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Save money and uninstall Tinder

by Paul
in dating

TLDR: Tinder is a dating app with girls looking for followers on insta, super attractive guys looking for sex, and non-super attractive guys paying for swiping on hot models. The likely next evolution of Tinder is to make the chat a feature

I assume you already know what is Tinder, the most popular dating app in the world, it's super quick to install and to signup, you will match some people straight away, but something weird will happen after 3 days

  • If you are a guy you will not get any more matches

  • If you are a girl you will be overwhelmed by the number of guys who want to talk to you

If you are naive you will probably think that the guy is ugly and the girl is very attractive, well wrong, whatever your attractivity level you will endup in the situation above.

Why ?

Simple, Tinder is a business listed on the NASDAQ (ticket:MTCH) [1]. Its only goal is to make the most money. It doesn't care if you meet people or not as long as they make money. And yeah they make plenty of money, so it seems like a lot of people are paying for a premium account.

Let's imagine you are the CEO of Tinder and your investors ask you to make money, what would you do ?

You want people to subscribe to a premium account, will users do it, if they can get everything they can on the free version ? For sure no. So let's disadvantage free users, this is simple to do, let's not show their profile to anyone and constantly remind them that this is because they are not premium. But a few issues are going to arise:

  1. Some guys will get upset to get zero match and uninstall the app

  2. Girls will get no match then they will quit and install another app

  3. You will have a lot of churn

Let's solve these issues:

  1. We are going to try something, we will try to hook guys to the app during a short period after they install. We are going to show their profile to a lot of girls so that they get a few matches and see that the app is working and enable them to talk with girls, in the same time we will show them tons of very very hot girls so that they get used to seeing better looking girls on Tinder than on real life. Guys will feel like they can date girls much better than the ones they are seeing at the bar. With that strategy more guys will convert to premium. But something else will happen, guys will get not so many matches, so instead of picking their likes, they will just like every girls possible, which is a pretty good thing.

  2. Unfortunately for Tinder they have to find matches for girls because girls know they can find guys on any dating app that exists, that's a very bad news for you because you know if you could make a dating app with everyone paying but no one matching with each other, that would be pure dream. But no, girls need match for social validation, so we will just make them match with the hottest guys, that way they will think they can have any guys they want and will have to be picky about who to date and will never be satisfied, you know when you can have anything you want, you are never satisfied because there is always something missing. So as guys will match any girl this is very easy for us to make girls match with the hottest guys. That would be amazing to find ways to make girls pay, but this is probably an impossible goal!

  3. Well let's never talk about churn, have you ever seen the word churn in the Match group investor documents ? We will use that trick, let's also hide the number of average active user on the app, instead we are going to show the number of downloads of the app, this doesnt represent the number of user but this number will always be increasing (Facebook has about stable number of active users but is still the most downloaded app). And we are going to show the number of subscribers, the one who pay, who care about the others.

A few others topic that we may want to tackle :

  • Girls will use Tinder to promote their insta, well that's a pretty good news, more hot girls and more girls who don't want to message guys

  • Premium guys will still be upset to get only a few matches, then we are going to invent Boosts. They will pay to get their profile shown to more girls, that's more revenue and that's addictive that's good

  • If we are so hostile to users, so many of them will go to other dating apps and at some point we will not have any user. But we own so many apps they will just end up on one of our other apps. But fuck you Bumble, why don't you want to sell for $450 million ? The other big dating app, Happn is doing the same strategy as us, so they are not a threat for now but look at all those tiny apps which get traction, don't worry we are checking on them, as soon as they get some relevant user base, we will acquire them, they will not have any choice but to accept because their only way to grow is to be free and if they dont have any revenu they need money ;)

Do you think all that is fiction ? Well I do think this is not. Tinder is a cash cow, and a pretty big one !

If you are a guy and want to meet some girls, use Bumble they are going to IPO in a year or so. So you still have a few months to enjoy their product. Then you will have to find another app :) (Edit : 18/12/20 time to leave Bumble too, they start doing tactics too, good luck)

If you are a girl, you can use Tinder, but if you want to be successful you need to have a strategy.

[1] Tinder belongs to the Match group. The Match group owns several dating app, the most popular ones are Tinder, Match.com and OkCupid