Advice Line with Justin McLeod of Hinge

Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod joins Guy on the Advice Line to answer questions from three early-stage founders. Plus, Justin describes Hinge’s new initiatives around intentional dating. First, Jessica in Toronto, Canada asks about opening new markets for her self-guided mystery road trip packages. Then Nick from Auckland, New Zealand wonders about strategies to drive word-of-mouth referrals for his designer security screen door company. And finally, Chandler from Minnesota discusses the challenge of getting his story across to customers as he sells hand-drawn posters that celebrate the history of golf and hockey. Thank you to the founders of Guess Where Trips, Framework Doors, and Archive 22 for being a part of our show. If you’d like to be featured on a future Advice Line episode, leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and a specific question you’d like answered. Send a voice memo to [email protected] mailto:[email protected] or call 1-800-433-1298. And be sure to listen to the Hinge founding story https://art19.com/shows/831bd173-0992-41b7-b1eb-112db904d947/episodes/cccc1024-5b79-4dae-8aa3-98f271ff45d1/embed as told by Justin on the show in 2021. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Andrea Bruce. Our audio engineer was Cena Loffredo. You can follow HIBT on X https://x.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis/ and sign up for Guy's free newsletter at guyraz.com http://guyraz.com and on Substack https://guyraz.substack.com/. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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  Visit mobilefuels.com for details. Hello and welcome to the Advice Line on How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on the show, who will help me try to help you. And if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298. Send us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. And you can also send us a voice memo at [email protected]. And make sure to tell us how to reach you.

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• 6:08Speaker 01

  Joining me this week is Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of Hinge. Justin, welcome back to the show.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  So it's, Justin, a lot has changed since you first shared your story with us a couple of years ago on the show, from sort of how Hinge kind of has evolved to your role as a leader. We will put a link to your original interview in the episode description, the show notes, and you can also find it by searching for How I Built This and Justin McLeod or Hinge. It's a great episode, really great episode. You guys will love it. Just an awesome story about how you guys kind of redesigned everything on the site and used your remaining last capital on a launch party before even getting your app into the App Store and all the messiness and craziness. Justin, before we get to our callers, just I would love to get an update on what's going on in your life right now. I know you're working on some new initiatives around mental health and intentional dating.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  So tell me what's going on.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think these are all taking our mission to the next level. And it really has been, we're the app designed to be deleted. We want people off their phones and out on great dates. And if you look at the loneliness epidemic, and you actually look over the last 20 years at the amount of time people spend on their screens, we've almost completely displaced in real life, time spent with our friends, with time spent looking at screens. About 70% of the time we used to spend with friends, we now stare at our screens. And so we're just thinking very deeply about, one, how we can approach that from a social impact perspective, but most of all, it's thinking about how we can set an example for the rest of the world, especially the world of social media and the world of dating,

• 7:46Speaker 02

  about how if you, you can build a truly sustainable business if you're actually designing around your customers' deepest needs, which is for us, getting out on great dates.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting. I have, I've had a lot of conversations with people in the tech world about this, and people have been really focused on this loneliness epidemic. And I'm not convinced it's a temporary epidemic. I'm convinced that it may be a behavioral shift in the way we are as humans. And I guess my, my big question, and who, I don't know if anyone has the answer, is with screens in our lives, right? With the access to screens and the addictive nature of them, can we really break that? I mean, can we, do you think we, we have the capacity to go back to how we were as humans?

