through word of mouth, and today we’re the fastest-growing, and in fact the only growing, major dating app. We grew 40 percent last year, while other dating apps are shrinking, because we built a very sustainable business model that delivers on value. The lifeblood of our company is getting more users out on dates, so they tell their friends and then their friends come and join Hinge.

The interesting thing about that business model is it’s in the tagline of the company. I always laugh when you all put out a press release, because it says, “Hinge, the app designed to be deleted,” and then a little trademark logo follows every time it’s mentioned, which is just very funny. I appreciate that you have to do it, but it just makes me laugh every time. That means you’re trying to graduate users. You’re a utility, you pay until you’re done, and then you’re out.

It means you constantly have to find new users. You basically have a different churn problem. How do you think about that life cycle?

We think about it in terms of good churn. We want people turning off the app for the right reason. We don’t want people turning off the app because they gave up too early or because they don’t like Hinge. We want people turning off the app because they found someone, ideally on Hinge.

What does it mean to find somebody on Hinge? Like you’re married? You’ve gone on three dates?

It’s different for different people. When we did the reboot, our core market was definitely 25- to 35-year-olds, and very much people who were, I would say, looking to find their person and get off the app. Now our fastest-growing segment has been 18- to 25-year-olds, and they’re at a different phase in their lives. It was pretty interesting. When we saw that segment starting to grow, it came as almost a surprise to us. I think what attracted these younger daters wasn’t so much a focus on finding a long-term relationship, or a marriage partner today; it was very much about the authenticity and vulnerability and intimacy they found on Hinge, and a moving away from platforms that felt very gamified and flat to something that felt very human and intentional and authentic.

So we think about our daters as having a journey mindset. They’re headed in a direction, they’re on a journey of self-exploration. They don’t want to waste their time on bad dates, but they aren’t necessarily looking for their marriage partner today, and that’s totally fine. We’re just looking to help people get off the app and out on great dates, and form intimate connections in real life.

But there’s a difference between getting off the app and going on great dates, and then deleting the entire thing, right?

There’s one exit ramp that is very different from another exit ramp. Not to keep comparing it to social media, but again, I feel as if I’m just viewing this from the outside, so it’s all metaphors for me. Mark Zuckerberg is terrified that young audiences will just abandon his core app, or whatever the core social media dynamic is at the time. This is why he bought Instagram. You can read his emails over the course of these trials. He’s like, “There’s another mechanic. I need to buy it before they overtake us.”

Zuckerberg keeps going down the line, whether that’s Stories or Reels or whatever the next thing is. You have the same problem, only you don’t get to keep the old users on the old mechanic. You don’t get to run Facebook and buy Instagram. How do you think about reinventing the app for that new, younger cohort that has different dynamics on the internet?

We always stay in tune with where the culture’s going. I think it’s just imperative, because, you’re right, we can’t rely on only a legacy user base. So we have to stay on top of culture and where it’s going, and then continually evolve the app accordingly. Right now, a big focus is on AI, and how we can increase the effectiveness of the app in a couple of different dimensions.

We’re actually finding, for example, the extent to which coaching has become really, really important right now. Especially during the pandemic, we saw social skills atrophy. People felt less comfortable meeting up with others in real life and interacting. So we’re helping people create their profiles, write their prompts, things like that. Another big thing that came out during the pandemic was more of a focus on voice, and adding voice prompts, which I think is, again, an example of our moving where the culture goes. So we’re always making these kinds of tweaks to continually keep the app fresh.

Do you feel the same existential pressure? There’s this idea that some cohort of people will delete the app — the old millennials will be married or tired or whatever it is they’re going to do, and you’ve got to go get a bunch of new Gen Z users or Gen Alpha users, which is frankly terrifying. How do you think about, “Okay, we’ve got to break the old model, because it’s existential for us if we don’t capture the younger user,” or is it more of a gradation?

If you look at the relatively brief history of this industry starting in the ‘90s, there’s only been one major disruption moment, which was around 2012. So you had the birth of the industry in the late ‘90s, where you had Match and eHarmony come on the scene, and then they dominated from 1996 to about 2014. It was actually a much smaller niche industry at the time. The users were older, people who felt as if they’d really struggled to find someone in real life.

Then you had the mobile dating apps come on because of a few different technologies that started to come online all together — one was mobile, one was the cultural change of everyone having a social media account. Another was data-processing power and moving away from the world of searching for people to a world of a feed of relevant people, one after another. That created a pretty big paradigm shift, where suddenly technology enabled an entirely new type of experience that it was hard for the old incumbents to mirror. They tried to pivot to mobile, but they couldn’t unseat themselves from their way of thinking about the world. It resembles a very classic disruption problem.

