Hinge Dating App CEO: Everyone Said Hinge Was A TERRIBLE idea! The 7 Love & Dating Secrets From Hinge’s Founder! AI Will Change Love & Dating!

What is the best way to get over a heartbreak? For Justin McLeod that was creating one of the world’s most popular dating apps. Justin McLeod is the CEO and founder of the dating app Hinge, which has over 20 million users and sets up a date every 3 seconds. In this conversation Justin and Steven discuss topics, such as overcoming addiction, early stigma around dating apps, the setbacks and difficulties when creating Hinge, his tumultuous love story, and why happy endings are for the movies.  Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/3kxINCANKsb My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We've done deep dive research studies on how can we help everyone to become more successful daters.

• 0:05Steven Bartlett?

  So what makes daters successful?

• 0:07Speaker 00

  So the faster that you can, the faster you're going to find someone who's like, yes, this is the type of person that I want to view it.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Justin McLeod, the founder and CEO of the fastest growing dating app, Hinge.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  I built Hinge because I wanted a girlfriend, but we had to suffer through a lot of failure to finally get to success. Why does the world need another dating app? I think it just needs one really that works well.

• 0:30Steven Bartlett?

  I'm going to be completely honest. Much of the reason why I never used dating apps is I had no success. So if I wanted to be the world's worst dating app user, what would I have to do?

• 0:39Speaker 00

  A lot of filtered photos with you and sunglasses or hanging out with a lot of friends, one word answers to your prompts, just like everyone.

• 0:46Steven Bartlett?

  And what about serial daters?

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Some of us have models in our head that are exceedingly narrow. They have to be over six foot and need to work in this type of job. And so you go out and you're just looking for some reason to say no because it doesn't fit your model. Give people more of a chance.

• 1:01Steven Bartlett?

  AI, the conversation around AI in relationships has always been quite pessimistic, sex robots and stuff.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's certainly not going to be what Hinge is working on.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  The bigger leap though is to move much closer to a matchmaker model and setting up dates with a much higher likelihood of success. It's happening already. It used to take a thousand swipes in order to get on a date and now about 50 likes.

• 1:23Steven Bartlett?

  Have you seen any changes in the dating culture?

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, in order to get on a date, people need to know this. So.

• 1:39Steven Bartlett?

  Justin, what is your job title?

• 1:43Speaker 00

  I'm the founder and CEO of Hinge.

• 1:46Steven Bartlett?

  And to quantify what Hinge is and the impact it has on the world, how many people use it as a product, its reach, can you give me some color towards that?

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Well, I can say that today we're setting up a date about every two seconds. So every other second, someone's going on a date because of Hinge. We've created millions of relationships and I'd say marriages at this point. The scale is far beyond, I think, what I imagined when I, when I started this thing.

• 2:17Steven Bartlett?

  I probably need to understand you a little bit better because it's so abundantly clear from all the CEOs that I've interviewed that there's often a series of catalyst moments that send them on the path indirectly. I mean, it's like the first domino that falls in their life that brings them to be sat here today for us to be talking about it. What are those first dominos in your life that fell?

• 2:37Speaker 00

  I don't think there are a number of them that probably like ended up defining my, my life. I was an only child, had a entrepreneur father who had a, ran a small business and my mom worked for my dad. I was sort of naturally as a kid good at math. I was good at computer science. I would spend my summers at nerd camp, going and learning how to like code as a kid. And I will say addiction is the last piece because I wanted, I like was desperate to be cool, was desperate to fit in. And that actually became like a huge piece of it as well for me.

• 3:14Steven Bartlett?

  In your first year of university, you went to see a drug and alcohol counselor. Is that correct?

• 3:18Speaker 00

  I did. So when I went to college, you know, it was, I would say the overachieving part of me started to slip away and I kind of just doubled down on the drinking and drugs and partying. My freshman year, at the end of my freshman year, I thought to myself like, gosh, you know, like, I haven't been to bed sober since school began, like not one single night. And maybe I have a problem, like maybe something's going on here. So I voluntarily went in to see this drug and alcohol counselor. It was like very sweet woman named Jane. And she listened to me empathetically and heard me out. And she was like, Justin, you know, I, I think that you probably have a pretty serious problem with drugs and alcohol. I think that you should definitely keep coming back and seeing me and I think you should stop.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, like that's, that was like, what are you talking about? I'm like a 19 year old kid. So I just kind of ignored that and went about the, the partying. But I had some inkling at that point that like probably something was not good.

• 4:20Steven Bartlett?

  You went to rehab eventually.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  I did. I had to spend my summer in rehab after my freshman year in order to even come back to school because I would, I'd still get in trouble a lot at like with campus safety or whatever, getting caught drinking or, and I'd been written up so many times that I actually got referred back to that same drug and alcohol counselor for an assessment. And she's like, well, I've already actually assessed this kid. He clearly has a problem. So I had to spend my summer in rehab in order to even come back my sophomore year.

• 4:50Steven Bartlett?

  So many people I've spoken to who had an alcohol addiction at some point in their life speak about the 12-step program and the role that that played in them turning their lives around. Did you, when did, did you learn about the 12-step program at all and did it help?

• 5:03Speaker 00

  I did. And I would occasionally go to meetings and they were like people from the town, like no one, no one from like college was going to these. I was literally the only college student. I did stop drinking the, and the day that I graduated from college. And, and 12-step programs was like a huge piece of, of my recovery after that time.

• 5:26Steven Bartlett?

  Why that day?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  I woke up that morning after being out at a party the night before. I was graduating that day. I'd gotten a okay job in Washington DC where I was going to move in the, in, once school ended. But I just remember thinking to myself like that the steering wheel of my life was broken. And that's kind of how, and I think that gets back to your sort of enslavement idea or that you just don't have control anymore. Like I envisioned my life going like this direction. Like I wanted to have a big career. I wanted to go make an impact in the world. I wanted to have like deep friendships. I wanted all these things. And yet every day it was like one more drink, right? One more drug and tomorrow I'll like start putting my

• 6:10Speaker 00

  life together. And I'd been telling myself that for years at that point. And I remember thinking to myself, like, I don't know what the point of living is if, if like without drinking, but I'm going to try to find out.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  And it was just like, how much longer am I going to allow this to continue to go? Like, I didn't get the job that I wanted, right? I wanted, I wanted to go work at Goldman Sachs in banking, which is the, and that's just like what the, I was a mathematical economics major and that's what all like the top math econ majors went and did.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  And, and I didn't, I didn't get the job. I got some like, you know, decent job at some management consulting firm that no one's ever heard of in Washington DC. And I'd lost the girl, we haven't talked about Kate yet, but my, I had a girlfriend all through college and I'd like lost her. It's just, it was just my life was like not headed in a good direction. It was so clear and I just viewed that as a moment to like change it.

• 7:09Steven Bartlett?

  When did you meet Kate?

• 7:11Speaker 00

  I met Kate the, basically like literally the day I got out of rehab. I like got out of rehab at 8:00 PM one night in Louisville, Kentucky. I drove all night back to school and, and I woke up the next day and decided to celebrate getting out of rehab by going out and partying and drinking. And Kate found me passed out in a stairwell, like on the landing of a stairwell. The first day of my sophomore year was her first day of school, first day of her freshman year. Later in that year, we had a class together, we started sitting together, we started to get to know each other and we just had this incredible like magnetic connection.

• 7:49Steven Bartlett?

  When you reflect on meeting her and how you felt and all of those things, I mean, you now are working in the industry. When you look back, is there anything that is consistent with, you know, all the people that Hinge has brought together today? That happened in that moment, because you know, you see on the movies, they say you'll feel this thing in your belly and there'll be butterflies and there'll be crazy, you know, all this kind of stuff. What was your experience like? Did you have butterflies? Did you know she would, they were the one?

• 8:20Speaker 00

  I think I, I'm not sure it was like the moment I saw Kate, like I knew she was the one, but I think the, our, our like relationship really started to build as we got to know each other better. And so it wasn't for me like one of those like instantaneous, like this person is the person. It just grew really, really quickly as we got to know each other better.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Whether that spark is a good thing or a bad thing, I think, has been debated. I know you had Logan, our relationship scientist, on from Hinge. And I think the spark can sort of like burn out. And what you're looking for is really like a nice, slow burn.

• 8:53Steven Bartlett?

  Within two years, you had broken up?

• 8:55Speaker 00

  We'd broken up like, we were on and off, you know, six or seven times, I think, during college. And then finally, by the end of college, we'd really like gone our separate ways. Once I'd gotten sober, I would think about reaching back out to her all the time. But I just wouldn't because I had enough sense to realize that like I had probably like messed up this girl's life enough. And it just like wasn't healthy. And so I would, I remember being like a year, two years sober. And I would like, you know, dial her number on my phone and I would just like stare at it. And then I would just like hit the end button. And I just didn't feel, I just didn't feel like I was good for her and I, and I just needed to stay away.

