Hinge, The Relationship App

Introducing Hinge Parental Controls: a dashboard in your Hinge account for your mom and dad to access. Your folks will set their preferences, designed to meet the top concerns of parents. Yes, we’re all grown-ups, but are we ever ready to make our own decisions? Maybe, but they’ll probably be the wrong ones.

Here’s a snapshot of the Parental Controls dashboard:

Download Hinge and Invite Your Parents

Hinge, The Relationship App

Swiping is an addictive game designed to keep you single. Hinge isn’t playing anymore.

Exactly one year ago Vanity Fair published ‘Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse,’ an expose on swiping apps, including Hinge, and the hookup culture they foster. Through a series of interviews with young professionals across the country, the author paints a picture of these apps having killed dating, relationships and romance, replacing them with objectifying games and on-demand sex where everyone feels dehumanized, disconnected and dejected.

While some apps defended themselves, we at Hinge couldn’t help but feel she had hit a nerve. Personally, I had to admit that when I started Hinge as the first social-media-integrated dating service in 2011, this was certainly not the world I imagined. Taking this criticism as a moment to reflect, we began research that would reveal how alarmingly accurate its indictment of swiping apps was.

Swiping Keeps You Single

The first thing that we found was that swiping apps are staggeringly ineffective at helping people find relationships. Not everyone on these apps are looking for relationships, of course, but among those that are only 18% have found even one relationship, ever. It’s hard to imagine any service staying in business where fewer than 1 in 5 customers ever found what they were looking for.

What became clear was that swiping apps are not ‘successful’ because they’re effective at helping users find relationships; rather they’re effective at maximizing user engagement (and therefore advertising revenue). Like a casino, a swiping app isn’t designed to help you win; it’s designed to keep you playing so the house wins. The most popular swiping app boasts that users login on average 11 times per day spending up to 90 minutes per day swiping, and have accumulated on average over 200 matches. However, for the vast majority of users this has led to exactly zero relationships.

There are four aspects of the swiping app’s design that orient the user towards engagement, not finding relationships.

• Match-Centric Design: First is the focus on matching rather than messaging. When you open the app, the first thing you see is not the people you’re messaging with, but rather new people you should start swiping on. Then when you do match, you’re prompted to keep playing so you can find new connections rather than deepen existing ones. As a result, we’ve found that even on Hinge users spend twice as much time swiping as they do messaging. To quote the CEO of the leading swiping app in a TIME interview, “It doesn’t even matter if you match because swiping is so fun.”
• Slot-Machine Interface: Second, the interface is designed to trigger the same neurobiological mechanisms as a slot machine. With every right swipe, there’s a moment of anticipation as you wait to find out if it’s a match. When it is, there’s an on-screen celebration giving you the feeling that you’ve won. This element of surprise creates a rush of dopamine that then quickly fades and leaves you wanting more. Perhaps that’s why users message back and forth with fewer than 10% of their matches. Just like a compulsive gambler at a slot machine, instead of taking their winnings off the table, they keep playing until they’re bankrupt.
• People as Playing Cards: The third is the dehumanizing way people are reduced to playing cards that we flick to the left or the right — a majority of the time not even bothering to click in to see the user’s profile. This static, superficial representation of people leads to the pathologically objectifying way many choose to engage with the real humans on the other side of the app, from snap judgments to crass pickup lines, often asking immediately for sex, nude pics, or worse. This model for engagement does not encourage investment in any one person, as everyone after a while starts to look and feel the same. Our research revealed that a majority users don’t even remember the name of their last right-swipe.
• All Things to All People: Finally, because swiping apps have a free, one-click signup and are advertised with a broad, open-ended use case, it encourages as many people to join as possible. This has gone so far now that a significant portion of swiping app users are reported to not even be single, much less looking for a relationship.

Essentially, swiping is an addictive game designed to keep you single. This is perhaps fine if you’re just looking to have fun, although there is growing research that indicates even in this case it’s neither fine nor fun, instead leading over time to anxiety and depression. Regardless, to call swiping apps ‘dating apps’ is a very unfunny joke at the expense of those looking for relationships — of which there are many. Currently when we ask Hinge users privately, 87% are open to a relationship, with 45% looking exclusively for a long-term relationship.

A World Without Swiping

While dating apps have become a pervasive phenomenon in our culture, they’re also a new phenomenon. They may have hijacked and thrown off balance one of our oldest, most central and most basic instincts as human beings, but it’s important to remember we’re likely very early in their evolution. Swiping and hookups may continue to stay relevant for some, but most of us will mature and moderate in response to our natural need for deep, long-term connection.