I think the next opportunity for that kind of disruption is going to be a big technology shift. We haven’t seen that up until very recently. Like with VR, AR, and other technologies like that, I just don’t see those working until they’re deeply adopted by 70 percent to 80 percent of the population, and that’s when I think it will really become something that people start using for dating. AI I think is a very different story, and it’s unclear at this point whether it becomes a disruptive force for the current players or whether it becomes more of an evolution. Obviously, Hinge has a tremendous amount of data we can use to train AI models. We’re seeing huge gains in our ability to match people up more thoughtfully given the tools, and at the same time we could introduce very new paradigms for dating.

I want to talk about AI with you, but you mentioned Match, so I think this is a good time to get to the Decoder questions. You’re part of Match Group. You sold to Match Group, and now Match Group owns all of the dating apps minus one, which is a little contentious. It doesn’t own Bumble. There’s a lawsuit. We can set that aside. What’s it like being part of Match Group? When you sold your company, what was that decision like for you?

Honestly, at the time we were in a tough position as a company. I’d done the reboot, and we were about a year into that reboot experience, and we had not really cracked the code yet. There were green shoots there that made me believe and made, I would say, the trained eye believe that there was really something there. But VCs just saw that we were popular, and then we tore down our business, and we restarted, and we started to rebuild again. There wasn’t a lot of juice there.

So we went with a strategy of recognizing the value of what we were seeing, including massive increases in effectiveness, women coming to the platform in a much higher proportion than on other dating apps. So that was very interesting to Match. And so we received a strategic investment from the company in 2017, and that gave it a path to buy the rest of the company, which it did at the end of 2018.

What’s that structure like inside of Match Group now?

It’s evolving. There’s a brand-new CEO, Spencer Rascoff, who just started, and I think he’s taking a fresh look at some of that. But up until recently, and still today, the company operates pretty independently. We’re in New York. We pretty much have our own space. We have our own product teams, our own engineering teams, our own marketing teams that operate very independently. We share learnings across the platform. We use shared services like accounting and legal and things like that. But for the most part, the company has its own independent culture, its own independent mission, product road maps, marketing strategies, all of that.

You said you shared some central services, like accounting and finance. Is there any product or data that you’re sharing?

We certainly share learnings. Especially on things that we don’t really want to compete on, such as safety or monetization or things like that. So there’s certainly that, and there’s sharing for safety purposes. Those are the main ways we share.

So if you’re a young and carefree single on Tinder, and you graduate to Hinge, you don’t get to just bring your data along for the ride?

Again, I’m just looking from the outside. Tinder is interesting. The CEO of Tinder just stepped down. Your new CEO at Match, Spencer, stepped in to run Tinder for a minute. In any normal circumstance, you would be on the attack. If Tinder wasn’t part of the same company as you, this would be a moment to say, “Okay, there’s some strategic weakness over there. We’re going to go get them. We’re going to put the screws on.” Are you allowed to do that inside Match Group?

So first of all, I’ll just say that we don’t really think too much about Tinder as Hinge’s competition. We think about Tinder in a very different psychographic mindset. You come to Hinge because you want to really take your time, be intentional, be thoughtful, find your person. Tinder has a much more casual, younger, “anything can happen” mentality. And so that was a very intentional portfolio strategy decision that Match made back when it acquired us. So no, we don’t think about it like that.

That’s why I asked about the data and the lifecycle question. There’s a time in your life where you might use Tinder, there’s a time in your life where you might use Hinge. It seems from the overall umbrella company perspective, you want to move that user around your family of apps, but it doesn’t seem as if that’s actually happening at the top level.

Yes. From the outside that would make sense. It’s a bit nuanced, because there are very different brand reputations. We like to think of Hinge pretty independently, and I think so do our users.

So there’s no pop-up on Tinder that’s like, “Maybe, it’s time to cool it and download Hinge”?

[Laughs] Okay, feature request for you. What’s your org chart like? How is Hinge structured?

That’s also been evolving over time, and we’re still a relatively small company. We have about 350 employees. If I think about the evolution of Hinge growing from one person to the first 100 to 150 people, originally, it was very centrally run. There was tight coordination. A lot of direction came directly from me and my executive team. Then as we started to grow beyond 100 people, I would say a lot of the technology was relatively stable. Like with social, mobile, big data, the question became, “How do we keep optimizing and iterating around this?”

We became a pretty decentralized organization, where we had principles around pushing decision-making down to the lowest levels possible, keeping it really on the front lines. We had pretty independent cross-functional product teams that would work on their individual little missions or surfaces. We oscillated back and forth between that.

