a16z Podcast - From Swipe to Scale: How Tinder Became #1

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

In 1995, just 2% of couples met online. Today, that number has surged to over 50%, making online dating the top way couples connect.In this episode, a16z General Partner Andrew Chen chats with Tinder founder Sean Rad about how he built an app that changed culture. Sean shares why seamless experiences matter, how startups often get marketing wrong, and how Tinder became the catalyst for online dating's explosive growth.This conversation was recorded live in LA at a16z’s Games third Speedrun program. Learn more about Speedrun: https://a16z.com/games/speedrun/Find Sean on Twitter: https://x.com/seanradFind Andrew on Twitter: https://x.com/andrewchenStay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

You're only as good as your ability to listen to the people using your products. If there was an easy way to get information without me inputting a lot of information, we always pursued that. It was really this idea that it had to be passive and magical. If I have to do work, it might make me feel like a little desperate. A lot of startups put marketing ahead of product. If you don't have product market fit before you do that, you're not actually actually getting quality feedback.

If I don't understand it in five words, and I can't connect with it, then you're probably not going to be that viral. In 1995, just 30 years ago, 2% of couples met online through sites like Match.com, which, by the way, was one of the few dating sites that even existed prior to 2000. Now, today, that number is well over 50%, meaning it's the primary way that couples meet.

Perhaps that alone is not surprising to you. but it was right around 2012 that we saw online become that primary channel, eclipsing meeting through friends, work, the bar, family, school, you name it. That also happens to be the year that Tinder was founded. At the beginning of this episode, A16Z general partner Andrew Chen asked the audience, how many people in the room have used Tinder? Well, count me in Andrew, but I want you the listener to reflect on the same. If you haven't used it, how many of your friends have used it?

How many couples do you know that have met through it? Any marriages? Well, today you'll get to hear from Sean Rad, founder and long-time CEO of Tinder, about how he created a product that changed culture. This podcast was recorded live in L.A. During our A16Z Games Speed Run program. So if you'd like to learn more about Speed Run, which is returning for its fourth iteration in San Francisco,

head on over to A16Z.com slash games slash speedrun. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16c.com slash disclosures. Show of hands of who has downloaded or used Tinder at some point in their life. Let's do this. All right. There you go.

Amazing. Yeah. Sean, this is all the people that you found. My wife just raised her hand. Fantastic. Where I wanted to actually start and where we're going to actually spend most of the conversation is the underdog story of being a founder and an entrepreneur. And so I wanted to actually just start with the Sean Rad origin story before Tinder.

Good question. I think up until the age of 17, I was in music. My dream was to be a singer-songwriter, but also always had a passion for technology. Something always gravitated me towards. I remember like when I was a kid and my dad got DSL, which is probably no one even knows what that is anymore. It's like early high-speed internet. I would rip that apart. I'd like try to hack into the system. I'd always mess it up. So I always. had a passion of technology. But I pursued music, got a job at a music management company, realized at least at that time, musicians aren't treated that well within the industry. And I was like, I'm not going to be beholden to anyone. So decided to go make a bunch of money and then come back to music. And then that's when I started my first company in college called Orgu. And that was basically taking all the different ways you communicate and putting it into one interface and then started my next company adly which pioneered influencer marketing and influencer advertising so we had 5,000 brands and 10,000 what you would call creators right now

and we would broker relationships with them and track the analytics sold adly and around the time the iPhone had just come out and I sort of recognized everything is about to change. The idea of having the most powerful computer in our pockets everywhere we go was just fascinating. And I wanted to do something in mobile. So I started one of my investors at Adley had created a test flight. So I started working with the test flight team and I built what is now Apple Analytics, then left to pursue two ideas. And one of them was Cardify, which was like a local loyalty program. It's still a great idea.

No one's done it. If you go into a restaurant, swipe your credit card. In the app, you get points, but you don't have to open the app, do anything. It was all connected through the credit card system. And then the other idea was Matchbox, which is Tinder. And my thinking at the time was both of those ideas came out of this realization that, I mean, now this is pretty obvious,

but back then I'm like, all my friends are. heads down in their phones when we were together and I'm like, this is so weird. And I saw very early on, I'm like, this device could either bring us closer together or it could tear us apart. It could take us out of the moment and distract us. So I started thinking, how can we use the phone to help me interface with the world and make my real world interactions even better? One of those work streams was, I want to interact with the places I frequent more. And another one of those work streams was I was single and want a better way to meet people and overcome, I would say, this kind of fear of rejection or anxiety we all feel in walking up to someone. And the root of Tinder was, well, what if we could take that away by introducing this ephemeral matchmaking?