• 8:34Speaker 02

  I don't know that going back, I think it's a false dichotomy. I don't necessarily think we're going to go back to how we were, but I certainly don't think we can continue down this path. I think it's completely unsustainable for people's mental health and mental wellness. I analogize it to sort of the, what happened with the personal wellness industry. I think for a while, we were headed in a direction as a country where like, fast food, not a lot of exercise. Like, I think people were starting to feel like, we had created an engineered food that was very easy to get, drive through restaurants, everything else. And then we started to wake up to what are the health consequences of this? And people started to design and create an industry around personal wellness, around health.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  And I think similarly, we need to start thinking about social wellness and social health. And how do we think about the time we spent on social media as essentially like junk food for our brains? And how do we actually start designing healthier ways of relating to our friends that are much more nutritious for our souls and much better for our mental health?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Justin, you know, I remember when we talked about this when you were on the show. I am of an age before, kind of before dating apps. And so I met my wife now 25 years ago at a barbecue, right? Just as an in-person event before we all were all addicted to our screens. And I talk to a lot of young people and I hear the same thing. It's so consistent. They're like, yeah, I'm on apps. It sucks. And it just sounds so soul crushing. And I wonder what you're hearing. I mean, you are, and again, I've met, I also have know people who met on Hinge, right? And are married and have great lives. But what are you hearing about dating culture right now?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, one is that dating has always been hard. When people were, before people were complaining about dating apps, they're complaining about it was hard to just go out and meet people in bars. It's hard to meet anyone. Dating is Always been challenging. It's always been something that, you know, most songs are about it. It's like one of the most emotional ups and downs, unpredictable things and most important things to us as humans. And at the same time, I would say I sympathize with a lot of the critiques of dating apps. A lot of them are why I started Hinge in the first place is because I wanted something that actually felt much more thoughtful, much more intentional, didn't treat people as kind of like disposable shopping items. And I'm actually quite excited about the possibilities that we're now seeing because

• 11:02Speaker 02

  of AI, which I think will even further our ability to help people spend less time on our app and more time out on great dates. It will allow people, instead of communicating to us their preferences through kind of Morse code of likes and passes and going through lots and lots and lots of people, they can just tell us in their own words who they are, what they're looking for, what matters to them and be able to make much, much more thoughtful matches.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Cool. Justin, let's go ahead and take our first caller. Hello caller, welcome to the Vice Line. Tell us your name, where you're calling from and a little bit about your business.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Hi Guy, hi Justin. My name is Jessica Off. I own a company called Guess Where Trips. We're based just outside of Toronto, Canada. We create and sell one day self-guided mystery road trips across Canada and the US. It's kind of like an amazing race while you're exploring your own backyard and we've been doing this for about five years.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Wow. Okay. Well, welcome to the show. Thanks for calling in Jessica. So you have a company and you sell self-guided tours, but no one knows where they're going?

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Exactly. So they're preset itinerary, so they're not custom and customers choose where they're leaving from, what type of road trip theme they want to experience. We have everything from haunted road trips to pet-friendly road trips, outdoor activity-type road trips. And then they get this beautiful package in the mail. We also have a digital version and there's four mystery stops. And you essentially just open up these envelopes one at a time and it takes you on a one-day adventure.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Wow, this is definitely for people who do not like predictability. So this is an unusual kind of traveler, right? Because you're basically saying, hey, it's gonna be a one day trip. You don't know where you're going, but here it is. Follow the, follow the instructions. How did you come up with this idea?

• 12:48Speaker 03

  I wanted to gift my parents a unique experience gift. They had too much stuff. And I wanted to gift them a road trip, but I didn't want to just give them a confirmation on booking.com. So I planned out everything. I didn't want them to think about anything. I divided it into four stops with the fourth stop being an overnight hotel. And I really tried to outline the history of the small towns they'd be visiting. I wanted to tell them like quirky little facts about the small businesses they would be visiting. So I loved doing it so much. My parents had such a great experience on it. I decided to start a business out of it.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  I'm looking at your website. I see you were on Dragon's Den, which is the Canadian version or the original version of Shark Tank.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  I imagine that that gave you guys a bit of a boost in sales?

• 13:33Speaker 03

  It definitely did. Yeah, I went on, it was featured October 31st last year. I got a, I was offered a deal from four out of the five dragons and it was, it was great exposure.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  All right, before we get to more about your business, so tell us what your question is.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  So my question is, I mean, we're in 20 states, four provinces, and we're often with a unique product that we're launching in these very like specific places. So what are the most effective strategies for successfully launching in new markets? When you're introducing a totally new concept, one that's location based, trust driven and unfamiliar to most consumers?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Great question for Justin McLeod because you had to do that with Hinge, right? Because Hinge is even though it's an app, you gotta, you gotta be in the city to meet them, right? And so you gotta, basically every time you opened a new city, you probably had to have some kind of campaign around that.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  We definitely did, but I'm curious. I mean, Jessica, you're, maybe I should be asking you the question because you've already in 20 states and four provinces. And I'm just curious, like, what problem are you? Running into, are you finding that just like it's only working in the Toronto area and you're and you're struggling to get traction in these other places or some more successful than others and how have you been doing it so far?