People felt they had a lot of autonomy. That was the main ethos of the company. And then I think with AI over the last couple of years, we felt like, “Whoa, we really need to make a pretty big shift.” Like I said, the risk of disruption is high, with very big opportunities to shift the product experience in a new direction. It now requires pulling decision-making back in toward the center a bit, and giving a much clearer strategic direction to the team, so that we’re all working in concert toward one thing. Because the whole app really has to move together. Different parts of the app have to talk to each other in ways that when we weren’t going through much change, wasn’t as essential. That said, we still have very highly cross-functional product teams where product managers sit with a dedicated designer, researcher, data scientist, and tech lead to attack very mission-oriented problems.

You mentioned “surfaces” and “missions.” Are those expressed as just the tabs at the bottom of the app? Is that how they’re broken down, or are they actual user journey missions?

That’s what I mean — surfaces versus missions. I think we’ve gone in different directions. There’s never really a clear line of one versus the other. Do you own the Discover tab, where users just discover new people, or is your job to help people find the right person? In that case, you have to think more cohesively about operating across different surfaces or parts of the app. Now we think about our teams operating less as individual surface units and more as part of a cohesive dating-outcomes team, where people feel a bit more flexible moving around to different surfaces.

How do you think about assigning product managers to those teams? Because PMs, at least in my experience, are like, “I own this square, and I will mess with this square to make this number go up as much as I can.” But “I can mess with all the squares” is really hard, right?

Yes, that’s why we have strong directors at the VP level who oversee an overall mission the way that a head of dating outcomes or a head of growth, who’s coordinating a set of product managers, would. And again, we ask our PMs. Their primary identity is as a dating outcomes PM, not as a discover PM, or a profile PM, or something like that. And while day to day most of their work may focus on the profile and identity work, they see themselves as very much operating as part of this team.

That feels like something you evolved to. You’re a relatively young founder. I think you founded the company right out of Harvard Business School. How has your decision-making framework evolved? How do you make decisions?

That’s also hugely evolved. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned through doing it all the wrong ways first and then eventually getting to the right way. When you’re a founder and you have a small team of 10, 20, or 30 people, you’re just making decisions by the seat of your pants. What feels good? What feels right? You’re just using your own gut.

As we started to get toward 100 people or so, what I noticed was I would be making different decisions on different days that weren’t always consistent. They were based on my mood that day or whatever data was in front of me or what I had last read or whatever. I was just finding I was getting pretty inconsistent. So what I started trying to do was to write down my whole management algorithm. I started putting it in a Google Doc, like “Here’s how I make decisions, here’s what I believe is true.” I started publishing that to the whole company, so everyone could just read it. We would be just very transparent about how we made decisions.

It was around the time that I think I read Ray Dalio’s book Principles, and got super dialed in on how we make decisions. What are our principles, and what do we believe is true? Then I opened it up so everyone could comment on it. We would have long debates in the comment margins of a Google Doc to consider everything from our product-strategy principles to whether Hinge should have a dress code. Literally anything. It was all just there so that everyone could debate it.

We had hundreds of principles, and then as the company got even bigger and we got to 300 or 400 people, it was very hard. One, you just can’t have these endless debates in Google Docs anymore. Also, the principles started to stabilize. There wasn’t as much debate and churn anymore, and then it actually became an exercise in distilling down the most essential things to communicate about our culture.

I worked a couple of years ago to write an internal book called How We Do Things, which distilled it all down to four or five principles. For example, what are the most fundamental things to understand about how we make decisions here? And then individual teams and individual projects would then write their own principles that were more specific to what they were doing at any given time.

One of our meta principles now is “decide with principles,” meaning that we don’t want decisions getting made based on some random person’s opinion that if tomorrow this person leaves the company and we hire someone else, they’re going to come in with a completely different set of ideas about how to do something. We really try to define our principles first, agree on those principles, and then see how our work maps to them. I’m happy to talk about what the other three principles are if you want, but that’s the framework we use to make decisions now.

Yeah, talk about them a little bit. There’s a beautiful website, we’ll link to it. It has storytelling, it’s well done. But tell people what the other three principles are.

So the next one is “love the problem.” What I would notice is we would get an inclination around a user problem, which maybe was not even validated 100 percent. Then we’d start getting feature ideas, and we’d get very attached to a feature, and sometimes the feature would drift and not even be solving the original problem. What I found was, if you want to build breakthrough innovative product features and products, you have to spend extra time with the problem to really understand the why behind the why behind the why of of it. You need to ask, “What’s really going on here? Can we really get deep into our users, into the data, into our users’ experiences?” You have to go to that level to get insight that just isn’t available on the surface, and then stay really committed to that problem. And that’s what, again, allows for innovation.