I don't need to tell the person I like them. I could tell the matchmaker and if someone else tells the matchmaker, then there's an introduction, the ice is broken, and we can connect. That was sort of like the core thesis of Tinder. And at the time, I mean, there had already been a couple large online dating products, like E-Harmony existed and gotten to an interesting scale. There was Match.com. When we've talked about this in the past, one of the observations you made is that all those products almost felt like work the way that they had been designed. Yes. I mean, if you think about this,

this problem that I laid out, which is rejection, those products actually were worse than the real world because I would message a bunch of people and not get a response. Granted, and this is true, I've never used any of those products still to this day, because we never saw ourselves as competing within online dating. We really saw ourselves as creating a new way for people to interact and make new connections. So we didn't even think about it as online dating or even a dating product. We always thought about as an introduction platform. And we actually banned in early days, like you weren't allowed to say dating because dating products were not cool. No one felt cool being on them. So we were a social discovery app because also dating

was a very loaded word. It's like, what does that mean amongst our age group when we talk to our friends? It's a heavy word. And we wanted to create a more natural, real experience. And more of a platform where you can define it and make use of it, how everyone, you could date, you could get married, you could make a friend, you could hook up, of course. I mean, whatever it is, it's all in the user's hands. Yeah. And I think this is like super visionary at the time also because as a business model,

I remember being in the Bay Area and investors would just say like, yeah, we don't fund gaming and we don't fund online dating. Yeah, it was just like a category they didn't believe in. Yeah, they didn't get, they didn't believe in. Obviously, these days, see how people meet romantically. And I think it's now up to, what, 70%? Tinder, I would say, we did a study in 2017. I think that concluded that 40% of U.S. marriages met on Tinder. Right. Yeah. I don't know if that's more or less. It's still the number one dating app in the

world. Yeah. But back when you started, it would have been like... Two percent. Yeah, exactly. Right. Right. Yeah. It was not really something that was perceived as a mainstream activity. And so that means you have to build a product that conveys trust. And you were already starting to think about is quote-unquote dating the right term. Talk a little bit about how do you even position yourself and talk about the idea, given all those constraints? I think it all starts with product. So what is the problem you're solving? Being very clear on that. I think a mistake that a lot of companies make is there's product as a silo, then it goes to design, then it goes to engineering, then it goes to marketing or maybe product marketing first,

then it goes to customer acquisition. I hated this waterfall model of building a product. We always saw it as one cohesive narrative. If you hear about it from a friend all the way to signing up, all the way to using the product, to experiencing the value proposition, to then telling your friends,

that's one narrative and that needs to be one unit. So I think what was unique about Tinder is we really fused together these multidisciplinary crafts, and we were able to bring together together these different perspectives and build on a platform that was brand new, right? No one understood mobile. I mean, I don't know if you guys remember Facebook's app at that time is horrible. Well, they tried to basically take their whole website and cram it into tiny app.

Yeah, I think everyone just saw it as like a different canvas. We saw it as a completely different way of interacting. So I think we also pushed the edge of mobile user experience design. And I remember the initial versions of Tinder required Facebook login. And then you showed mutuals. We really believed in like human design and really understanding what people are already doing and accentuating that versus getting people to do something completely different. And if you think about meeting,

you don't walk into a bar and give someone a resume. That's what every dating experience felt like. So we knew Tinder had to be very minimalistic, very simple, very natural. So if there was a easy way to get information without me inputting a lot of information, we always pursued that, whether it's mobile phone sensors,

whether it's connecting your Facebook account, where we were able to pull in a lot of information about you. That was also unique at the time. Not a lot of apps were even thinking that way about how do you properly leverage the social graph to create new experiences. So it was really this idea that it had to be passive and magical. If I have to do work,

it might make me feel like, little desperate, like I'm going out of my way to meet someone, and we never wanted Tinder to feel that way. Right. And one of the ways that I'm interpreting the way that you're talking about this is that because you had mobile as this new platform, there's a whole thing about like, how do you surf these waves, right? And a lot of what you're talking about is sort of like creating the native product experience to that wave as opposed to just trying to take the last thing and kind of copy and paste it onto it. Yeah, totally. I mean, look, you always have to remember in these waves, it doesn't mean that the new technology necessarily creates a new problem.