• 9:38Steven Bartlett?

  And would you ultimately end up reaching out to her when she's living in London and working in finance?

• 9:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I, I, four years in, I'm sober, I'm at business school. And I, I, finally, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna like write her a letter, like an apology letter.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  And see if we can reconnect. And I, I wrote her this letter and she was living in, she'd moved to London at that point. And she called me back the next day and she was with someone at the time. And she's like, well, I'm gonna be home for Christmas time, so maybe I can see you at Christmas time. And then she called me back the next day and she's like, listen, I just, if I see you, I don't know what's gonna happen. And I just, I have a stable life now. I have a partner, we just bought a flat, like, I just can't. And so I was just totally heartbroken because I really thought in the back of my mind, like someday we'd, I just felt like we were like meant to be together. And I thought like, one day, we're, we're gonna end up back together.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  And I think in that moment, I realized like, wow, I've really messed this up. Like, there's no, there's no going back.

• 10:50Steven Bartlett?

  You were at Harvard at the time.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:52Steven Bartlett?

  You're single.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 10:55Steven Bartlett?

  You're sober, which makes it hard to meet people, I guess.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Precisely. I mean, that's the thing is I, is I, um, both it was very special with her and also I really had trouble meeting other, other people. Like, I really relied on drugs and alcohol as a crutch. And when I graduated, I threw myself into work and then I, but then I arrived at business school, where I think, by the way, we're there to like, study business, but it's like a huge party atmosphere. And like, everyone connects around drinking and, and partying. And I just couldn't, it was like, just too hard for me to be around any of that. It was hard for me to meet new people.

• 11:29Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, that's the case for so many of us today. So many people who, much of the reason it feels like they continue to drink and do those things, which they don't necessarily love, is because it's almost unavoidable if you want to, it seems unavoidable if you want to socialize and be, not be perceived as a weirdo.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. And just the whole culture and the whole, like, it was just all revolved around drinking. So it was just constantly saying no, constantly saying no, thanks, I don't drink, like.

• 11:54Steven Bartlett?

  Is this at all correlated? You know, you're in that situation where you've given up drinking, you're a bit heartbroken. Does this also explain why you were so compelled to do something in the dating space?

• 12:07Speaker 00

  There was a business plan, like a business school, like, business plan competition. And so I was working on like a few ideas for that.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  And nothing really hit. Like, I was trying to work on, I had like, various little silly ideas. And I tried to work on them, but it always just felt like homework and I just like, wasn't getting much traction. And this was kind of shortly after everything had happened with Kate. And she, you know, told me in so many words that like, it was time to move on. And there was this last chance dance party happening at, at Harvard, where people were gonna like, list all their crushes. And then if two people like listed each other, they would like, let you know right before the dance. So this was like a moment of like, okay, like, we're heading towards the end of school. I think it was around Valentine's Day. And so this is like your last chance, your second year. If there's anyone that you had a crush on, it's like your moment to find out.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  I was actually like pretty excited about this because like I again, I was like so awkward. Like I didn't know how to like connect with people or meet new people. I just like, I didn't know how to do that without the crutch of of alcohol and drugs. And I was walking to class one day with the with the student body president, this guy Brett. And he was like, yeah, we actually decided to scrap that whole thing. It was just too complicated, like a thousand people all listing each other. Like, how are we going to manage all the, you know, like too hard? Like, we just scrapped that whole thing. I went to class and I started sitting there, I started thinking and I was like, I bet I could just like build this really quick on Facebook. Like, I I used to code. I like knew how these kind of things got worked and Facebook had recently opened up their API for Canvas apps like Farmville and things like that.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  I was like, you could just like go through and just check your friends that you liked and you could just build something like this really quick on Facebook. So I enlisted a friend. Her name was Frances and we got together and we built this thing where people could like list their crushes on Facebook and would tell you if two people matched. And we launched it and it made a bunch of matches and it was fun and people had like a good time. But then it was, you know, you find out if you have a crush, you either do or you don't and then everyone's done with it. But the idea then started to like percolate in my mind, like what if you could actually introduce people to their friends of friends? Because at the time, there was, there were online dating sites, but no one my age used them.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  There was a lot of stigma around it because it was like a long, arduous process. You did on desktop computers. You answered like deep questions about yourself. You paid a lot of money usually to use them. And the idea of like creating something like really simple and easy that would just connect you to friends of friends suddenly just like popped in my mind. And I don't know how to describe it. I just like, I was so excited about this idea. I was just convinced this is going to be the future of how people were going to date. And I like couldn't stop working on it.

• 14:55Steven Bartlett?

  And to set the scene there a little bit, this is at a time which is hard to remember where there's like OkCupid and Match.com, but there's not like mobile dating apps.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Right, that's exactly right. There were no, nothing was mobile and nothing, no one really used it. Or if you used it, you didn't really talk about it. Like, people my age just like didn't use or talk about online dating services. There was just nothing. The term dating app was not even a term yet.

• 15:18Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think that's a, because I, so many people ask me the question about how to know which idea to pursue. Many entrepreneur types, creatives have lots of ideas. They have a shelf full of them.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:32Steven Bartlett?

  How do we know which one is the one worth pursuing?

• 15:36Speaker 00

  I can only speak to my experience. Like, I don't know what the right answer is, but I will say that when I was... I had other ideas that were interesting to me intellectually. Like, yeah, like, this is a good idea. But it just didn't hit me in my heart. And I would try to work on it, but like I said, it felt like... It felt like doing homework. Like, okay, I'll force myself to work on this, but it just wasn't... I don't know. And then, when the idea for Hinge hit me, I just don't want to describe it, except to say, like, it was like, it infected me. And this service, this app, was gonna come out of me no matter what. And it's like, I was almost possessed to have to work on it. But I think there was the magic of me being open and thinking about ideas and trying to work on ideas.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  And then I was like, open. And then when the right idea hit, it almost didn't even feel like a choice. Like, I just had to work on this.

• 16:27Steven Bartlett?

  So many people have the idea. So many people feel infected by their belief in that idea. But then, the vast majority will be incarcerated by fear. And, you know, loads of naysayers telling them, "You can't make a dating app. What the hell is that?"

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Which is exactly the feedback that I got, by the way. Like, I entered it in the business plan competition. We didn't place at all. We were told, like, this is a horrible idea. I wrote a paper on it for our class. They told me it was a horrible idea. I had friends telling me it was a horrible idea. I would later try to raise money and VCs would tell me it was a horrible... Like, everyone was... There was very little positive feedback I was getting on the idea for Hinge. I just had this thesis that if you could make a dating service that was stigma-free, if you could make something that was really fun and easy and lightweight, then young people would use it. I'd always hear that the dating market is full, it's saturated. This is what VCs would tell me when I would try to raise money. They'd be like, "Match.com owns this market. You'll never be able to beat them."

• 17:30Speaker 00

  And I remember thinking to myself, like, it's not, how can you say a market is saturated? Like, I don't, I almost know no one who uses dating services. Like, it's not saturated. You just have to fix the problem why people don't use it. And people don't use it because it has stigma to it.

• 17:44Steven Bartlett?

  We can't remember that.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:46Steven Bartlett?

  This, this generation can't remember that there was a stigma around dating on the internet. In fact, what's so funny is, as you said the word stigma, I said to myself, what stigma? And I thought, and then I thought back to my childhood and, and I remember the, what I thought of people that used Match.com.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:03Steven Bartlett?

  Lonely weirdos.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Totally. And that was definitely, that was, that's how people, that's how people thought about it.

• 18:09Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  In 2011. It was just not, you know, the iPhone had just come out a few years ago. The App Store was relatively new. Yeah. And people did not meet strangers on the internet to go date. That was just weird.

• 18:22Steven Bartlett?

  So when did it go from Facebook to an app?