I think for a lot of Silicon Valley, the strategy is just to throw feature ideas against a wall and see what sticks: “Let’s see if this works. Oh, it doesn’t work, throw that out, let’s try something else.” When you have a lot of deep conviction around a user problem, and you really know you want to solve it, then you have the resilience to try and try again to solve that problem, even if your first or second iteration doesn’t make it. So one of the most foundational of our principles is, “love the problem.” Fall in love with the problem, don’t fall in love with the solution, as you must be willing to give up the solution at any given time if it’s not solving the core problem that you’re trying to solve. So that is “love the problem.”

Next is “keep it simple,” meaning that I think the best solutions are always the most elegant solutions. Overall, we want to keep the product very simplified and minimal. Our colors are black and white. If you look at the Hinge product today, it’s very clean, it’s very simple. We’re always stripping away features that don’t make sense and just recognizing that there’s complexity.

There’s a cost to complexity every time you add a feature. So even if you add a feature, if it’s only marginally beneficial, the cost of the complexity and maintaining that feature versus the marginal benefit it adds will end up gunking up the app over time and slowing you down over time. That’s a hard conversation to have with product managers, because they’ll work for months on a feature and they’ll ship it and say, “Yeah, it didn’t harm the user base, we like it, and it even moved this metric over here by 2 percent.” And you’re like, “Well, the cost of complexity is high, and so we need to focus on things that are actually going to have a major impact.”

Are you all the way two features out for every feature in? Do you think about it that way? I know some founders do.

I haven’t heard that before. I don’t necessarily think that way. But I do believe in constantly reevaluating what’s in the app, asking what needs to stay, and having a high bar for building a new feature. So does it actually accomplish what we need it to accomplish, and is the complexity worth the cost? So that’s the third one now.

The fourth, the last one, is “tend to trust.” I just find that trust is the lifeblood of an organization. You have to do a lot of work to proactively cultivate and tend to trust by creating strong interpersonal relationships, by creating lots of opportunities for transparency at the organization. We have always been very, very transparent about where the organization is headed. So much so that we had to make all Hinge employees Match Group insiders so they couldn’t trade Match Group stock except during trading windows, because we would be so transparent about where we were, what our financial position was.

Everyone should know that all the way down to any position at the company. I think the trust that you create both interpersonally and from the leadership on down to the rest of the organization is absolutely essential. It just saves you a lot of headaches when it comes to internal politics and all those types of things.

Let’s put this into practice. You obviously made a big decision to refocus on AI. How did that come about? Did you wake up one day and say, “Oh boy, it’s happening”? Was it that Match Group put out a press release with OpenAI saying, “We’re going to work together”? Did you read that and say, “I got to figure this out”? How did this come about?

Certainly the release of whatever version of ChatGPT that sent shockwaves through the world was a pretty big wake-up call. Obviously, we’d already been using machine learning and things like that in the interest of safety, and in our algorithms, our recommendation algorithms. But I think the shot across the bow that came from the release of ChatGPT [with GPT-3.5] was what really woke us up to the potential capabilities here and to realizing that this could be a major disruptive force in a way that we hadn’t really seen since we started Hinge.

It took a bit for us to get our strategy clear about what our thesis was on how this was going to affect matching and dating in the future. It wasn’t immediately apparent, but I think we have a pretty clear thesis now, and we’ve started to organize the company around that thesis.

That there’s two main vectors that AI is going to impact: dating and matchmaking. I think the big story is AI is going to move Hinge much closer to the experience of working with a personalized matchmaking service, and away from the experience of feeling that you are joining a social platform on your own as you try to find your person.

So what does that mean? Two big pieces. One is personalized matching, and the other is effective coaching. On the personalized matching front, we should be able to move much further beyond the world we are in today, which is our users speaking to us in essentially Morse code as they try to communicate to us what they like and what they don’t like.

The idea is that they would be able to speak much more directly to us with “here’s what I’m looking for, here are my values, here’s my personality, here are my interests.” It means Hinge being able to listen to them and hear their preferences, and even integrate things like relationship science into the app to better understand what types of people are compatible and what types of people are not long-term compatible, and introduce them to a much more curated, higher-quality, less-quantity list of people, where they have much more trust that if you’re introducing them to this person, this is probably someone they want to go out with.

We’ve already seen big gains, by the way, just by using the power of LLMs to drive more of our recommendation systems using the data we already have. But we released a new algorithm a couple of months ago that increased matches and dates by like 15 percent, and that’s just using the same data. But now we can start to use much more of that unstructured, nuanced data, with people talking to us in their own voice about who they are and what they want, which we can use very effectively.