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Great question. So we, I decided to start a travel company January 2020, like right before COVID and after COVID, everything shut down and but then staycations and like traveling locally became a little bit more popular and Ontario grew like crazy like it was COVID was really a catalyst for our growth and we grew so organically. I started this company with an $80 printer and right now Ontario is doing about 80% of our sales. So while we've launched in these different areas, we're just not seeing the same kind of growth that we see in Ontario that it keeps on doubling year after year, but we're not seeing that same type of growth in these other regions.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Any clues why? Like, do you have any sense of what's happening or any like hypotheses?

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Um, I think, I mean, certain, some regions just aren't very road tripable. We've learned that very quickly. Um, I also think we're just not there physically and every time we launch, we've had some successful launches where we get a ton of content creators on board. Um, and then when we launch, we make that money back like, you know, within a few hours, which is great. And then we've tried that exact same approach with other markets and it doesn't seem to do well. We've hired some PR companies. Um, we've ran a lot of ads and we're just finding that some markets stick, some don't. And with our budget, I mean, we have a budget of about $20,000 when we're launching. Where do we put that money? Because influencers are expensive, Meta is expensive, everything's expensive.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Well, in Hinge's day, we started originally in Washington DC. There was a lot of movement between like DC and New York and so people in New York would start to hear about it, but we wouldn't let anyone in until, because we had such a network effects product until we had a waitlist of a few thousand people waiting to get in and then we would throw a launch party, invite everyone there, make sure everyone saw each other using it, talking about it, try to build like a tipping point, uh, like release all the energy at once and then use that to get the New York market going and then people started hearing about in San Francisco and we kind of just kept moving like that. And so I just wonder, given yours is also, it's kind of a new category.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  It's not something that people, you probably don't have a lot of competitors who are also doing surprise road trip packages.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  No, not at all. We've had some copycats, but we're the main, the made ones.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so it's something that people really have to get their head around, have to see other people using to like, think of as a category or something. So I just wonder ways that you can, because it sounds like you had a lot of focus on your initial market in Ontario.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  And, and then you probably got that critical mass of people doing it, their friends doing it, everyone's kind of doing it once, and then it built that sense that this is a category.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I was very naive thinking, oh, it can, I can grow it to this very organically. And so launching in these other areas, I'm like, oh, it's just going to grow organically. And it obviously has not been the case.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and we have this principle at Hinge of kind of depth over breadth. And we always, you know, it's hard to try to cover up for weakness by just like expanding more, like, oh, like that market's not working, let's just launch more markets. So thinking, thinking like, okay, we got one market going. How do we get our second market going? Like, what's the next ripest, interesting market? And then putting all your focus there, getting the learnings, and then launching your third market versus kind of launching 20 markets and then suddenly realizing you spread yourself so thin and you're, you've, you've got like 20 different markets kind of working and.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  We have totally done that. Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  I, I wonder, Jessica, if you have a way to incentivize or offer some kind of rewards to people who post about their experience online on social media, because especially in new markets, I think about Sarah Blakely when she started Spanx. Okay. She got an opportunity to go to Neiman Marcus. And so she, you know, had to sell Spanx there. And who's going to buy it? No one knew what they were. Pantyhose with no feet, you know, right? She literally paid friends to go and buy Spanx off the shelves. I mean, she spent her own money buying her own product. And eventually it turned into Spanx, right? Because she needed to get some

• 18:56Speaker 01

  momentum. I mean, is there a world where you can send friends to, you know, just have them do it and have them just post constantly throughout the day?

