😽 Dating Apps

Match, Hinge, Tinder, Monet and more

Oct 04, 2021

Hello Friends 👋,

The other day right after I upgraded to iOS 15, I found myself down the rabbit hole of top grossing apps, something I have not done in years. To my surprise, dating apps still dominate the rankings, with so many new emerging apps I have never heard of.

That surprise manifested into curiosity and it wasn’t long after that I found myself digging down the rabbit holes of the internet about how dating apps get their first 1000 customers.

Let’s dive right in

1. Match.com (1995)

Offline Events

After constantly a barricade of “what is the internet?” reply when trying to recruit women at straight bar to join match.com, Kremen shifted his focus to the gay community who had already been early adopters of the internet.

Glinsky went to a gay computer club, where members gathered to talk about AOL and the latest deals at Radio Shack, to explain Match to the crowd. Match held a promotion during a gay skate night at a roller rink in Burlingame, just north of Palo Alto. Bailliere and Glinsky urged skaters to come over and learn more about Match, offering to take their photos with giant digital cameras—which seemed exotic at the time. One by one, the skaters marveled at seeing their faces appear on the computers, and word began to spread.
- The Atlantic

2. Plenty Of Fish (2003)

SEO

I was looking for a way to improve my resume so I can get a job as a developer, I hate reading books as a developer I would rather go do something. What I did was I went and thought what was the hardest thing I could develop. I thought dating website would be really changing, back then there wasn't any dating website that was dynamic. Over the next two weeks I went and created a website.
Somehow Google started indexing the website and after about two weeks people started signing up and I was like WOW there are people signing up here. I thought I should take this more seriously and stared adding more and more features. By end of June Adsense came out and I about 4,000 people signed up all through Google. I made $1000 from Adsense I thought maybe I should start taking this more seriously and it blew up from there
- Markus Frind

3.Tinder (2012)

College Campuses

I had to get really crafty, I took a picture of one of my girlfriends and one of my guy friends and dropped them into the match screen. I wrote a big thing on top of it saying FIND OUT WHO LIKES YOU ON CAMPUS and printed a thousand copies and offered a bunch of people $20 to help me put them everywhere around the SMU campus
I rallied all my friends who were still at school, I had just graduated a year earlier and we made the rounds. We went to all the sorority house and told all the girls you have to download this app because college is all about meeting people and right now you are only meeting people you hangout with. We then ran into the fraternity houses and said a different pitch. Hey guys you have no other way to access 100s of sorority girls now download the app because they’re all waiting for you.
- Whitney Wolfe

4. Hinge (2012)

Launch Party

After failing to gain any traction for the better part of a year, Hinge rebuilt its app for mobile and decided to have a large giant launch party that was attended by over 3,000 guests.

5. Coffee Meets Bagel (2012)

Launch Press

Despite being in a crowded industry, Coffee Meets Bagel managed to garner significant amount of press around its launch. During launch week the company was featured on Techcrunch, Venture Beat, Glamour and many other smaller publications.

6.Bumble (2014)

College Campuses

Whitney Wolfe, cofounder of Tinder, created Bumble shortly after she left Tinder.

I had a little bit of a playbook. I maybe done it once before. I went back to SMU and went back to all those sororities and spoke from the heart…I have lived through the pain points of male dominated relationships….every other women in the sorority house chances are they felt it too…. Me and my early team members, we went in there and took pizza boxes with stickers on it, and offered a piece of pizza to the fraternity boys, we wrapped cookies in bumble stickers and took all sorts of goodies and we growth hacked our way to success
- Whitney Wolfe

7. Monet (2020)

Tiktok

Monet is a dating app that matches people based on their drawing. When they launched the app on Tiktok, this video got over 500,000 views. I absolutely love this video!

8.Thursday (2020)

Offline Marketing Stunts

Before Thursday, the dating app that only works on Thursday, was a pivot out of Honeypot. They placed whiteboards with quirky messages around the streets of London.