So that’s the whole personalized matching front. Then there’s the effective coaching front. A lot of our users struggle to get out on that first date, and they often don’t know why. I have friends who are incredible people, and they’ll ask me to take a look at their Hinge profile. I’m flabbergasted that this is their attempt at putting themselves out there.

So we’re starting with pretty basic things. Hinge has these prompts, which are short questions designed to get you into a conversation, and you put them on your profile. A lot of people write great responses to prompts, but a lot of people write not-so-great responses, often just one-word answers that just don’t work. We found it’s just incredibly effective to have trained an AI model on good-prompt responses and give people feedback. And it’s mostly like, “Can you say more about that?”

[Laughs] Don’t just put “no.”

Yeah, and to be a little bit more specific and tell a little bit of the story. Good answers invite another question back, or get a conversation going. So we can give people those nudges so they write good prompts, so that they choose good photos. We have a team called Hinge Labs, which is always looking at why some people succeed, and why some people don’t on the app.

Some of it is, again, simply building product features that help solve those problems, but another part of it is just giving guidance and notes about how they can be using the product better. We have traditionally published those in date reports, and we publish them in the press and we place them in the help center. But for the most part people just don’t read them. But the idea that we can take this body of knowledge we have about how to succeed on Hinge, and then look at how our users are using Hinge, and then deliver the right piece of advice at the right time to the right user, I think is going to be pretty transformative for a lot of people.

There’s a pretty fine line between that and what I see lots of people already doing all day long, which is just talking to ChatGPT, just hanging out. We had Eugenia Kuyda, the CEO of Replika, on the show, and she said, essentially, “My plan is people are going to date AI bots that will coach them up into being fully formed people, then we’ll release them into the dating pool, and they will have confidence and self-assuredness.”

Again, there’s a fine line between prompting someone and coaching them inside Hinge, and we’re coaching them in a different way within a more self-contained ecosystem. How do you think about that? Would you launch a full-on virtual girlfriend inside Hinge?

Certainly not. I have lots of thoughts about this. I think there’s actually quite a clear line between providing a tool that helps people do something or get better at something, and the line where it becomes this thing that is trying to become your friend, trying to mimic emotions, and trying to create an emotional connection with you. That I think is really playing with fire.

I think we are already in a crisis of loneliness, and a loneliness epidemic. It’s a complex issue, and it’s baked into our culture, and it goes back to before the internet. But just since 2000, over the past 20 years, the amount of time that people spend together in real life with their friends has dropped by 70 percent for young people. And it’s been almost completely displaced by the time spent staring at screens. As a result, we’ve seen massive increases in mental health issues, and people’s loneliness, anxiety, and depression.

I think Mark Zuckerberg was just quoted about this, that most people don’t have enough friends. But he said we’re going to give them AI chatbots. That he believes that AI chatbots can become your friends. I think that’s honestly an extraordinarily reductive view of what a friendship is, that it’s someone there to say all the right things to you at the right moment

The most rewarding parts of being in a friendship are being able to be there for someone else, to risk and be vulnerable, to share experiences with other conscious entities. So I think that while it will feel good in the moment, like junk food basically, to have an experience with someone who says all the right things and is available at the right time, it will ultimately, just like junk food, make people feel less healthy and mo re drained over time. It will displace the human relationships that people should be cultivating out in the real world.

How do you compete with that? That is the other thing that is happening. It is happening. Whether it’s good or bad. Hinge is offering a harder path. So you say, “We’ve got to get people out on dates.” I honestly wonder about that, based on the younger folks I know who sometimes say, “I just don’t want to leave the house. I would rather just talk to this computer. I have too much social pressure just leaving the house in this way.” That’s what Hinge is promising to do. How do you compete with that? Do you take it head on? Are you marketing that directly?

I’m starting to think very much about taking it head on. We want to continue at Hinge to champion human relationships, real human-to-human-in-real-life relationships, because I think they are an essential part of the human experience, and they’re essential to our mental health. It’s not just because I run a dating app and, obviously, it’s important that people continue to meet. It really is a deep, personal mission of mine, and I think it’s absolutely critical that someone is out there championing this. Because it’s always easier to race to the bottom of the brain stem and offer people junk products that maybe sell in the moment but leave them worse off. That’s the entire model that we’ve seen from what happened with social media. I think AI chatbots could frankly be much more dangerous in that respect.

So what we can do is to become more and more effective and support people more and more, and make it as easy as possible to do the harder and riskier thing, which is to go out and form real relationships with real people. They can let you down and might not always be there for you, but it is ultimately a much more nourishing and enriching experience for people. We can also champion and raise awareness as much as we can. That’s another reason why I’m here today talking with you, because I think it’s important to put out the counter perspective, that we don’t just reflexively believe that AI chatbots can be your friend, without thinking too deeply about what that really implies and what that really means.