• 19:06Speaker 03

  That's a great point. We're not, we're doing something, we just started it this week, where we're reaching out to these meetup groups and day trip groups where I'm like, I will give you, I will give everyone in this group a free trip if you post about your experience after.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Because I think we were so focused on those big influencers. So now we're kind of rethinking that strategy and just really focusing on those nano-influencers or just people who like to go out and post about their experience and they don't have much of a following. So that's what we actually just started to do.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  One other quick question for you. How confident are you that the product is as good in these other markets as it is in Ontario, the market that I guess you know? How much do you invest in making sure that the one in Connecticut is just as good?

• 19:54Speaker 03

  That's a great question. I mean, when we're launching, we go down there and test out the trips. We talk to locals. We talk to like destination marketing organizations and then we pay smaller influencers just to test the trip to get their feedback. I've personally done most of the trips. Between my team, we've done all of the trips multiple times and they are great. We are seeing like more growth in like the Midwest area. So we're realizing places that have more traffic like Miami, New York City might not be as desirable to do these trips.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Takes forever to get out of New York City. The whole, half the road trip is just trying to get, you know, through the hall and tunnel.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  LA too.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just off, the company's called GuessWhere Trips. Thanks for calling in. Good luck.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Thanks so much.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  I know you've got children, Justin. When you travel, do you like spontaneity or do you like to plan?

• 20:44Speaker 02

  We've figured out that the right balance for us, I call it like light structure. Like you plan one thing a day. So you anchor on something, but then you leave lots of room for spontaneity and flexibility. And you never know, you might meet someone who has an idea that, you know, and you end up somewhere different than you thought you originally would. I'm definitely someone who likes, as you could imagine, risk, adventure, and unpredictability.

• 21:10Guy Raz?

  All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with another caller and another round of Vice. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to the Advice Line right here on How I Built This Lab.

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• 25:02Speaker 01

  Welcome back to the advice line on How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz and my guest today is Justin McLeod. He's the founder and CEO of the popular dating app Hinge. And we are taking your calls. Let's bring in our next caller. Hello, welcome to the advice line. Tell us your name, where you're calling from and one line about your business, please.

• 25:20Speaker 06

  Hello, Guy. Hello, Justin. My name is Nick Kelly. I'm calling in from Auckland, New Zealand, and I'm the founder of Framework Doors. We were set up about a little over a year ago and our mission is to radically transform people's relationships with their homes by providing beautiful peace of mind via thoughtfully designed steel security doors.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Welcome to the show. Thank you for calling in, Nick. Happy that we have got listeners in Auckland. I know we do. So these are doors, Framework Doors, these are like steel. Door that you can lock, but you can leave your main door open, I guess, so you could allow air and circulation and.

• 25:56Speaker 06

  Exactly, yep. So it's it's a similar sort of form to aluminium screen doors, barrier doors, which are common around the world.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:04Speaker 06

  These doors install and lock directly into the existing frame of the door. As you say, Guy, allows you to open up your home without compromising security. So if it's a beautiful day, perhaps you want to invite a little bit of breeze through, or perhaps you have dogs that are inclined to explore, or little ones that like to wander, then these doors are a great option for you.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  And I should, just because we're describing this, right, they're like, you can see through them. They're they're like wrought iron designs.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  Steel.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  And these are very steel. They're very common in like, the Mediterranean or the Middle East. I've seen these all over the world in pretty warm climates where people want to keep their doors open, but they don't want to allow anybody to walk in. So it's a locked kind of gate, essentially.

• 26:50Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  That swings open and close like a door.

• 26:52Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  And tell me what you, why you decided to get into this and what you wanted to bring to it that would be different.

• 26:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I had worked most of my career in advertising and production companies here in New Zealand. I was in Sydney, Australia for about six years prior to that. A little over 12 months ago, I actually found myself out of a job. And I had lived for a number of years in Sydney and Australia. And my wife and I had been really impressed by this beautiful wrought iron door that we had at our home in Sydney. Two big dogs, you know, very enthusiastic. Anytime someone comes to the door, and we were like, this is, you know, these doors are amazing. When we moved back to New Zealand, we found that there was essentially no one really in the space that was offering a similar sort of product.

• 27:39Speaker 06

  If they were, it was mainly communicating the sort of more functional benefits of it. No one was really building a brand or telling a story. And I thought, hey, this is an opportunity here could be, have a really broad appeal.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  And you're making them in New Zealand?

