Hinge CEO Justin McLeod went from bribing fellow Harvard students with chocolate to having 14 million people signed up for his dating app.
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00:00Hinge CEO Justin McLeod was so desperate for people to sign up for his app that he even bribed them with chocolate.
00:05McLeod was just a Harvard Business School student in 2011 when he came up with the idea for Hinge.
00:10It's now the second most downloaded dating app in English-speaking markets, right behind Tinder.
00:14At the time of the launch, online dating largely took place on desktops, and swiping on your phone was a foreign concept.
00:20So convincing fellow students to sign up for Hinge was challenging.
00:23The opportunity was actually, originally back in 2011 when I started, it was really trying to solve for online dating stigma,
00:30because it was something that was on desktop, you filled out like very long, intense questions, usually paid a lot of money,
00:37and just people in their 20s and 30s really weren't doing that, or if they were doing it, they weren't talking about it.
00:42McLeod told Fortune he remembers the days of bribing kids with KitKats to come try my app.
00:46Financing Hinge also required a lot of scrappiness, with McLeod recalling he had to beg and borrow a lot to get the app off the ground.
00:53However, by 2015, Hinge had raised $26.35 million and had an estimated valuation of $75.5 million,
01:01before Match Group bought the company off McLeod for an undisclosed amount.
01:04Hinge now has more than 14 million people signed up and brought in $396 million in revenue last year.