We keep going back to junk food, but people had to start waking up to the fact that this was harmful. We had to do a lot of campaigns to educate people that drinking Coca-Cola and eating fast food was detrimental to their health over the long term. And then as people became more aware of that, a whole personal wellness industry started to grow, and now that’s a huge industry, and people spend a lot of time focusing on their diet and nutrition and mental health, and all these other things. I think similarly, social wellness needs to become a category like that. It’s thinking about not just how do I get this junk social experience of social media where I get fed outraged news and celebrity gossip and all that stuff, but how do I start building a sense of social wellness, where I can create an enriching, intimate connection with important people in my life.

The connection between the wellness industry and the rise of social media is a whole other podcast, and maybe a PhD thesis, too. There’s a whole lot there to unpack. I take your point though, that maybe using our phones in healthier ways is the future. It will make us better, and that will be a reaction to the negativity we see from phones today.

Literally as we speak, I’m sure Elon Musk and Donald Trump are continuing to tweet at each other in an unhealthy way for maybe the future of the entire planet. But you’ve got to use AI today. You have prompt feedback running in the app today. You’re helping people pick better photos. The flip side of that is that they might just use AI to generate the content. Can you detect it if your prompt feedback says, “Hey, that’s not a good answer,” and someone runs away to Gemini or ChatGPT and comes up with a better answer that doesn’t actually reflect them?

I think about this like the extreme photo filters, which used to be popular on Instagram back in the day. Ultimately, you are going to have to go meet up with this person on a real date, and so you want to come across as best as you can, because, obviously, you’re not going to bring ChatGPT on your date with you.

I’m worried about this. I want to say that I’m worried about this.

So it’s not a winning strategy. That said, do people ask for advice and little tweaks? They already do it today. They ask their friends, “How should I respond to this text message?” So in some sense, I don’t see it that differently, because you will have to meet up with this person eventually and show up as the real you.

Would you add that feedback inside Hinge? Hinge obviously has messaging features. Are you going to add a little coach into the messaging feature to say, “Hey, don’t be a dick”?

That already exists. It’s called “Are You Sure?” That’s AI-driven to make sure people don’t send inappropriate messages. But yeah, again, the right nudge at the right time, because I think if we build the right tools within Hinge that are appropriate for dating, people will then use it and be less likely to run out to ChatGPT and use [the feedback] in ways that are probably less appropriate.

Nudging people to say, “Hey, you guys have been chatting for a bit. Did you know that most people, after they exchange this many messages, usually just go on and move to a date?” Or, “Hey, it seems like the conversation has died. Here’s something interesting that you may not have noticed on their profile that you can ask about.” Little things like that, certainly.

One of the interesting dynamics here is you’ll add more and more AI to the digital experience people have with each other to make them perform better or act better or be more interesting, whatever it is. And then they’ll go on a date, and then they might leave your platform.

They might switch to iMessage or call each other on the phone. I don’t think Gen Z is calling each other. They’ll do something else. They’ll go on Discord. How do you bring that experience along for the ride to say, “We’re going to continue to stay here and help mediate and coach you through this relationship”?

We’re not there yet. We still have a lot of work to do just to get people out on the first date. And at the same time, I do think there’s actually a lot of opportunity to help coach people through that experience. How to show up on a first date. What to talk about on a first date. How to build intimacy over time, how to ask about the right things to determine compatibility. So I think there are definitely opportunities for that. It’s not on the 2025 road map, but it’s certainly something I’m thinking about.

Do you worry that people are going to just upload full AI avatars on Hinge and catfish each other to death?

We have a very robust trust and safety team that is thinking two to three steps ahead about how to mitigate things like that.

I have spent too much time talking about watermarks in AI and SynthID, and there’s lots of episodes of the show that are deep in the AI watermarks game, and it has effectively come to nothing so far. There’s just a lot of problems there. Are you able to say, “Okay, we can detect a full AI photo here”?

There’s so many signals when it comes to creating a dating profile from the phone number you use and the email you use and your IP address, all those things like that, that we have a very multifaceted way of determining the authenticity of profiles. I’ll say that.

Running these models is costly. There’s lots and lots of different kinds of models you can run at different costs. Are you using lots of models? Are you sending everything to GPT-4? How does this work for you?

We use different models for different things. Sometimes we build them completely internally. As you said, it’s public that we have a relationship with OpenAI. So we use different things and are always balancing cost and performance against our ability to build in-house versus not.

Do you see that trend shifting over time? I’m very curious about what the frontier models can do versus what the cheaper, more efficient models can do. Have you seen that shift over time as you’ve started to deploy these tools?