• 27:56Speaker 06

  We are indeed. It's all locally made. We've got a couple of different fabrication teams here in Auckland, which is great. It means that we can stay really close to the process. There's no reliance on overseas.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  And your ambition, it sounds like, is to remain mainly in Auckland or mainly in New Zealand?

• 28:12Speaker 06

  Well, look, I feel like I've seen what success looks like. Having lived overseas, these doors are so common. You know, I feel like the opportunity, if I could set myself up here and build the product and build the brand, then there's no reason why I couldn't elevate this and take this further apart, whether it's franchising, take it overseas.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yep. And tell us what your question is for us today.

• 28:37Speaker 06

  So, my question today relates to word of mouth in terms of driving interest inquiries and sales. I think from an instincts and an experience point of view, I have a pretty good grasp of marketing and brand building fundamentals. But my question relates to driving word of mouth. How to accelerate the level of conversation and drive inquiry?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Got it. Okay. Justin McLeod, we've got framework doors here. Questions, thoughts, ideas?

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, so you think about word of mouth. I mean, that's how Hinge has primarily grown, building a good product and people using it and then telling their friends about it. Luckily, though, we're in dating, which people talk about all the time without me needing to prompt them. Steel front doors probably less so brunch conversation usually. And so the question is, how can you create moments for people who do buy your product for them to talk about it? In my mind, there's kind of like two moments. One is the delivery moment. Some unreasonable hospitality kind of moment that gets people so excited that they get something they didn't expect. I recently used a furniture rental company because I need a little stopgap for furniture for a place.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  And they delivered a little handwritten note and a house plan, which I didn't order, but they just had like a nice little succulent plan as like a home warming kind of gift. And it just made me like, think about them. It like raised my, like, it made me want to tell people about like the overall experience because it puts such a nice touch on it. And then, by the way, the other moment is every time someone walks through your front door. Because this, people are going to experience it for the first time. And if there's a way to call out Something that you could give people that would make them sort of remember to talk about how great it is to have a door like this, like a little handbell instead of a doorbell that you can ring that you attach to the outside, or just something that makes

• 30:33Speaker 02

  people like trigger to talk about their experience.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, to your question about how do you drive a conversation or word of mouth around this product, I mean, these are, look, it's, this is not a mass consumer product, right? This is something that is, it is kind of niche and that's okay. You can still build a significant and great business around a product that only some people want or have. But I think what you, you might want to try to do is maybe when you sell one to a customer, you offer them the opportunity to buy a second one for their back door at a significantly reduced rate if they refer a new client to you.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  I love it. Yep, that's really great.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  I mean, you're selling these one at a time. I'm sure you're connected to each person who buys these things. I would, I would hop on the call with them and say, hey, look, our business depends on, on our customers telling people how much they love these things and how much it's improved their lives and their home. If you're willing to, you know, do a testimony, even a testimony on the website could be helpful, you know, or here's what people are saying. Things like that could be useful. Get your customers talking about how they're using this, how it's improved their lives. But I think it's really, it's one person at a time, it's one customer at a time, getting that customer to be a force multiplier, as the military says.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that's totally right. Imagining those little, little coupons and certificates, like the kind of give 100, get 100, or give 200, get, get 200 when you deliver.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I also think that there's a world where you might see if you can partner with an outdoor garden kind of store, because it strikes me that people who would be particularly interested in this are people who obviously like the outdoors and probably garden, or like to see their garden, or like to see, right, what's in front of their house. So I wonder if there's a way to also integrate this idea with a home gardening supply store in Oakland and see if you can partner with them and maybe, maybe just brochures.

• 32:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, we do a lot of letter dropping, door knocking. You know, I've sort of canvassed a whole lot of the central suburbs and it really is just a kind of a one door at a time, one home at a time, you know. And what's great about these doors is you can kind of see straight away from the get go whether or not they're a potential consumer on the sheer virtue of whether or not they have one of these doors. If they don't, then it's great, you can chat to them.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, can you set up, by the way, could you set up like a mobile version of this? Like, you know, a door frame that you can stick on the back of a truck with a relatively lightweight door and one of these frames and then you could set it up at, you know, a county fair or somewhere where you're allowed to display it so people can see how it actually works?