You still have to solve the problem. Now, the new technology gives you new ways to solve that problem. But I think what you always see in some of these waves is you have startups that are like, I'm doing something in AI or I'm doing something in mobile. But like, what does that really mean? Right? Like, mobile or AI is a way to deliver an experience. It's a tool. It's not actually a problem or a solution. So I think going back to this like human-centered way of building business, like who's your customer? What is their problem? And how are you solving it? AI might be part of that narrative. It might not be part of that narrative. But I think definitely the technologies give you new ways to solve problems. And then sometimes you have these distortions. between how people are accessing information and what's being provided to them. In our case, there's a shift to mobile. And it was like, even if you had the same exact product,

Tinder but on the web, right? That's a very different product when it's on mobile because a behavior is different. And that's something Facebook didn't understand in the early days. They saw mobile as like mobile web. They didn't see it as a new behavior, a new way of interacting.

Right. Let's go to a process of launching. launching the product and tell us a little bit about what did the team look like at the point where you were getting started? And then how did you get your first users? So in the beginning, it was just me. So I designed it myself. Very few people who know this, but I'm a product UX designer. And to me, this is how every great idea starts. It's like get it on paper so you can actually show it to people. You need that to recruit and inspire others to join you, but also it's like the first product market fit test.

And then I think recruiting a team to build it, but it was very important to me to bring people on the ride who really believed in our vision and had that passion. Because I think I knew very early on that passionate, inexperienced person will still be more effective than a dispassionate experience person.

So like passion to us, was like the number one currency of joining the team. And that started with me being able to articulate the vision or else, how can anyone else get passionate about it? We had this whole group earlier this week. Actually, everybody gave like an elevator pitch, which I always love, because you put so much effort into simplifying the message to a point

where everybody can understand it. And it takes effort to make it simpler, not more complex, right? That was actually a core principle at Tinder was simplicity is genius. There's a great Albert Einstein quote that if something isn't simple enough, it's because you don't understand it. Right, right.

It truly gets to the essence of something. It requires deep exploration and thought. The iPhone is a great example of that, right? Removing buttons and simplifying and subtracting versus adding. Right. So I think the same thing applies to your pitch. Right. If I don't understand it in five words and I can't connect with it,

then you're probably not going to be that viral because how am I going to explain it to someone else? Yeah, that's right. I'm not going to say to my friend, hey, can I give you this pitch about this new app? It's more like, check this out. Five words. Yeah, that's right. Well, it's a little bit like the NPS question is like,

how likely would you be to recommend this to a friend? The sub-question that I always love there is, okay, now tell me how you would recommend it to a friend. Like literally describe it. What words do you use? What words you use? And it's always completely different than whatever the creator of the product thinks. Yeah.

And it's very, very educational because it tells you like, oh, okay, I'm being compared to these things. Yeah. Maybe you like, maybe you don't like. It's a very important signal. You're only as good as your ability to listen to the people using your products. And many times these products take a life of their own and they're taking you somewhere that you didn't even think about going. So one of the nice things

about Tinder was that we were in L.A. and we were in West Hollywood and nobody was in the tech business there. So like when we go to restaurants and we'd show the app or we get feedback, we were getting some pretty honest reactions. It was more about reaching the populace and what they think than our other technical friends who might give that explanation very differently. I totally agree, because if you can't tell your story, not only is it maybe unclear in your own mind, but also, yeah, maybe you can't recruit,

maybe you can't fundraise. 100%. Maybe your product is actually less viral, so getting that right, it is so key. Absolutely. So you have the V1 of Tinder in your head, you write it down, you start recruiting the people, and then famously, you eventually get into this motion

of going college to college to college. Yeah. Well, I had the benefit of, Tinder of coming off of Adley where I sort of really understood how social media marketing or let's call it virality worked at least in a digital environment also a real environment but like the first thing we did we had the app and we launched the app we were all playing with it gave it to a few friends we loved it and we're like what the fuck do we do how do we get this out there the first thing we did was I told everyone in the team take out your phones text a hundred of your friends.