For one, we’ve seen the cost of the frontier models just decline precipitously, which is pretty interesting to watch. But I’ll say that there are models, even the prompt feedback model, that are very, very specific and discrete, and that we can mostly build internally to understand.

Do you run that in your cloud and your data center? Or are you running that on people’s phones?

I don’t actually know. I think that’s in the cloud. I’m almost positive that one is in the cloud.

The reason I’m asking is that to do any of this well, you need more and more data from people, and you’re asking them to generate more and more data. For instance, “That’s not a good answer; tell me more about yourself,” is more data and it’s data that you’re now storing. In particular, it’s data about gender, sexuality, and dating preferences — that’s stuff the government suddenly has a very unusual and somewhat threatening interest in.

Are you worried about that? That the Trump administration or some future administration would show up and say, “Tell me all of the transgender people on your platform”?

Obviously, we have very, very sensitive data that we have very, very clear protections around. And we haven’t seen anything like that.

So you haven’t had any of those incoming requests yet?

The Trump administration has also said it’s going to start scanning social media profiles for references to Palestine, and for comments about Trump himself. When you talk about matching people and values, those things come up. Has there been any request for Hinge profiles from the Department of Homeland Security or ICE or any of these other parts of the Trump administration that are doing this social media scanning?

The reason I’m asking is the amount of data you might collect is very, very personal. It seems like a rich target. Have you thought about the planning for how big of a target this might become as you prompt people to input more and more data with AI?

Certainly. I think we’ll have to handle those things as they come. We’re obviously in a very uncertain time right now, but I will say that we are primarily a platform about creating intimate one-to-one connections where people should be able to express themselves in the way they see fit, and describe themselves and their own sexuality and their own gender in the way they need to do. That will inevitably touch on people’s very private lives.

I view that as absolutely sacred and fundamental to our mission, and people feeling safe to express themselves is absolutely critical. So those would be our very highest priorities, and I imagine not top priority for social media, where people are blasting posts to thousands, or millions, of people. Our platform is not about one-to-many posting and conversation. It’s about intimate one-to-one connection and one-to-one conversations.

I think I would warn you that having a data pool of that kind might make you a target. I’m curious how that plays out over time, particularly in this administration. There’s some platform dynamics here as well, like iOS and Android exist. They are platforms. They’re also themselves rich targets for the government.

Overall, there’s a push for the platforms to do age verification themselves. There’s laws now in certain states, and in other countries, that the Apples and the Googles of the world have pushed back against in various ways. Do you think they need to do it? Do you think that it’s at the iOS and Android level that you need to do the age verification? Because this is a core component of bringing people onto Hinge. It’s not for children.

It’s certainly not. We’re 18-plus and we have our own age verification methods. But yeah, we have been pushing for these platforms to do age verification themselves because they have even more robust ways to do it.

The arguments in response — when you listen to Apple and Google push back against these laws — is that it would be too hard. It would create a censorship regime, that the app vendors need to be liable for this. Have you seen any movement in that dynamic? I think at the highest level, this is one of the big dynamics of how we might regulate platforms in the future.

I am staying much closer to product development and where we’re going with AI right now than I am to that.

Your monetization method is obviously a premium version of Hinge. I think one tier is $55 a month. There’s another tier that’s $45 a month. The big news in the platform world is that Apple is no longer allowed to prevent alternative payment systems. Match Group, in particular, has been leading this fight. It’s in all the press releases. Has that changed the dynamics of Hinge for you?

I don’t know if it changes the dynamics, but it’s certainly going to give us more flexibility in giving users options to be able to pay in different ways. I think that’s good for everybody for sure.

Have you launched an alternative payment service yet?

Certainly by the end of the year.

Is that going to be a Match Group payment service or a Hinge payment service? How do you think about that?

These are things that we’re figuring out, but most likely Hinge.

That would return somewhere on the order of 15 percent to 30 percent depending on how the billing works for you at your scale and recurring subscriptions and all that. Is that just going to be pure margin? You’re just going to get the money back?

Well, I think it changes the equation on many fronts. It allows us to invest more in the company. It changes how we would price, so no, I think it could result in lower prices. It could result in more investment in the company, or it could result in more margin. It’s probably some combination of all three of those.

Match Group has been doing this fight for a long time, and you’re already describing how you might change pricing or the lifetime value of customers. Fortnite maker Epic Games fought this fight for five years. At the very end, the judge says, “I’m very mad at you, Apple. You can’t do this anymore.” Did you immediately start making plans that day or were you like, “This is going to get appealed, we have to wait”?

There’s been back and forth and appeals and stays and things like that. I think just a couple of days ago, the appeal was denied. So I think that made it pretty real.