• 33:15Speaker 06

  Definitely, I'd love to do that. I've sort of thought about, you know, what would the experience at a trade show be? We haven't done trade shows yet, but I'd love to create that sense of being in a home and having one of these doors and, you know, perhaps creating a nice scene of imagine what it would be like to have one of these at your home. Similarly, you know, you've talked about having one of these doors and actually getting people interacting with them. That's great.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  And then one more idea I had for you, Nick, which is it's very American. I don't know if New Zealanders are this obnoxious like we are, but, you know, in American homes, it often says the family's name, like, you know, the Kelly family or Nick Kelly, right? So could you, is there a world where maybe you offer a customized one where sort of the Kelly family is integrated into the design of these doors? So you know that, you know, you're being welcomed into the Kelly home when you see it?

• 34:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot of customization there. I think also opportunities to color the doors, you know, different color finishings, name finishings. I feel like there is a, there's a huge opportunity to really develop the product. Once I've kind of built the foundation of it and that'll be, that'll be a really great growth opportunity.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, anything that makes it striking and generates conversation when someone walks in the door is, will obviously help word of mouth.

• 34:37Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  For sure. Nick Kelly, your company is called Framework Doors. Good luck. Thanks for calling in.

• 34:44Speaker 06

  Thank you so much, guys. Appreciate your time.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Cheers. You can't do that in New York City in your apartment there because you live in an apartment probably, right?

• 34:52Speaker 02

  I live in an apartment.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you don't really want your door open and your neighbors walking by and looking in your apartment and, you know, being nosey.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Knowing what you have inside.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think New York City's this market, but luckily it's in New Zealand.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  All right, we're going to take another quick break, but we'll be right back with another caller. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to The Advice Line right here on How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to The Advice Line on How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz and today I'm taking calls with Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod. And let's bring in our next caller. Welcome to The Advice Line. Tell us your name, a little bit about your business and where you're calling from.

• 35:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, Guy and Justin, thank you so much for having me on the show. My name is Chandler Withington. I am calling from the land of 10,000 lakes in Victoria, Minnesota. I am the founder of Archive 22, where I'm a licensed artist for the United States Golf Association, PGA of America, and the National Hockey League. Through the use of logos, my hand-drawn artwork celebrates the history of golf and hockey. I think what makes my artwork unique is, especially in the golf space, I've been able to negotiate and license pieces of artwork which have never been done or even attempted before.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Got it. Okay, Chandler, thanks for calling in. Welcome to the show. All right, Archive 22. So basically, if I understand correctly, you do hand-drawn sort of posters of golf, like the logos of the golf clubs?

• 36:38Speaker 07

  I cover the championships for golf. So we're talking about the US Open, the PGA Championship, and the Ryder Cup. And to answer your question, really the logos of the clubs that have held those tournaments, and then also the names of the champions that have won them. So it's a bit of a history lesson.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  And these are framed posters? I'm looking at your website now. They're framed posters. You also do stuff with the NHL. Framed posters of the logos of these clubs and then also framed posters of NHL.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Team logos and you draw these all by hand?

• 37:08Speaker 07

  We draw them all by hand. This was a project that started for me back in 2018. At the time, I was a golf professional. I've been a golf professional for 20 years. I had a great life. I loved my job and for 10 years I was the head golf professional at Hazelton National here in Minnesota. This was just two years after we had held the Ryder Cup, which is a global tournament. And two years after that, we welcomed our third daughter into the world and following the delivery of that, my wife suffered pulmonary embolism, which is a blood clot in the lungs. Thankfully, we were able to catch it when we did, but that's really, that winter, I stayed close to home.

• 37:48Speaker 07

  I got the drawing board out again. Growing up, I wanted to be an architect and I kind of put it away for 20 years. And that winter, I just started drawing things that I wanted to have in my office and that's where it all began.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  That's amazing. So you draw these yourself and now you're selling these posters, these framed posters, direct to consumer online. And before we get a bit more into your story, tell us what your question is.