• 18:28Speaker 00

  So we started working on it. It was originally this, yeah, Facebook Canvas app. And that was 2011, 2012. And, um, but it was really having trouble getting people to adopt this thing. It was not a good product designer, not a good brand. It was originally called Secret Agent Cupid. It would introduce you to friends of friends, but it was really a complex user interface. You'd like answer questions about your friends. There were like little rankings, like it was, tried to be really social and like show you which of your friends are most in demand. It had like all these different components to it. It was like way over complicated. People would come in and they like, wouldn't understand like, why am I answering questions about my friends? Like, what's this? I'm here to date.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Around the end of 2012, I'd raised a little bit of money from just like angels and friends and family, like a hundred thousand dollars or so. We're running out of money, not making a lot of progress. I made the call around Thanksgiving. I got together with my team and I was like, we just need to start over from scratch. Let's throw this whole thing out. Mobile is the future. That's more things were starting to come out on the App Store around this time. So let's redesign it for mobile and let's make it just like a dead simple. We'll just, you connect your Facebook account. We'll show you a photo, you know, their age, like one or two lines about them. And then you just say, yes or no, are you interested in this person? We had literally like two and a half months left of cash to like tear everything down, rebuild it from scratch,

• 19:53Speaker 00

  and then take our remaining money and throw a giant launch party in Washington DC. With your remaining money? Yeah, that's it. Literally took our last $25,000 and threw a giant open bar party in DC and you had to download the app to get in. We had submitted our app to the App Store with what we thought was like plenty of time, about two weeks. And App Store review times were typically like just a couple of days at that point. And then a few days go by, we don't hear anything back. A week goes by, we still haven't heard anything back. I start trying to reach out to like the head of the App Store, but no one, they don't, I'm like some random kid like with an app idea. No one will return my calls. It is now the night before the launch party and we still

• 20:37Speaker 00

  have no, we don't have, actually have an app to launch. So I like literally have like my last $25,000 spent on this launch party with no app. I remember being literally like sitting, we had a little coworking space and that night I was just like sitting on the floor, like covered up my head in the, in my jacket and just crying on the floor thinking like, wow, these last two years have been for like nothing. I've worked so hard and I'm going to launch an app tomorrow. There's no App Store, like there's 2,000 people are coming and there's no app. And then I went home that night and woke up the next morning and somehow miraculously the app had been approved in the App Store. And

• 21:19Speaker 00

  so we had the party that night. 2,500 people came. They all saw each other using the app. The next day, people, we made more matches than we'd made in the entire history of the app up until that point. And they had to download it to get in? They had to download it to get in. And that helped overcome, I think you had to like jumpstart the stigma because we had a lot of like the very, like the cool people in the social scene in Washington DC coming and all downloading it in front of each other and talking about it. And so the fact that it was like really, really dead simple and the fact that everyone saw each other using it, I think like started to like jumpstart and get over that stigma problem. And then we had like 400 people login the next day and we're like, okay, wow, 400 people on their own came in. I mean, up until that point, it was such a

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Like literally a trickle of users coming into our like little app. Like I would, I remember I would like sit there and like look at the logs and people like a user would come in and like, oh, okay, like there's a user using the app. And then we're like, okay, he just clicked this button and like, then he like passed and then, and then he would leave. And I'm like, oh, okay. Wait for the next user to come in, like sitting just like watching the logs. So hundreds of people coming the next day, a few hundred more the next day. And then it just started to like build and build and build after that.

• 22:30Steven Bartlett?

  Was it like a snowball effect?

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, it really was. And, and once, once we'd hit it with the, with the product, it started to spread through word of mouth. Then people in DC started to tell their friends in New York. And then we started to build up a waitlist there. And then people in New York told their friends in San Francisco and they would like build the waitlist up there. And then we would start opening cities one at a time, once we felt like we had enough liquidity.

• 22:52Steven Bartlett?

  And how would you open those cities? Was it the same?

• 22:54Speaker 00

  We'd do another launch party. Literally, my life was just like throwing launch parties in cities like we would, we would, you know, from Boston and San Francisco and New York and LA, we were just like.

• 23:07Steven Bartlett?

  I remember 2012 well, and there was, that was kind of the golden age of apps in a way. I remember, cause we worked quite a lot on, on apps back then. And there wasn't many apps. The app store was, was, felt like it was growing very quickly. I was, you know, people were discovering lots of new apps all the time. I feel like people are discovering less apps at the moment. I don't know if that's true or not, but I just felt like that was kind of the app boom moment. So things like a launch party, you know, I can see how those things would work then. But I question whether people listening to this right now that have got an app.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  Would they go throw a launch party? And like, that's, that's what's gonna solve their problems? Probably not, yeah.

• 23:46Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting. And then Tinder around that time starts to emerge a bit, bit further on, right?

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, right about that time. So right around the time we threw that launch party, I think Tinder had launched just a couple of months prior. Out in LA. So almost the exact same time, we had a very similar model. They took off hugely and we started to grow as well. In fact, their growth helped our growth because it would, like the category was emerging. And now people were like seeing Tinder and Tinder was a, was an app that was all about location. And ours was all about friends of friends. And that was really the, the main difference. But as a result, people viewed Hinge as like the sort of like more serious intent dating app because it was friends of friends, people you'd meet at a house party or dinner or wedding, whereas like the other one was a bit more of like a casual reputation and like meeting at a club.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  And as a result, all of a sudden, the VCs who were telling me, there's no way, this market's totally saturated. Now I was no longer begging for money, I was like turning away. People were trying to send, like, trying to raise a round at that point. We went from like, you know, begging for scraps to like raising almost a $20 million round where I was turning away money because I just couldn't take anymore. So it really, that changed the game.

• 24:59Steven Bartlett?

  And was it a straight line up from there?

• 25:02Speaker 00

  No, definitely not. So we had some good success in 2013, 2014. 2015, growth started to level out. Tinder had definitely gotten successful. Beat us at the game of like overcoming stigma. Like that, it was cool to use, it was, it was quick, it was easy, it was fun. Ours was just like a Tinder copy that was friends of friends, but we weren't, we were like, the growth just like wasn't there. And, and more importantly though, around that time, there was an article that came out in Vanity Fair called like "The Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse." And it was all about how dating apps had destroyed dating culture and romance, and

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Hinge was featured like pretty heavily in that article. And I was just thinking like, gosh, this is not what I, like, I built this because I like wanted a girlfriend. Like, this is not what I, what I wanted to build from like a values perspective. I remember going out with my, my head of marketing at that time, her name was Katie, and I was, I was about to head home for Thanksgiving and we sat at a little cafe in New York and... I was just telling her like, gosh, I like, I wish I could just start over from scratch. Like, this is not the company I want to build. This is not what I want to do. And she's like, well, I mean, you're the CEO. Like, what's stopping you? I went home and I thought about that and, you know, nothing was stop, like, what was stopping me? We just raised a big round. We had resources.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  And so I decided to reboot the company again. So we first reboot 2012, this reboot, let go of half the company and then threw out the old code base and built something new from scratch. That would be about really helping people who wanted to find their person, like a long-term relationship brand and totally change the user interface and the profiles and the whole flow and design it for people who actually like really want to find their person.

• 27:00Steven Bartlett?

  If you hadn't have had that interview with Deborah from Cafe.com before, right?

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:08Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think you would have made that decision? Tell me about that interview with Deborah from Cafe.com and how it changed, changed things for you.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  So in 2014, someone reached out to me, her name was Deborah, and she had downloaded Hinge. She lived in New York. And the very first person that she, that like we suggested to her, she liked and matched with and then fallen in love with. And so she had reached out and was like, how did you like, I want to learn more about you, I want to learn about your company. We were just, you know, we were getting popular in New York, but not hugely popular. So we met up for an interview one day in Madison Square Park near my office. And, you know, I didn't have my, like, it was dumb luck. Like, I don't know, it was like the first person that happened to show up on her app. Like, we didn't, we didn't, it was just, we were lucky.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  But as we chatted, you know, kind of a standard interview, at the very end of the interview, we were getting up and she's like, you know, one last question, have you ever been in love? And I was like, well, once, a long time ago, but I, you know, I just didn't realize it until it was too late. And Deborah turns off the tape recorder and she's like, listen, I have to tell you a story. And she tells me the story of how actually she sort of had this missed connection moment. She wasn't with someone that she had met much younger and they had found each other all these years later and realized they should have been together. And she was like, You know, you don't have to make the same mistake I did. Like, you can still be with the one. You just have to do something dramatic. You have to just go over there and like pour your heart out and like put yourself on the line.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  And I was like, listen, lady, like, you know, it's been almost eight years since I've even seen her. It's it's kind of over. There's there's no way.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  That said, I was about to head over to the launch party for Hinge in London. And I thought, OK, like, I'll just shoot her one last note. And so I reached out to her and I said, hey, I'm going to be in London. Would love 15 minutes to say hi and goodbye. It's just weird to think that we're never going to see each other again. And she wrote back and she was like, for the first time, so in now another four years. And she was like, listen, I don't live in London anymore. I live in Switzerland, but I'll be around this weekend and happy to hop on the phone.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  So I like got that message. I went to the airport. I got the I got a ticket to Switzerland. I got on a plane to Zurich and and she reached out the next day. She's like, hey, I'm around if you want to chat. I'm like, great, because I'm going through customs in Zurich right now. And she agreed to meet me at a little cafe. And we sat down with each other. And I think at that time, I, you know, part of me thought like, I really want the girl back. Like, this is it. And part of me thought like, it's been eight years. Like, I've changed so much as a person. Like, I'm sober now. I'm like, running this company. Like, she's with someone else now. And by the way, was literally like a month away from getting married at that point.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  She was she had a fiance. She had a fiance, yeah. And and to be married in a month, like, so like on the verge of getting married.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  So I thought we'd see each other and kind of just like laugh it off and glad we saw each other and I just didn't, I honestly didn't know what's gonna happen. It's like it felt, but there was this hope in me that like, wow, maybe she really is the one. Maybe we'll like realize it. And we sat down at this little cafe and and it was just like,

