Tinder had swiping from day one but flopped because there weren't enough local profiles to swipe through. The fix: seed college parties with mandatory app installs and target Greek life school by school, building density city by city.
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So Tinder is. I do love that story also, because it's such an iconic product and it's just so fun what they've been able to do. And so Tinder, in the early years, it was a product that actually basically the first version of it had everything, all the elements that you would think of as Tinder. They just like nailed the product idea from day one. And sometimes that happens. The first version of Instagram just nailed it. The first version of Tinder just nailed it. And so John Badeen, who was their iOS engineer, had a deck of playing cards that he would kind of fiddle with while he was coding. And one day, while the very, very, very first version actually just had an X and a check mark, and that's how you would kind of advance and you didn't swipe. But then he was like, oh, swiping is fun. And It's a new iOS thing. So he added it in and then, boom, off you go. This iconic thing. They built basically all the right features. The problem with building all the right features is that, um, then they went and they started to invite their friends and, and they, they went on their address books and they started texting their friends again. This is at a point where online dating kind of is a little bit of a stigma. So imagine this. You're getting. You're texting your friends and you're kind of like, you're almost saying, like, hey, you seem kind of lonely. I feel like you, you need, you need a. You need a boyfriend. You know, it's kind of a little bit like an insult. And then importantly, I think the Tinder Atomic network is not two or three people. It's also not thousands of people, but, like, it's probably, it's like probably hundreds of people because you can actually swipe through. If you think about how many swipes you can do each day, you can actually swipe like a couple dozen people a day pretty fast, pretty easily. And so as a result, you actually need hundreds of profiles in order to make it interesting. And so that was the problem, that was their cold start problem, was how do they get enough people in it at once? And it just turns out, even though they had all the right features, that even when they told their friends about it, it was not working. And, and I think that that is such an important thing just to stop there for one second, which is that sometimes you actually have all the right features. You just don't have the right network. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And it's very easy that for them to potentially have just stopped Right there and just have said like, you know, okay, like this isn't working, okay, let's move on. But instead what they did was they realized that, well, how do we get everyone in the app at the same time, that's all in the same geography and do it all in one go. And what they realized was they could throw a birthday party. They were going to go and sponsor this birthday party from one of the really popular people on the USC campus where they'd gone to school and they had one of their siblings, younger siblings, was still in school there. And so they ended up throwing this party and sponsoring it. But funny enough, it was like it was at an amazing house. You had to like they bust people from the campus and the whole thing. But then they actually required you to install Tinder, show it to the bouncer and then it's in order to get the party. And like you wouldn't use Tinder at the party. But what happened was after the party was done the next day, there was a bunch of people that maybe you saw from across the room that you didn't have a chance to talk to. And so, and so the, they would just check the app and off they went. So they saw that if they could get 500 people at a party together and, and this was like 500 of the most desirable people, this was like the Greek system, super like popular, like hyper connected to people that then they could take over the whole USC campus. And by demonstrating that to themselves then they were able to then pick another school and another school and another school and the next school they picked wasn't a tiny liberal arts school on the west coast. What it was was they actually started to go after some of the schools that were in some of the southern states. And the reason is because the Greek system is very powerful, very, very strong there. A large percentage of all students are in the Greek system. And so they could kind of do this top down approach and go to the top fraternities and sororities and like kind of sell into there and then like build it and then, and then, and then what happens is once you get USC and UCLA and Loyola and bunch of these other schools, eventually it seeps into la and you get la, and then once you get la, then you get New York and San Francisco and then it goes from there. And so I think it's just this really interesting thing where that is also why, you know, to something Ellie that you just said is that that's why I don't think of Tinder's network as a super, super broad, monolithic network. It's a network of networks of all of these individual schools and neighborhoods. Because even in, in a San Francisco, for instance, you're not going to necessarily date somebody that is from, you know, deep, like South Bay in San Jose, like, that's just too far. That's like an hour and a half. That's too far. Or like, you're not going to date somebody that's in Berkeley, because that's like, that's like an hour. And so it's a very hyper, local kind of experience. And so you can win and lose these hyperlocal networks. And it was important for Tinder to be able to win kind of piecemeal.
