Tinder – the hugely popular app which took the dating world by storm in August 2012. Tinder is the brainchild of Sean Rad, Justin Mateen, Jonathan Badeen, and Dinesh Moorjani of Hatch Labs and winner of the Techcrunch’s Crunchie award for the ‘Best new startup of 2013’.
If it’s an award winning app, it must either be too complicated for the average Joe or it must be really simple to be so popular. Turns out in Tinder’s case it’s the latter.
So how do I find my soul mate through GPS?!
Tinder finds the locations of its users using GPS, and then uses their Facebook information to create a profile. Its profiles are made up only of the user’s first name, age, photos, and any pages that the user may have ‘liked’ on Facebook – Tinder’s users get alerted of new matches, can respond to messages, and get their swipe on while leaving their phone in their pocket.
Tinder’s genius is that it uses Facebook profiles rather than cheesy bios. It uses geo-location technology to identify users in a specific radius (set by the user) to match and meet up with.
It allows the users to anonymously like or reject potential matches using a simple swiping gesture. If two users are interested in each other, it is a “match” and Tinder introduces the two users and allows them to chat. Subscription-exclusive features allow users to undo “swipes” and search the network globally.
Since it uses existing data from the Facebook profiles of the users, like number of friends, likes, common interest, it eliminates the need for over the top dating profiles. Users just need to swipe left or right to ‘accept ‘ or reject a profile .To add to the awesome factor, its used by celebrities like Olympian gold medalists Jamie Anderson and Miss USA.
In a June 2014 update, Tinder added “Moments”, an ephemeral photo feature. Tinder also added editing capabilities to the photos, enabling users to draw on the photos and add filters.
Tinder, which has logged 600% growth over the past 12 months, has been downloaded 40 million times since it launched in 2012. Tinder is now facilitating almost 14 million romantic matches every 24 hours. Available in 24 languages, this app is grossing maximum users across Australia, Denmark, United Kingdom, Ireland and New Zealand.
Tinder was first used on college campuses, the University of California to start off with.
The people behind the successful story of Tinder
Sean Rad – A graduate of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business- Prior to Tinder, Sean was the Founder & President of Adly and Orgoo.
Justin Mateen- Justin is also an active angel investor, real estate investor, and art collector. He graduated from USC’s Marshall School of business in 2008.
Jonathan Badeen is Co-founder & VP of Product at Tinder. He completed his BA , Marketing at Creighton University.
Dinesh Moorjani is currently an Executive-in-Residence at Warburg Pincus. He is the Founder and CEO of Hatch Labs, a mobile technology incubator and captive fund, which built over 10 startups from ground-up since 2010, including Tinder.
Sean Rad in an interview states that the idea behind Tinder was to bring people together on the basis of their existing Facebook profiles and proximity using GPS to give that initial connection. Talking about Tinder’s expansion plans, he says, they are looking at making tinder more than a dating app, so people meet and network not just with the idea of dating but to connect on other levels as well. There is no formula yet to implement the same but it surely is in the pipeline.
As Justin Mateen puts it, ‘Tinder is not a dating app but a social discovery platform.’ Sure Justin we’d love to see school kids teaming up on the basis of their interest in sports or stay at home Moms meeting up with their similar aged kids.