• 30:51Speaker 00

  I think we both felt like an incredible amount of that connection that we'd always had. And we sat and we, we talked for like seven or eight straight hours in this cafe. Never even got up to get a coffee. And at the end of that conversation, she's like, I think I'm calling off the wedding. And

• 31:10Speaker 00

  and so about a week later, she moved out of Zurich and moved from back into, back to New York into my like 300 square foot apartment in the West Village. And and my, and this is a long way of getting back to your question, which is like, how does this relate to Hinge and would I have done the reboot? Because here I am and I've like gotten the person, like this is the person that I've always want, like wanted, like I finally got her back. And it was totally amazing for like a month or two or three months, maybe max. And then the honeymoon period ended and we're two people living in this little tiny apartment together in New York, who haven't seen each other in eight years.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  And we've got to like start figuring each other out. And it wasn't perfect. And the part of me, like I would have, if I were just dating this person, I would have run, right? I would have like cut it off and been like, okay, like not the right person, like it's not, it's not perfect. Like I imagined it was gonna be, but she called off this life. She like, you know, she left a, her person, she left her whole existence over there. So I couldn't just like break up with her.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  And that's when I think the real work of the relationship started and like real intimacy and vulnerability and like love started to form. And I realized like I would have just passed over this person. And I think it just totally changed my, my mentality of how a dating app should be designed. Because I think up until that point, I thought, you know, it's a, it's a numbers game. You just gotta like get through enough people. And once you find your person, then it's, then it's kind of happily ever after after that. And realizing that like, how many people, you know, we all must just skate right past because we don't, because we're not vulnerable, because they're not vulnerable and we fail to like make that connection.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  And so I wanted to like rebuild an app if it were really for relationships.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  You just, it would be a very different kind of app. You would have to like have people slow down. You would have to have people be more vulnerable. You'd have to people share about themselves and put themselves on the line a bit more in order to form that initial connection. And so that was the foundation and sort of like the design principles for what we wanted to build with a new hinge.

• 33:35Steven Bartlett?

  Fairy tale endings are made for movies because there's a lot of work that happens when the credits, after the credits roll.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah, we were just getting started. I had no idea.

• 33:46Steven Bartlett?

  And you also, when you talk about this new vision for hinge, it's quite idealistic. You know, this idea of just being able to create an app where people slow down and they give more information and they're more vulnerable tends to be the case that your ideal scenario for how humans behave isn't actually how they want to behave.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Right. Especially these days because we're all, we all believe things should be like quick and easy. And it's not quick and easy. You get, you get out what you put in. And so we were always fighting this balance of like what people are willing to do and what they should do, you know? And, and we were trying to, like, we could of course build an app that's just like. Makes it like what people think that they want, which is like quick and easy and fun. But you have to slow people down, get them to put in a little bit more effort. And it's a real, it's a real balance of, of like getting people to be vulnerable as much as at least they can tolerate. And because the more that they are, the more effective their experience is, the better

• 34:47Speaker 00

  chance that they have of finding their person.

• 34:49Steven Bartlett?

  How is that received when you come up with this new vision for Hinge, which is going to be slower, much more meaningful and much more deeper and really based on forming long-term connections? How is that received by people?

• 34:59Speaker 00

  I think in theory, it was, it was celebrated, right? In theory, I think people are like, yes, the world needs this kind of, this kind of new thing. Like, we definitely want something that's like a little bit less like fast food and more like, you know, a nice nutritious meal when it comes to dating. You know, it was, it was still hard to really get people, like, they like it in theory, but then they're like, wait, I have to fill out like three prompts? Like, wait, I don't just swipe on people, I have to like like something about them? Wait, if I like someone, they're just gonna see it? Like, you're just gonna tell them? I have to add a comment and like say something about them? So it was like a lot to get people's head around who are used to something that was quite different. But it was effective and that's what mattered the most.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  And, you know, the, that was a, it was such a huge mindset and shift for us to stop thinking about user engagement and user retention and all these like classic metrics that, you know, VCs look for when they look at like social media apps. And to just think, are we getting people out on more good dates or not? And that's going to be our North Star metric. And we'll grow through word of mouth because people are actually gonna go on good dates and they're gonna tell their friends about it. And so that was our North Star. And so we didn't worry so much about like all those engagement metrics and, you know, we didn't, there weren't as many matches and there wasn't as much whatever engagement on the app. It was actually way more efficient and effective at getting people out on good dates. And so we launched this new thing.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Our user numbers actually started to decline initially from the old version of the app.

• 36:28Steven Bartlett?

  And what about money?

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so right about that time, we're starting to, we've burned through all that cash in order to build this new app and we're starting to run out. And so I went out to start fundraising again and telling the story of like, look at these, like, we were way more effective now, people love the product.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  But on the other hand, we used to have, I don't know at the time, 400, 500,000 users. And now we're down to like 100,000, 150,000 users. And that's a pretty tough story to tell to venture capitalists.

• 36:57Steven Bartlett?

  But you're shrinking.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're shrinking, but we're gonna grow because look at how amazing these. And no one like really bought that story. And I was flying around everywhere, talking to every VC. And I could talk to, you know, at that point, Hinge has gotten popular enough that any VC would like, take my meeting and talk to me. But it was just, I probably had 50 or 60 VC meetings and like, not a single, not a single yes. But at right on that time, we also started talking to Match Group. They saw, they could see what I saw. They saw, wow, this is actually something that's different. It's differentiated and it has real promise. And so when we were down to like, once again, like days of cash, probably like a week or two left of cash,

• 37:43Speaker 00

  we negotiated a deal for like an initial investment from them. That would set the stage for them to eventually acquire the company.

• 37:51Steven Bartlett?

  And between 2016 and 2019, when they acquired the company, what was growth like?

• 37:58Speaker 00

  It was slow at first, 2016, 2017, we were kind of still figuring out the, it was a completely new model. And so we were figuring out how to really make that new model work. And we were like, you know, tuning it. And around 2018, we felt like, okay, we've really started to like, now people are really starting to love this app. It's starting to really grow through word of mouth. And, and then we started to like pour on marketing money. And at that point, it was showing like how much that could accelerate the growth. And that's when Match Group invested.

• 38:27Steven Bartlett?

  Hinge Labs. What is Hinge Labs? I don't believe any other dating apps have something like Hinge Labs.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's all part of this idea that we want to build, like, we're just focused on user effectiveness. And does this actually get people out on good dates? And a huge piece of the, you know, a dating app is, is relatively unique. It's not just a piece of technology. It's You know, what, what it's the people that are on there and how they're behaving and the technology, like that's your experience as a user. It's not just like, it's no matter how good we get at product and product design or whatever, like we have to control for the behaviors of other people and making sure that we have the right people on who are behaving the right way. You know, we can only guide them so much with, you know, UX. We also have to like kind of coach people and guide people and teach people how to become better daters.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  And so Hinge X, or sorry, Hinge Labs was developed to sort of study daters who are successful, study daters who are not successful, figure out what are the patterns, what do we see? And how can we help level up everyone to become better and more successful daters? And so Hinge Labs really does, you know, deep dive research studies on just what is, what makes data successful and, and gives us the fuel to be able to build better product or build user guides, things like that.

• 39:53Steven Bartlett?

  So what makes data successful?

• 39:56Speaker 00

  Makes dating successful?

• 39:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, like, you know, I've got friends that seem to be successful at dating and friends that are just those prolific serial daters that go on a hundred dates a year and never seem to make any progress.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:07Steven Bartlett?

  And also, are there like categories of daters that you talk about? You must have got like categories, like the serial data that's never going to be successful. They're just doing it for the fun of it.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:16Steven Bartlett?

  And they're like one hit wonder.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  We, we definitely have different profiles, but we, anytime we try to like just put people into discrete categories, it never works because people are complex and they have different, everyone's story is kind of unique. And so it's hard to put people just like into buckets. And there are, I think, some general principles that I've learned and we've learned through Hinge Labs. And, you know, again, you had Logan here relatively recently, and if, if people are interested, they should definitely go listen to her podcast because, with you, because it's like a masterclass in how to become successful in dating.

• 40:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  But I would say like, the more that you are willing to be honest and vulnerable and real, like the quicker you can find those connections and the higher quality connections that you're going to get. I think that's the kind of upshot and the way that we really try to design Hinge to help people maximize their success on that front.