And then like we texted 300 people and to our shock, it was like three days later we had 500 users. I was like, what the fuck? Did anyone else text anyone else? What is going on here? And part of that was really refining

what was that pitch? It was like we were reeling people and I think the message we sent was download this app and think me later. We didn't even say what the app was or what it did. So we also understood there had to be an element

of mystery and curiosity in how things go viral. Then one of our interns was in college at the time, and his friend, she was very popular on campus, was having a massive birthday party, 2,000 people. And we went to her and we said, hey, why don't we throw the party for you? We ended up doing it at Justin, my co-founder's house, and we literally shuttled all these USC students to his parents' house, and we kind of trashed the house, but worth it. Yeah, worth it. And what we did was, we were like, okay, you can't get into this party unless you download

this app called Tinder. And literally the bouncer was checking. Cannot get in the door unless you download the app. And the next day, a bunch of hungover college students or like, what was that app I downloaded? And we realized, like, whoa, we just created a little echo chamber within USC. and it's starting to go viral and we are a local product which I think introduced more complexity and how we grow. We were a social product that needs network effects to work that's hard enough. Social local product compounds it even more. So we realized, wow, that's like a way to reach a bunch

of people who are within an ecosystem, have connections to each other. And it's another way to stress test, this thesis that we had, which was, we're not for people who are busy professionals who go to match.com because they don't have time. And how many people walking around a college campus might see someone but not have the courage to go talk to them? Can we make more of those connections? And it was working. So then we're like, okay, how do we penetrate USC even more? And we realize that every Thursday night, fraternies and sororities have like chapter dinners where other fraternities and sororities would come in and give a presentation of what they're doing that week. So we literally posed as college students and would go to the fraternies and sororities and just talk about the app. And that worked.

And then we're like, okay, well, that just got us 5,000 users, I think, at the time. And we're like, all right, if we do this in every college, it's all going to add up. So we hired a bunch of college students across all campuses in the U.S. And we just started pounding the pavement. We would throw parties. We would go into Greek life, introduce the app. But again, like, none of this would have mattered if we didn't have a product that works. Right.

Like, I think this is like so fucking important. A lot of startups put marketing ahead of product. If you don't have product market fit before you do that, you're not actually getting quality feedback. You're doing yourself a disservice. You have one chance to introduce your product to people. That one chance has to count. So I would say it was systematic of a great product, but also really focusing customer acquisition on the right people, creating a bubble around groups of people rather than like spraying and praying and going wide. Did you guys worry at the beginning where if you had certain kinds of VCs that were involved or something like that,

they would have probably told you something like, oh, this go-to-market via college, it's great and everything, but you're only getting a couple hundred users. It's not scalable. It's not repeatable. You know, why do it? And obviously, it ended up working out ultimately. This is actually a very important lesson that we learn, especially when you're building a network product, like the engagement you get from every user matters. So if I see something on a billboard, I download it. The effect is very different than if my friend tells me about a product. And we had opportunities, many opportunities to actually do mass market. Actually, in the early days, Kim Kardashian wanted to promote the product. Again, going back to my Adley days. And we didn't want

to do that because we're like, wait, if we just get a bunch of random users all over the world and we're not creating the density and the organic virality, then the network effect will be very week. So that was our answer. Whenever this question came up with investors was like, hold on, this isn't because we can't go and do bigger marketing. This is because you have to understand the nature of the product and how to actually create effective network effects. And I think once we would explain it that way, they're like, wow, these people really know what the fuck they're doing. And it was about consistently sort of widening the tent, but taking every step on the way and not trying to take shortcuts. Shortcuts don't always work. Yeah. Amazing. I know Tinder went through lots of

really interesting ups and downs. And one thing I always admired was you guys were always launching in new countries or there was like different new product lines. I remember one time we were chatting and you were like working on something where there was going to be tabs on top of Tinder. Yeah. You were going to be able to meet friends and maybe even professionally network on Tinder. Talk a little bit about this culture of just being okay with failing and being willing to try stuff versus I can also imagine a version when you're working on a product that's kind of working you're kind of like okay don't change anything yep and you're trying not to like rock the boat well okay so two things so one is you all know starting a company is very hard it's