Just to put the decision-making into practice, did you say that day we need an alternative payment system?

Certainly the day that the original ruling came out, we started to plan.

What does that planning look like? Is it, “I’m going to call Stripe”? Put us in your shoes. That happens. Someone comes to you and you say, “Okay. We need to start to plan.” Walk us through that moment.

Just like anything else at Hinge, I think that we stay grounded in our principles. We look at the big picture. We look at the teams and the road maps and the things they’re focused on right now, and we think, “Does this new information change anything? And as we look at our growth team, does it make sense to build the next monetization or expansion feature? Does it make sense to pivot resources over to this thing?” And given, as you said, the 15 percent to 30 percent gain that’s on the table, it’s a pretty high priority.

There’s an ecosystem of companies that might be building this stuff more centrally, that might be charging different rates. I’m excited about that. It’s wonky and boring. There’s a reason we’re ending the episode on payment systems.

A whole new industry I think will emerge. Well maybe not an industry, but certainly a suite of services will emerge around this to allow people to manage subscription payments, cancellations. It’s certainly nuanced.

But at the end of that, what you want is rates to come down. Where do you think the rates should be? I know no one has ever thought they should be at 15 percent or 30 percent. Where do you think they should be with a little more market competition?

When you stack the credit card payment processing fees on top of the fees around customer service and all the nuance of managing those, I do think it comes down to the 5 percent to 10 percent range.

When you think about recovering that up to 20 percent, are you thinking, “Okay, I can use this to lower prices and grow,” or is it that you have to build many, many more AI features to compete against the coming onslaught of AI chatbots?

[Laughs] I think we’re very, very focused on innovating for the future. Like I said, it changes the equation, so it’s on all three fronts. It’s lower prices, it’s higher margin, and it’s more investment in the company. But it certainly gives us major opportunities to invest in the core product experience at a time when there’s massive disruption. So it’s a particularly critical time to be doing that.

There’s a lot of talk about platform shifts. You’ve talked about platform shifts here. People might be using Hinge differently, because they have AI tools or because the AI tools are helping them find one another more efficiently, or better. A lot of the platform shift I hear about is, “Oh, we’re going to have new devices. We’re going to have new form factors. People are just going to talk to ChatGPT in the bar.”

Maybe we’ll just have agents that represent us, and they’ll go on dates for a while, and come back and say, “You should go on this date with this other person we found on Hinge,” because the agents have fallen in love, and now you just have to not screw it up. That takes the screen away. That takes your surfaces and your missions and puts them in a totally different place. How are you thinking about that level of shift? Is it even on your radar?

Yeah, I’m thinking about it right now. I think we overuse the form factor of our mobile devices right now for all kinds of things that it doesn’t need to be used for. I think a lot of those will be siphoned off into some other form factor. I especially think audio and voice is going to be a very big piece of it. But I don’t think that means that the form factor completely goes away. There are things that you need visual cues and references for where a screen is still going to be the dominant form factor. At least a piece of the dating equation is going to be that, for sure.

Do you think we’ll get to a place where people’s agents are just dating each other and then reporting back?

No, I don’t really think so. I think there are much better–

Isn’t that what’s already happening in the matchmaking algorithm, in a very reductive way? Isn’t that what’s going on?

I think in a very abstractive, reductive way, you could say that. But that’s not really what’s happening. We are not simulating dates. I think it’s a very expensive and inefficient way to do something that is actually much more straightforward.

There’s just a part of me that says you’re going to have some competitor that attempts this, and we will all have to contend with it.

I just think that’s a bit of a red herring for trying to map someone’s psyche and guess how they’re going to act. That adds a lot of complexity when actually you can just talk to people very directly about who they are and what they’re looking for and what matters to them, and compare that against someone else and what they describe, and actually make a lot of good connections and [get a] clear understanding in figuring out who should match with whom.

Justin, this has been great. Tell people what’s next for Hinge. What should they be looking for?

It really is the evolution of the product. I think that the shift to AI is going to be bigger than the shift to mobile for the industry. If you think about the big picture of what mobile did, it just made the process more approachable, faster, more fun, easier. But it was still the same fundamental experience of just cruising for people and trying to find someone based on very limited information, matching with them, trying to figure it out, going on a date, realizing this is not your person, trying to find the next date.

We’re moving much closer to a world of really deep understanding of compatibility. Being able to zero in on the right person very quickly. It’s going to be a very transformative experience that I think is going to very much change people’s understanding and perception of the industry. So I’m really looking forward to the next couple of years, because I think that we will see more change than we’ve ever seen in the industry before.

We’ll have to have you back to check in on how it’s going. Thanks so much for coming on Decoder.

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