• 41:11Steven Bartlett?

  Why does that matter at a human level, being honest and vulnerable?

• 41:16Speaker 00

  I think two reasons. One is that you get to an accurate assessment more quickly of someone, right? Like, if you're trying to be, pretend to be someone you're not, or you're just trying to be cool, or get a lot of likes, or whatever, people aren't seeing the real you. And they're gonna eventually see the real you. So the faster that you can just put, like, be clear about who you are and what you're looking for and what you want and what's not perfect about you, then I think the faster you're gonna find someone who's like, yes, this is the type of person that I wanna be with. And you're gonna avoid all those people that were attracted to the kind of veneer that you'd put up, but then they get to know the real you, and then that's not. And then I'd say the second piece is that it gives people, like, hooks to grab on to.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Like, there's just nothing to talk about with someone who's perfect and invulnerable and invincible. Like, what do you, like, what do you have to say? Like, we connect over the cracks and the little imperfections, and that's how we connect and relate to one another. And so you'll form a much better and deeper and quicker bond with someone when you open up like that versus try to impress.

• 42:23Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, what about this then? So if I wanted to be the world's worst data, if I wanted to be the world's worst, most unsuccessful hinge user, or dating app user more generally, what would I have to do?

• 42:37Steven Bartlett?

  So I've got your first point, which is about be really inauthentic. Pretend I'm perfect and use fake photos or portray myself in a way that's not authentic.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of, like, filtered photos with you and sunglasses or hanging out with a lot of friends. One-word answers to your prompts, you know, just like everyone or no, or wait for likes to come to you. I think, like, that, that's the kind of mentality they're trying to get people out of. We wanna, we want people to, like, fill out deeper, like, that's so much of our work is, like, helping people select better photos that show more of their personality, help people answer prompts, which are these short questions designed to get you into a conversation, and answer them thoughtfully to be really thoughtful with your likes. Because the more thoughtful you are with your likes, the better our algorithm gets, because we actually understand who you like and who you don't like.

• 43:25Steven Bartlett?

  So don't just like, you know.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  No, because then we can't, we can't learn your taste, right? And we're not going to get closer and closer to the type of person that you like.

• 43:34Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, interesting. And what about these, these serial daters? Because I've got some friends that are like those serial daters, literally a hundred dates a year. And I'll sit with them and we'll chat and they'll tell me, oh yeah, I want three dates this week, et cetera. For those people, I'd love to be able to give, offer them some advice. Thinking of one of my friends in particular, who I know is gonna watch this.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I was one of those people, right? I mean, I was a person who, you know, constantly was, I wouldn't necessarily just go on a whole lot of first dates, but I would go on a whole, I'd had a whole lot of two to six week relationships. And, and then as soon as I would find something quote unquote wrong, or I wouldn't feel good in the relationship, then I was like, well, this doesn't work. Like, this is wrong. Because I think I had such a, I had such a fantasy about what a good relationship looked like. I like, my model was totally broken. And I think for so many of us, we're like, we're trying to fit like a model in our head with the, with the reality,

• 44:39Speaker 00

  that we're trying to like match this reality to like some model in our head about what a good relationship is or should look like. And I think my model was like, you know, it stays sexy and fun every single time we're together. We don't fight, there's never any, you know, there's like, I think I just had this like very happily ever after moment in my mind. And so I skipped over and passed over so much because it just didn't fit this like model I had in my head. And I think some of us have models in our head that are exceedingly narrow. They have to be like over six foot and they need to work in this type of job and they need to be like this. And so you go out and you're just looking for some reason to say no, because it doesn't fit your model.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  And I think the biggest thing is for us to like change the model in our head that we're, that like, of like what we're trying to look for. And like widen that aperture a bit and give people more of a chance and like see things through a bit more.

• 45:40Steven Bartlett?

  People have to, this height thing you mentioned, the six foot thing, seems to be a lot of conversation. Because I think the vast majority of people.

• 45:51Steven Bartlett?

  The vast majority of women, I imagine, would want someone that's more than six foot. Is that correct?

• 45:58Speaker 00

  No, I don't. I don't know if that's actually true, but people like someone taller than them.

• 46:02Steven Bartlett?

  Taller than them, okay.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:05Steven Bartlett?

  Six foot seems a bit more.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  That's just one example. I mean, I don't know about the height, but I think it's just, the point is like, we have very specific and narrow models. And I think a lot of people who end up in successful relationships say, this isn't, you know, if I were making a shopping list and like, you know, writing down all my like little features that I'm looking for in a partner, like this person didn't necessarily, that like, I would have, I would have missed this person.

• 46:30Steven Bartlett?

  There's a website, isn't there? I can't remember the name of it, but you go on there and you say what you're looking for in a partner and it shows you your statistical probability of finding that person.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  Okay. Yeah, I don't know about that, but yeah, I think if people saw that.

• 46:41Steven Bartlett?

  It's horrifying.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it'd be pretty horrifying. Like you're cutting out 98% of people based on your criteria.

• 46:48Steven Bartlett?

  The salary, the height, the way, the race you put on there, and then it shows you, it goes like you have a 0.0% chance of finding this person.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 46:57Steven Bartlett?

  And obviously you want them to be single as well as another criteria. I find it interesting. One of the things people say about dating apps and like dating app companies and founders and CEOs is they want people to stay single because then you've got more customers. And surely if every, if you have this metric where people are becoming,

• 47:15Steven Bartlett?

  are getting married, you're losing customers.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. So our belief on that, which has always been, we, we like, our motto, our, our tagline is designed to be deleted. And that came from, by the way, we were working with a branding agency and they were like, what's Hinge's shtick? You know, like what makes you different? Like you're Tinder, but what? And I was like, I don't, there's no gimmick. Like there's no like, oh, we're Tinder, but like X or Tinder, but Y. Like every single part of the app is like designed to be different and like designed to help get people out on great dates. And that's kind of where there's like designed to be deleted, which by the way, was like, there's so much debate internally about that because it's so, it sounds so

• 48:02Speaker 00

  technical, like design, like in your own tagline, like designed to be like, and it's, people won't understand it. But we kind of went with it because it's the only thing that really represented what makes Hinge really different.

• 48:14Steven Bartlett?

  And what does that mean?

• 48:15Speaker 00

  And it means that, do we get people out on great dates or not? And that's what's driven every design decision and why Hinge looks different than all the other apps is like, that optimization function. And so, in terms of a business model, the belief is that like, we will grow through word of mouth, which is the most effective and efficient and cost-effective way to grow, if we just create more great dates and more relationships. And the thesis is like, as long as there are single people in the world, which I'm pretty sure there are plenty of single people left in the world, that they'll want to use Hinge, which feels more like a utility that's truly effective versus like, perhaps what's something that feels like a little bit more like a game.

• 48:55Steven Bartlett?

  Since the company started, have you seen any changes in the dating environment, the dating landscape, dating culture?

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Gen Z, for lack of a better term, has different dating patterns. I think in some sense, like when I started Hinge, people were, there was a lot of stigma around dating apps because people just didn't use them at all. Then I feel like everyone started to use them, and it became sort of the default way to meet people. And I think this is why we've actually, like, Hinge's growth has accelerated so much even recently, is that there actually is a desire to move away from the sort of like, quick-hit, superficial...

• 49:35Steven Bartlett?

  Swipe, swipe, swipe.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And moving to something that's, people are willing to share more about themselves and be more, like, I think, like, Gen Z is generally willing to, like, you know, it's like the TikTok instead of the Instagram kind of feel of being vulnerable, putting yourself out there. You don't have to look so polished and so perfect. And that's actually great for, for dating, because that's exactly the kind of ethos that we actually need for people to be successful.

• 50:03Steven Bartlett?

  And Hinge, as I was reading, has got these sort of five first principles. What is the current company mission statement?

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Well, so the, we want to foster intimate connection to create a less lonely world. And a lot of social, we'll call them like social networks, they started social networks, were also, I think, had a similar mission, like you wanted to get you connected to the people who matter most to you.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  And they've all kind of like, like, they all became social media companies instead, because it turns out that like brands and influencers and outrageous people are just more interesting than your friends. And it's easier to get you to spend more time in app and more time looking at ads if we like show you much more sensational content than, than like, you know, real, like, creating real moments of connection with the people who matter most to you. And that's what I wanted to drive home, like, really clearly in our mission, is that, like, Hinge at its core, even if we were to expand in new business lines or do something in the future, like, we are a company about intimate connection, about one-to-one, deep

• 51:12Speaker 00

  connections between people, and we don't ever want to deviate from that as our core, because it's really what the world needs right now.

• 51:20Steven Bartlett?

  First principle, two, radical trust. So you've got designed to be deleted, number two is radical trust.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:26Steven Bartlett?

  Which means?