• 38:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think we're three years into it. We're doing rather well, but you know, three years in, I would say we haven't replaced the income that I made as a head golf professional, to put that in perspective. But we're a bootstrap company and three years in, we're getting by largely from our sales, not only just online, but at golf championships. I'll be at the US Open next week in Pittsburgh. But I think where we could really use some help is I do really well when I go to a championship, like next week at the US Open, when I get to engage customers and tell our story. I'll sometimes get 30 to 60 seconds or longer to engage with them. But we know how fast society moves, especially online when people are scrolling, is how do I really get them to understand who we are in a very short amount of time?

• 38:56Speaker 01

  All right, got it. Okay, let me bring in Justin. Justin, first of all, any questions for Chandler about Archive 22?

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple. One, so you do get to have this face-to-face interaction when you're at golf tournaments and I'm curious, is there a like a hook or a moment or something that you say that people like get it, they light up and that makes them want to buy? Like what is it that you're trying to communicate?

• 39:22Speaker 07

  I think when people first look at championships, they'll come up, they'll survey the artwork, and they'll kind of get within my blast radius. And I'll say, if you give me 10 seconds, I'll give you the quick story. And really, what I'm trying to convey to them is, one, who I am. Thankfully, the Hazel Team logo is on each piece of the artwork. So I get to kind of point the logo, explain that I was a golf professional for a long time, that I started drawing these for my office. I want to have things in my office that when people came in, would just get us talking and connecting about mutual interest. And really, also the process that it's hand drawn, and that it's also the first time that all these clubs have agreed to be on the same piece of paper, which was a process that took well over a year.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  And your typical customer is who?

• 40:01Speaker 07

  Well, we're at the golf championships. It's golf fanatics. It's people that are going to go play a lot of these, you know, that love the sport.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  It's interesting, because I'm on your website, and I'm looking at it, and I just noticed that the story that you tell just doesn't come through. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is that there's kind of zoomed out photos of your posters, and I can't tell they're hand drawn. Like, from this distance, as I look through them, it just looks like posters with little images on them. And your story about you and who you are, people connecting over these posters and creating conversation, the fact that you're the only licensed illustrator that has, you know, relationships with all of these clubs. To me, like, almost none of that comes through when I hit your website.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  So I just wonder how you can take each of those threads that really catch your customers when you have them in person and bring those to life, like a much more zoomed in image of the hand drawn, like a picture of you drawing the, and sort of your process for how handcrafted these are and how unique they are.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would just double down on that, Chandler. I mean, I think that your personal story is certainly compelling and interesting, but I think the reality is when it comes to selling the product, it has to be the fans' story. That's really what matters. Like, what is it about these posters that bring them to that place? Their passion for a club where the US Open or the Ryder Cup was held, you know, their passion for golf. This is something that they're going to put up in, you know, I'm imagining around a pool table in their house or sort of like a man cave, you know, kind of place, right? Or around the bar where they might be serving drinks. My brother-in-law has tons of these sports memorabilia posters in his house where he's got a pool table.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  And, you know, one really cool thing that he has and one idea I wanted to kind of bring up, which was a lot of what he has are signed by athletes. And I wonder if there's a way for you to sort of think about creating or integrating what you're doing with those signatures, you know, the signatures of golfers. Is there something like that that you might be able to do?

• 42:19Speaker 07

  I think there is. We just haven't gone down that road yet. The gentleman who won the 2024 US Open was Bryson DeChambeau. And we learned later that when he went through Pinehurst, this was the one thing that he purchased from the club because his name was on it. So it's hanging in his house. We need to kind of go down that road. To your point, it's what would elevate it and separate it from the rest.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think he's on to something in terms of, especially because it seems like most of your posters are like histories of every single tournament, but if you started focusing them more on an individual tournament, especially the tournament that you're at right now selling, you also get the repeat customers of like buying, you know, a new poster for each tournament. And then also, by the way, if the most recent US Open winner bought your poster, like... I don't, I'd find some way to be able to advertise that and, and show that as well. Cause that's going to be obviously a major influencer for the community that you're selling to.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. The other thing I would say Chandler, again, you know, the story is about the fans connection to the team. You know, people love the Detroit Red Wings or the Montreal Canadiens or the New York Rangers or whoever. I wonder whether you can also fairly easily, and I think you could, offer things like T-shirts. Print these on, you know, maybe hats with the logos or, I mean, other sort of product lines that people could start to kind of, if they're not yet ready to commit to a poster, because it might be a bit more expensive, maybe a hat, maybe apparel. Is that something that you, you thought about?