emotionally like you're kind of like a mental athlete and if you're not doing it for the right reasons if you don't have that drive that passion that motivation of love then I think when gets hard, you're going to give up. So I think resiliency starts with passion. The more passionate you are, the more resilient you're going to be. And that I think leads the second thing, which is when it's from the heart, we can be honest and critical of each other and we're all fighting towards one mission. And it's not about me. It's not about you. It's about the mission. When it's out of ego, well, then maybe we're not being honest, we're playing politics. And we had a culture that was extremely honest and open. And that kept making these products better. And part of that

open and honest culture was also recognizing that if something doesn't work and we made a mistake, that we have to be able to look at each other and say that didn't work and not be afraid of that and take that as a lesson and leverage it into something greater, companies grow through trial and error and learning. Do you have a favorite project for your days? I'm sure there are many about where you feel like you really learn from it. There were a lot. I would give a good example of how we institutionalize some of this is like our all hands were all about the product and design team and every team presenting to the company. We were small. We started doing this at 10 people, but like we'd present to the team. And I would encourage everyone to say what you like

or don't like and rip it apart. And that mattered because people learn, oh, if I actually say something sucks, I'm not going to get in trouble. And every time that would happen, it would lead to a better result. And then we also embodied that. I mean, the amount of debates I had with John, we would have like lovers quarrels over product openly in the floor. Because I wanted everyone to that that is okay for you to debate and that builds better products. Getting all those perspectives in there is only going to result in a better product. And then there's many things that we killed that didn't work. Matchmaker was one of them. We had a product where we were like sure was going to work where you can pick two of your friends and force a match so you can play

a matchmaker. I was like certain that that was going to work and we ended up killing it. I remember when we killed it, the team was really sad because they'd work really hard on it. But the The way I presented it was like, if we don't kill it, then we don't have room to do something new. But if a team is afraid to do that because, oh, gosh, we work so hard on something, and you're not really being honest or intellectually honest or in it for the greater good of the company. So you have to check the ego at the door. That's right. I remember the very first couple times I was hearing about Tinder, it was often. So this is sort of a question about press and controversy and all that other stuff.

you know, obviously many of us remember the point where it was like, oh, it's a hookup app. Do you think that was ultimately helpful because it just created heat? And I asked us sort of knowing that there's so many folks that are working in AI right now, and AI itself is controversial. Do you kind of play into that or do you have? I think in the early days we've leaned into it because we didn't give a fuck. We just wanted more users. We believed in what we were doing and we didn't care what the press was saying.

At a certain point, we started caring. and I think it became a huge distraction. And then you start comparing by your competitors and that becomes a huge distraction. We let it go at a certain point and that unlocked a lot of creativity because really what matters is your relationship with your users.

They're the people you should really listen to and care about. Your pundits matter too, right? Because maybe they have great feedback for you. And there are many times like press would say something. We're like, oh, that's actually a good criticism. We've got to look into that. But also, at least in our case, it would never make a difference in metrics. Yep.

It was a fraction of the horsepower of our users being our advocates and telling their friends. And that's really what we tried to focus on. And it also ignore the competition because it's like they have a different set of circumstances. They're doing a different thing. We're focused on our users. And that was always where we would get alignment and peace. Yeah, we had a very similar experience at Uber as well, There was, you know, famously a week or two in France where all the taxi drivers came out

and did like a mega anti-Uber protest and all the politicians were like saying all this stuff. It was sort of like in all the news headlines, absolutely crushed downloads that entire month. It was like record everything Europe. We had moments like that too. So it's sort of a fun. Controversy sells. One point of view is as long as they're saying your name, your app's name, then great. That's a win.

Especially nowadays, most people don't remember what they read in the press, but they remember maybe if you're lucky, they'll take away the name of the product. Right. And then maybe that generates curiosity to go download it. And then if you have a really good product, despite whatever anyone's saying, then you'll earn that user's trust. All right, that is all for today. If you did make it this far, first of all, thank you. We put a lot of thought into each of these episodes, whether it's guests, the calendar, Tetris, the cycles with our amazing editor Tommy until the music is just right. So if you like

what we put together, consider dropping us a line at rate thispodcast.com slash A16C. And let us know what your favorite episode is. It'll make my day and I'm sure Tommy's too. We'll catch you on the flip side.