• 51:27Speaker 00

  So radical trust is our commitment to, and so these cultural principles that you're reading off came from this book called How We Do Things. And so when I, when we rebooted the company in 2015, at the end of 2015, beginning of 2016, we, at that point, I didn't think about company culture kind of at all, it was just like, it was just, we were a bunch of people in a room trying to solve problems, like, that's, and we were only 30 people, so culture just kind of emerges naturally among that group of people, it really rotates around the founder, but I didn't think consciously about it.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  When we did that reboot, we let go of half the company. We took the remaining half and we went and did an offsite. And we did a breakdown and had like some really honest, at times tearful conversations about like, what had gone wrong? What did we do right? What didn't we do right? What do we wish we had done better? And a lot of them were, of course, like product decisions like, oh, we focused too much on the competition and copying the competition and not focus enough on our customer. But a lot of it was like, how we operated as a company? And coming out of that, we actually started a like open source Google doc that listed our kind of what we believed and how we think things should get done around Hinge.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  And originally, it was just like a long doc of just all kinds of principles. It was me just trying to like, put my management algorithm like down and on a piece of paper so that everyone was very clear about how I made decisions and how we should all make decisions and how we should prioritize and what we should do. And then eventually as Hinge got a little bit bigger and we started to have more than 100 employees, that model didn't make as much sense anymore. And we put it in this book called How We Do Things, which was at that point, just a list of all our lessons. It's really about, it's a story of our lessons learned. It's like, we did it all the wrong ways and that led us to learn to do it the right way. And so that's where, just to give the context on where these principles came from. So Designed to be Deleted was like, we used to focus on the competition and focusing on like,

• 53:31Speaker 00

  what features our competitors had. When we did the reboot, we just focused on making our one metric, getting people out on great dates. And I prohibited people from looking at the competition. I didn't want any of their apps on my phone. Like, I just focused on novel innovation in service of our customer. Radical Trust was about, a lot of the decision making was like very top down. And I think people felt disempowered. They felt a lot of whiplash. And Radical Trust was about, how do you push decision making down to the front lines? And how do you empower people with the information that they need? So have a lot of transparency from the top down about like where we are as a business,

• 54:14Speaker 00

  what our needs are, what our problems are, so that people on the front lines can go solve it. Love the leap. Love the leap is this idea that small incremental optimizations can be great, but the things that matter require a level of much bigger innovation leaps. And we have to not be afraid of failure because when you make those much bigger innovation leaps, a lot of them won't, of course, land. Or you have to, I think even more importantly, trudge through a whole lot of failure to finally get to success. I think there's a culture that comes from people, especially who have worked in tech companies and much larger tech companies of like, oh, you just test and iterate. You test this thing and then if it works, great.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  And then if it doesn't, then you just move on and try the next thing. I think the difference between that and then the way that often a founder and entrepreneur will think is like, I believe in this thesis and I'm going to get there no matter what. And if I had like, I mean, think about how many iterations of Hinge I had to eventually get to the successful Hinge. If I'd just been like, oh, I'm thinking about building a dating app. I'll throw something out there and see if people use it. Oh, gosh, they're not really using it. I guess the dating app's not a good idea. I'll go like build a, you know, whatever, a car hailing app. You have to trudge through that. So that's, love the leap is like, you have to suffer through a lot of failure to make the big innovation leaps.

• 55:34Steven Bartlett?

  Do you see a variance in even your team members, but other people you work with, they're biased towards failure. They're at the different failure appetites.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it gets harder and harder as you get bigger and bigger. And you're fighting against a larger cultural inertia, which is very human, by the way, to not make mistakes and not look bad. And that's why, by the way, this whole book is written as like, here's all the mistakes that we made and how we did it all wrong, just to give people the permission to know like, we're all works in process, we're all trying to learn. So you are overcoming a much larger cultural inertia to get people to take risks and make mistakes.

• 56:12Steven Bartlett?

  How do you do that?

• 56:14Speaker 00

  You exhibit failure from the top. You admit, I think, when you've made mistakes, like when I've made mistakes, or even talking about my development plan or things that I'm working on. I just think it's like, you, almost all of these cultural attributes have to be modeled from the very top.

• 56:34Steven Bartlett?

  Super interesting because most people are just incentivized to just do their job. So when you bring along a new idea or a new innovation, you know, incentive structures mean, oh, listen, I'm not getting paid to take that fucking risk and then be made to look stupid.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:48Steven Bartlett?

  So I'm not doing that.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's right. And that's why I think we're, and we're continuing to evolve these principles and, and refine them. And in fact, we're going through a process right now. It's kind of ironic because we're walking through these and I'm about to release a new version of these to the company. And there has been a bit of a refinement and we're actually kind of changing this one and combining it with the first one to call it Love the Problem because so much about what we're really trying to get across through this is that you have to go like really deep and develop a deep thesis on a problem. And that's what you do, I think, at this stage of a company. You don't take like wild leaps based on the intuition of a founder anymore. You like do deep research on a problem. You get conviction around it and then you're not afraid to like fail again and again trying to solve that problem because you are convinced that it's a real problem and you understand a lot about it and you're making a very informed decision.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  You're taking a very thoughtful approach to solving it.

• 57:37Steven Bartlett?

  Number four was, and it currently is on my iPad here, guided by principles.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  And that one's definitely staying. And that's one of the biggest, my own personal journey, and I would say like this journey and it's sort of what I talked about when I talked about how this got created in the first place is that if you keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and you're not having an honest self-assessment about where you are and how things are working, you won't get better. And so both of my own personal journey, and this has happened through, you know, recovery through alcohol and addiction and getting better and better as an entrepreneur is like I was always self reflecting and thinking about like, okay, like seeking feedback, like what didn't go well there? What did go well there? How can I do that better next time? And it became, like I said, too arduous for me to even to track all these things in my mind.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  So I started putting them in that Google Doc so that everyone at the company could hold me accountable to this like management algorithm I was developing. And what I wanted us is to do as a company is always make decisions based on principles. Like what's the underlying reason? Like if I'm making a decision, no one should ever think, well, that's just because Justin likes it that way. Or that's just because some other leader at the company, that's just what they want. So let's just do it their way. We want people to think like, to understand. Like, how am I making those decisions? What's underneath that? What principles do I believe in that made me to choose this over that? Because if you make that really explicit and clear, then you gain trust. People understand like why you're making the decisions. And two, they can start making decisions on their own without you needing to be in the room

• 59:07Speaker 00

  and start developing their own principles for how they make decisions. And so so many of our meetings start off with like, well, here are the principles that we sort of aligned on as we started to make, you know, think about this body of work. And it just aligns everyone on the, um, what's the, what was like the core set of assumptions and beliefs and values that we have before we get into the details of the work.

• 59:30Steven Bartlett?

  And that kind of counteracts the whole CEO, because I said so, you know, vibe, which might get, I guess, um, might get compliance, but it probably won't deliver upon whatever someone calls leadership.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not scalable. And maybe some CEOs always know the right thing to do, but I don't always know the right thing to do. I, I think my job, once we got past 20 or 30 people, which by the way, I didn't know the right thing to do, even when we were that small, but I thought I did. But as we got much bigger, like, I can't be close enough to the, to the information to like, make really great decisions. And so my job primarily is, is building and fostering the culture that makes good decisions.

• 1:00:10Steven Bartlett?

  I've been thinking a lot about company culture, and I threw this at Brian Chesky when he was here, this idea of how you create company culture, like, how do you decide? I think some people think, especially post pandemic, which caused all of these companies and businesses to start thinking about what their company culture was in a new way. You'd see CEOs and managers almost like brainstorming a principleless culture. And it was more like, how, what days do you want people to come in? Mondays and Wednesdays? We say two, two days a week, one day a week? Should we, you know? And that just doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like it's based on anything. So I said to Brian, I said, one of the things I'm thinking about is maybe culture is already there and you just kind of have to reverse engineer it from the problem you're trying

• 1:00:51Steven Bartlett?

  to solve in the world, which means, for example, if we want to be the best dating app in the world, then there's a set of behaviors we're going to have to exhibit to get there, which is going to require a set of values. And then with those values, we're going to use those values to create systems, processes, and hire the people that we need. And so you can almost reverse engineer your mission as a company backwards to figure out what your culture is.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  You said something about like you're just describing the culture that already exists. And I think that's kind of true, especially if you do it early enough where it's not out of control yet. When it's like relatively close around the founder, you've only got like 30 or 40 or 50 people, then you definitely have some sort of culture. And at that point, though, I think you want to start defining it so that everyone's clear on what it is because it will start, you'll start losing, it starts expanding and people start, it's a game of telephone, right? And it will like, it will get lost over time. So you want to get really clear on like what it is. I think it's the best of what is as well, right? Because I think you're trying to like articulate when we're at our best, this is how we're acting.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  And when we're at our worst, this is how we're acting. Because both are always happening within a company like, and you don't want to, you want to constantly prune away the stuff that's not, that's sort of not great and start having more people replicate what is great. So it's that, it's more like a pruning process and not just like a, here's our culture, like describe it and put it out the door. But on the other hand, you can't just like throw it up on a wall and invent it from scratch. Like, once an organization is big, you can't just say like, our culture suddenly is going to be X, Y, and Z, it'll be so inauthentic to what's actually going on on the ground that no one will ever follow it. I almost think about like parenting in a way, like you can tell a kid a rule or tell a kid like a, but you always have to be watching and like giving those little guidances like here and there.