• 43:52Speaker 07

  We have, and I think it's, we're, we're trying to just be successful at one thing at a time. So let's be successful paper, then let's figure out what apparel looks like. But we've had that conversation about taking some of the designs, especially with the NHL, putting them on the back of T-shirts that tell a story. One thing I think we know, the power of logos is that when we see a logo on another person, you know, if I were to see Justin wearing the Colgate logo, for example, I'd say, hey, Justin, you know, my, my brother-in-law, Drew Lane, actually went to Colgate. You know, small chance that you know him. So logos do that and we know that. But when people get to wear them outside of the house, not just be on the walls of your apartment, your studio or wherever you are, that's really how you kind of find your people. And I mean, look, Justin's doing that with Hinge.

• 44:35Speaker 07

  It's when all the interests are laid out, that's how you get people to find each other.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Awesome. Oh Chandler, good luck with Archive 22. Thanks so much for calling in. Congrats on, on what you've done so far and keep us posted.

• 44:48Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys. Appreciate the advice and the help.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Thanks Chandler.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  I think that, yeah, I mean, golfers are super passionate, right? And, and now that he's in hockey, I mean, that's also like people, obviously it's, you know, massive fan base. But I, I think that if he can get this on other things besides posters. Even though the poster is the sort of the core, the hero product, it could be an interesting way to increase visibility.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  I was almost thinking in the opposite direction because they're hand drawn. They're almost pieces of art and I'm looking at his price point and these things are like $75. And do these become limited editions? I don't know exactly what his volume is, but knowing that you have, you know, print number 273 of 500 and actually it's like a $250 price point or a $300 price point.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  That's interesting. Yeah, that could be interesting, too. Justin, before I let you go, a question I ask everybody who joins me as a guest on the show. What if you could go back now to when you started out your career and you could, you know, with the perspective you have, what would have been helpful for you to know? Or what advice might you give yourself?

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Well, maybe some meta advice for this show, but I think I would have asked for more advice. I think I was someone who always just thought I could figure these things out and always wanted to figure it out my way from first principles and learned over time that so many people, like I had to go through so many failures and learnings to realize now that like the gems that I'm just handing to you because you asked me. And I think I would have just asked, like gotten a lot more mentors and asked a lot more questions and gotten a lot more curious earlier.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Justin McLeod, thank you so much for joining me this week. It's great having you on.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  That's Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of Hinge. And by the way, if you haven't heard Justin's original How I Built This episode, you gotta go back and check it out. It's a great episode. Awesome story with a great plot twist. So check it out. And here's one of my favorite moments from that interview.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  When we did the relaunch, you know, my first instinct was obviously to like go raise money. So I was talking to every VC, but no one would give me money. I mean, I was begging.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  And I had this like one investor that I was really holding out for. And I remember the partner at the VC firm called me and she was like, you know, we've never seen a company that was cool and then went away and then was able to come back. And we just can't do it.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  And I was like, Timberlands?

• 47:19Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. And by the way, please make sure to check out my newsletter. You can sign up for it for free at guyraz.com or on Substack. And of course, if you are working on a business and you'd like to be on this show, send us a one-minute message that tells us a little bit about your business and the questions or issues that you're currently facing, because we would love to try and help you solve them. You can send us a voice memo at [email protected] or call us at 1-800-433-1298. Leave a message there and make sure to tell us how to reach you, and we'll put all of this information in the podcast description as well. This episode was produced by Casey Herman, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei.

• 48:04Guy Raz?

  It was edited by Andrea Bruce, and our audio engineer was Sina LaFredo. Our production team also includes Alex Chung, Elaine Coats, Catherine Seifer, Kerry Thompson, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, J.C. Howard, and Neva Grant. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to the Advice Line on How I Built This Lab.