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  You always have to be giving those little nudges when you, when you see people acting within accordance with the culture and praising it or not in accordance with the culture and giving them constructive feedback. Because it's such, it's this living, breathing thing, like defining it is just like one, one step, but a very important step.

• 1:03:02Steven Bartlett?

  And as the company grows and scales, I was thinking about this idea of the best of what is. Is it possible that the best of what is when there's 10 of you and you're potentially all sleeping under a table, like the stereotype goes, is not going to be the right culture for when there is like 200 of you?

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. And the book you're reading from right now is when we were 50 to 100 people. And now we're 300 and something people and we're evolving them and we're actually changing some of them because I've learned things over time that like no longer work at a company this big. I'll give you an example. One is that idea of radical trust, which we just talked about, which actually kind of pained me to talk about because that's not, I've learned that's like not right for a company this big anymore. You want to push decision making down somewhat, but if you do it too much, especially in a larger organization, you start getting like a lot of silos and everyone just doing micro optimizations.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  And there's, you actually want to be, there needs to be much more of a conversation. And I actually watched the Brian interview and he talks about pulling decision making in. And that actually is, I think, more in line with where you have to be if you want to stay innovative and still think like a startup, even at a big scale. So there's things that I took for granted because when we were 100 people, that was happening already, but I didn't see it because I just had, I knew everyone's name. We were all in the same room. And so there was a lot of CEO and executive team influence on the team that was kind of hidden because it just happened naturally. So we thought we were pushing decision making down. However, I was, I was in conversation with junior developers and junior engineers and

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  junior designers all the time, giving like little nuggets of, like I was like, I was involved, just not officially. And I think as we got much bigger, we realized like, oh gosh, you can't just like push decision making down and like, hope for the best. You have to like, pull it, people in and coordinate. And there are people at the top that have a view across what's going on across the whole company that need to actually be making decisions. We can't just like push it down.

• 1:05:09Steven Bartlett?

  Just to be super clear on that for someone who is, you know, in their first month of business, pulling decision making in, in that regard is. Empowering people to make decisions, but those decisions coming again through the central lens of the company's mission.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  When you're really small, it's happening already, right? If you're a team of 10 people or 12 people, like you're all aware of what each other are doing, you're talking and you're being conscious about if I'm the marketing person and the product person over here working on this product feature, I'll think like, oh, I should probably market that product feature. There's this like, understanding of what's going on. So you are making, you're like kind of a hive mind.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  You just take that for granted and as you get much bigger, you can either make, you know, I think the extremes are you just have like a founder who makes all the decisions. Everything just gets brought into them, which I think makes a lot of people feel disempowered. On the other hand, you push decision making completely down and you say, you all just handle it. I'll just articulate the high level vision and strategy and you, but then you usually don't make great sort of interdisciplinary or major

• 1:06:17Steven Bartlett?

  Cohesive.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  leaps that are, that feel cohesive. Everything starts like, so it's this balance of having just like a constant conversation opportunity for feedback. I still ultimately the decision makers are the people who are close to the work. However, we are like pulling it in and articulating strategy and generating conversation. I'm in the room with more junior people a lot now than I frankly, more now than I used to be so that we can continually bring people along on what the strategy is, what are the big leaps we're making and what are all the little ways that we keep this cohesive?

• 1:06:53Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting because in the age of the internet and the age of dating apps and all these other tools and technologies, even though we have better internet connections, the stats continue to show that we're getting lonelier and lonelier.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Steven Bartlett?

  Which is a word you use central to your mission, the word loneliness. 52% of Americans report to feeling lonely and 57% of Americans report to eating their meals alone, et cetera. So something's clearly failing, isn't it? Something's clearly not working in this pursuit of connection and social connection and social media, et cetera.

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think, so loneliness has been a problem that I think has been creeping up on us for a while, but it's really started to accelerate in the last few years. And if you look at You know, I've seen charts that show like time spent together in real life with friends and time spent consuming media, consuming like digital media on apps. And it's like over the last like 20 years, the one is almost completely displaced the other. We used to spend hours a day with friends in real life on average and make like having genuine connections, seeing and being seen.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  And now people are virtually almost always consuming some form of digital media or they're working. So even when you're at the gym, you're probably like listening to, you know, a like whatever, like a music or a podcast or you are-

• 1:08:20Steven Bartlett?

  Nothing wrong with that, Justin.

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  What's that?

• 1:08:22Steven Bartlett?

  Nothing wrong with that. Listen, don't get rid of my because we're not designed to be deleted over here.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  Which is fine because you're conscious. I mean, so and I'm not saying all media consumption is bad. I'm saying that like when you are, but when you're pulled in all day and it's completely displaced, like you're no longer talking with friends because you're just like doom scrolling on social media platform X, Y, or Z, you've, you've really, we've really lost something. And I think it's that, I think more than anything has led to this like crisis level acceleration in loneliness.

• 1:08:53Steven Bartlett?

  I'm so interested in the disparity between men and women in dating. We've had lots of conversations over the years on this podcast about this, but even in your app, you see a big disparity between like the bottom 50% of men or the bottom group of men on dating apps and like the top one or 2% of men on dating apps. I'm going to be completely honest. Much of the reason why I never use dating apps is I had no success. I would get like no good matches. I was a 18, 19, 20 year old kid that had nothing, was super scruffy, had no money. I had no chance in these apps. And I had this best friend called Logan, who looks like he comes out of like a Calvin Klein ad. We were both broke.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:36Steven Bartlett?

  But he could go on those apps and he would, he would clean up. And I look over at him, I think, Jesus Christ, like what's left for me? I genuinely believe, and people might find this quite shocking. In my life, I've been on five dates in my entire life. My strategy is I go all in. So the minute my current girlfriend said she wanted to go on a date with me, I pulled up an Excel document and it was a three day itinerary. I just went all in. I've only been on five dates in my life. But I but I emphasize with men that really struggle with dating apps and have become disillusioned. And in fact, when we had, I think it was Whitney Wolfe Heron from Bumble, I was really surprised because those men showed up in the comment section

• 1:10:20Steven Bartlett?

  and they felt like they've been forgotten about.

• 1:10:24Speaker 00

  So it's a big, I mean, it's a big focus for us. And we, I mean, part of this is like larger cultural forces that I think are at work. But part of it are things that we can really address, I think, within dating apps. And some people are just good at dating apps. And some people, I think, are quite datable, but they're just not good at dating apps. And it's, I think the question is like, how do we help really make it a much more focused quality over quantity experience? How do we help the people that are struggling? And this is where I actually think a lot of the promise of of what's being unlocked through AI and generative AI is gonna like really help us coach people who aren't finding

• 1:11:07Speaker 00

  success and help them find better success and create matches that are much more like quality over quantity. I mean, that when we rebooted Hinge, we want to make it more quality over quantity. And we went from a world where people used to like, it used to take a thousand swipes in order to get on a date. And then the new Hinge, it took about 50 likes. So we made a big leap back then in terms of helping people get on on good dates.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  I think now with AI, I think there's like a whole other leap of focus in terms of learning about you, learning about who's out there, helping match people up in like a really nice one to one way. And you don't feel like you're in this like very crowded room where, you know, some, all the attractions, you know, or all the attention's going to just a certain group of people. And so I think there is a like. I think the future is getting brighter for us to be able to solve that problem.

• 1:11:59Steven Bartlett?

  What are the, what is that disparity? I read, and this might not be accurate. A 2021 study by Hinge found that the top 1% of men on the app receive more than 16% of all of the likes, while the top 1% of women receive just over 11%. This indicates a significant disparity in the level of attention men and women receive on dating apps. And similar things from Bumble. A 2022 study by Bumble found that men send an average of 13 messages per day on the app, while women only send roughly three messages per day. This suggests that men are putting in significantly more effort to initiate conversations on dating apps. And then more broadly from that, we've had people on this podcast like Scott Galloway that talks about how the very top 10, 10% or the top group of men are having all the sex.

• 1:12:43Steven Bartlett?

  And basically, there's this kind of disillusioned disenfranchised group at the bottom of men who are having no sex and aren't finding relationships and aren't having intimate connection. And it's that group of men that he says are the most dangerous of all because they're like lonely, broke, disillusioned young men.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  We still have work to do. There's like a major opportunity to help those people that are struggling to find their person by helping them zero in better on the person that they like and the person who will like them back, helping them put their best foot forward and make sure that they are not shooting themselves in the foot by like choosing the wrong photos or like getting one word answered on prompts or any of those types of things. So that I think is the, the key is like, so like a big effort at Hinge right now. Internally, we're calling it flatten the power curve, but it's essentially that. It's like, how do you help the people who aren't getting to success? How do you level them up to get to success?

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  And then how do you focus the people so that there's not that kind of like power curve behavior on, in society and on dating apps? We think we can actually correct what's going on and more largely in society through dating apps.

• 1:13:55Steven Bartlett?

  And so I'm clear, we do that by coaching people to be better at dating apps, basically, like picking better pictures, understanding better ways to reply. We do that by helping them match with people that are more suitable to them and that are more likely to.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think giving like better, more warm introductions so that people have more focus and more of a chance. And you also limit like what's going on in terms of people sending too many likes or matching too much and getting them to focus on the people that they actually really want so that you don't over engage the rest of the user base.

• 1:14:29Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a challenge in getting people to go from the app to the real world? Because I would always be super scared of that.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's the whole point of our app and that's very much what we're like pushing people towards.

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  But yeah, I mean, the whole funnel is a challenge in terms of getting people to sign up, getting people to like create profiles, getting people to match, getting people to like move from a match to conversation and conversation to date.

• 1:14:55Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned AI, big topic of conversation this year, of course, generative AI and how that might be able to help people find their person. I mean, the conversation around AI and relationships and dating has always been quite pessimistic because people are thinking about sex robots and stuff.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's certainly not going to be what Hinge is working on.

• 1:15:20Steven Bartlett?

  How can you use AI to, you mentioned it briefly there, but I want to make sure I'm clear.

• 1:15:26Steven Bartlett?

  How specifically? You can give me feedback, kind of like Whoop does, they have their, they've released their AI coach.

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  I think one level of it is like just thinking like, how do you make the dating app experience better? How do you help people build better profiles? How do you help coach people through the conversation process and help them move off to a date? So you can certainly like coach people, be like, hey, you should choose these types of photos or whatever, like all that is possible with AI. What I think like the bigger leap, though, is to move much closer to what feels like a matchmaker model. And that, I think, starts to solve some of the problems that, what you were just talking about, where it's less like you're just sitting there evaluating. And that, that whole idea of like, creating a profile, matching, trying to chat, trying to move it off to a date. Like, when you work with a matchmaker, you just have an interview,

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  and they learn who you are. They go out and interview other people, and they say, hey, we think you all should meet, we'll set up the date. And then after the date, I'm gonna follow up to see how it went and provide some feedback.

• 1:16:24Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  I think we can get closer and closer to that model, where we're like, going almost straight to setting up dates that are with a much higher likelihood of success, than sort of leaving it on the user to create a personal advertisement for themselves, and, you know, do all the work to sort of find through people that are gonna like them, that are gonna, that will like them back, et cetera.

• 1:16:48Steven Bartlett?

  The word company, by definition, means group of people. You talk about hiring in your principles quite often, and just generally in this book. Principle number five here is people with heart, hire people who embody the core values. I've come to learn, longer I've been in business, that hiring is really central to everything, culture being the thing that binds those group of people together. But what have you learned about hiring? And what would your message be to maybe your younger self that is 2012, when you're relaunching the new Hinge? What would you say to that guy that you know now about hiring?

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  We made a whole lot of hiring mistakes in the beginning. And it was still, we sort of did it like we did the principles, which is we looked at, okay, who are the people who have succeeded at Hinge? What are their attributes? Who are the people who have not succeeded at Hinge? And like, what are their attributes? And then we started to just create attributes for like, who succeeds and who doesn't. And then we started to design an interview, which we call the culture interview, which still everyone goes through at Hinge, which essentially like assesses for those attributes. And that led to a dramatic increase in success, making sure that we, you know, when people came, they didn't quit or weren't fired within their first year. And now we have extraordinarily low attrition at Hinge,

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  especially voluntary attrition. And I think it's because we focus so much on making sure we get people in who have those values. And then, once you have people in who have those values, and they're all around other people who have those values, it's like a place they want to stay, because it feels... They feel so aligned with the people that they work with.

• 1:18:23Steven Bartlett?

  And if there was, if you had to get rid of every value but keep one when it comes to hiring a hinge person, which one would you keep?

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  Our three core values are authenticity and courage and empathy. That's like, and they are a bit of a trifecta because one without another is like, is very imbalanced, I think. So you want people to be authentic. You don't want them to like be so authentic and so blunt that they like are rude and mean to people, right? There's that level of empathy. But I think like those two values especially, that like authenticity, showing up, being who you are, saying what's on your mind. And that level of empathy is ultimately what builds trust. And I think trust, like within an organization, is really the lifeblood of the organization. And those two values, I think, build more trust than anything else. They're like the two ingredients of a great relationship.

• 1:19:14Steven Bartlett?

  10 years from now, we sit here and we have another conversation and we talk about what hinge is, the impact it's had on the world. What do you tell me?

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  I think the, the next level impact that we can have in terms of shaping dating culture and coaching and teaching people to become not just better daters, but like we become, it's better, better people, really. And coaching people how to like have more harmonious relationships, form better relationships. Like, I think there's so much opportunity to guide people on that process. And, and so the idea that 10 years from now, we like really shaped dating culture in a way that just made everyone more successful, that I think is like the vision for where we're headed.

• 1:20:06Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. And the question that's been left for you is, if you could go back in time and give one piece of advice to your 10-year-old self, what would it be?

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  Well, what comes to mind if I could have impressed on myself that like,

• 1:20:38Speaker 00

  you are, I mean, impressed on myself that idea of intrinsic worth. If I could have like let myself know that I was worthy no matter what, regardless of like who dumped me or who ostracized me.

• 1:20:53Speaker 00

  That's what I wish, in some sense, I wish I could have understood. And then in the other sense, it's like shaped my entire life and is the reason that I have Hinge and the reason that I have Kate.

• 1:21:03Speaker 00

  So I think maybe the advice I would give is just buckle up.

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  It's gonna be a really wild ride. And it, you know, does have a way of working out in the end.

• 1:21:17Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:21:18Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:21:19Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:21:19Speaker 00

  It's a pleasure.

• 1:21:20Steven Bartlett?

  You've built a really incredible company. You've built a different business. And that's, that's so evident in the product that is Hinge in a market where there's a lot of people doing the same obvious thing, going for the low hanging fruit. It was so clear to me from a very long distance that at some point, someone was being guided by first principles. Because you went an obvious route, which has turned in your favor as society has evolved. And we've got sick of surface level things. And people are dissatisfied with not actually, the promise of these apps not being realized, which was, you told me you were gonna help me find love.

• 1:21:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm still using and swiping on this app three or four years later and feeling despair, maybe even feeling worse than I did when I started. But Hinge took a different route. And when you describe Hinge to someone, you say, it's an app that cares more about meaning, that cares more about fostering deep connections. And that, as you say in your own words, slows things down a little bit. So you can take the time to find a much more real, authentic. Potentially successful bond than the rest of the dating market. And that's why Hinge has always been, I think, has always represented the future. Because at the end of the day, people are coming on these apps to find love. And it's clear to me, this whole designed to be deleted thing, that, and from everybody that I've met at Hinge, that that is a promise you are genuinely trying to deliver upon.

• 1:22:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's totally true. And that idea of first principles is exactly right. I think you have to just rethink from the ground up, like, how would I build this? And stop thinking like, oh, other apps do this, we'll do this with this twist. And that, I think, is what initially you don't find success during that path. Because everyone's like, well, this is different. This is weird.

• 1:22:58Steven Bartlett?

  There's no blueprint.

• 1:22:58Speaker 00

  Right. And but over time, that like, the the compound interest that comes from actually building an effective product that grows through word of mouth is, is you just, and now today, Hinge is, you know, the fastest growing major dating app, or the number one app in the UK and Australia, and quickly growing in Europe to become like a top dating app in Europe. So it's, it pays off eventually. You have to be very patient.

• 1:23:24Steven Bartlett?

  I see that in great founders, you know, I see it sort of in the Whoop founder, these unobvious decisions that they made because they're so guided by their first principles, usually based on the founder's personal experience. And that's what I see in Hinge. So thank you for creating an app that I consider to be a really great one and a really important one, and being someone who's driven to end loneliness ultimately, and bring people together, because it's never been more important than it is now. Thank you, Justin.

• 1:23:45Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:23:48Steven Bartlett?

  Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done. So I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.