Although Hinge is already seen by our users as the most relationship-oriented dating app, 70% of them are now telling us they want something even further in that direction — though most are not willing to join the baby boomer generation on expensive, old-fashioned websites like Match and eHarmony. We believe technology has incredible potential to help people find compatible partners with which they can form successful relationships. Given the current state of our culture, it’s now more critical than ever that there exist a service that helps those bold enough to seek real relationships find meaningful connections, while still being accessible to the millennial generation. What became clear through our research was that swiping would never achieve that mission. This new service would have to break the mold.

At the end of 2015, despite the fact that Hinge was as big as ever and still growing, we decided to cut bait. Starting fresh, we embarked on what became a nine-month journey to develop that new service which would ditch swiping, matching, timers and games and replace them with a way to help people meaningfully connect.

On October 11, this new service will launch on iOS in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and India. With it, we hope we can pave the way for a new normal in dating culture that treats people with dignity and helps those seeking relationships find what they’re really looking for.

Justin McLeod is the Founder and CEO of Hinge

Meet the new Hinge

In November 2015, a team of 20 decided to take a successful mainstream product, rebuild it from the ground up and create something completely new. The below details how Hinge built a refuge from swipe culture for those looking to escape the dating apocalypse and find something real.

PART 1: Facing the Facts.

Last September, Vanity Fair published an article titled “Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse.” Penned by Nancy Jo Sales, the piece explored an empty hook-up culture driven by the proliferation of free dating apps. Sales painted a lonely world, where apathetic singles practiced competitive ambivalence and avoided “catching feelings” like a plague. Where they addictively swiped, chasing only the thrill of their next match. Where romance had died and a detached indifference replaced it. A world where everyone swiped, but rarely connected.

“A world where everyone swiped, but rarely connected.”

While some apps defended themselves, we at Hinge couldn’t help but feel she had hit a nerve.

The mission at Hinge had always been to create relationships — but somewhere along the way we started contributing to superficial swipe culture. When we asked, our community agreed: Hinge was the most relationship-oriented of the free apps, but it just wasn’t different enough.

Outside, Hinge continued to grow exponentially. Inside, we knew something had to change.

PART 2: Rebuilding for Relationships.

So our team set out to build something better. We wanted to create an antidote to detached swiping and endless choices. But to do it successfully, we had to understand our community and data more deeply than we ever had before.

Distilling the problem.

We had to figure out what exactly about Hinge was broken. So we launched HingeLabs, our first user-led research division to communicate directly with our community. Our goal was to create an open dialogue with our users to better understand what they did and did not like about the app. Through dozens of surveys and data analysis, here’s what we learned:

• Our users were matching, but not truly connecting. Our users were swiping a lot — but only 15% of matches were turning into actual conversations. This pointed to a broader trend of mindless swiping for either entertainment or validation.
• Hinge was the best for relationships, but it wasn’t enough. On a 1–10 (hook-up to relationship) scale, Hinge was considered the most relationship-oriented app at a 7. When asked what they were looking for, 70% of users wanted something even more serious than Hinge.

The hole in the market.

We immersed ourselves in the broader dating space. We looked at competitor designs, advertising, growth and more. We surveyed and focus grouped our community about their perception and usage of other online dating sites and apps. We even tried them all ourselves! Check out our findings: www.thedatingapocalypse.com

A Match.com for the next generation.

Our team determined there truly was a hole in the market. There was no modern dating experience for people seeking real relationships.

With clunky web based products like Match.com still incorporating screen names, and apps like Tinder letting everyone join regardless of intentions, we knew our community was craving a better, more relationship-oriented experience — and we believed we could deliver.

PART 3: Introducing the Relationship App.

We were over mindless swiping and endless games that resulted in more dead ends than relationships. Our community was too. So we redesigned and rebranded Hinge for people who want more. For people who want to escape the games and find something real. Here’s what to expect:

No Swiping Games. Instead of “hot or not” swiping and racking up matches, people engage with the rich stories on your profile for more human conversations. It’s like Instagram profiles for dating and in beta testing has driven 5X the conversations.

$7 Monthly Membership Fee. We’re curating an invested community of people who want more than mindless games. $7 is less than your monthly Netflix or Spotify subscription, and nowhere near the cost of eHarmony ($60/month) or Match.com ($42/month). But it’s enough to make sure everyone is on the same page and not just using Hinge for entertainment.

PART 4: Proof and Pudding.

In beta testing, the new Hinge has proven to be a 10X better experience for those seeking real connections. It has exceeded our expectations.

• On average, 2X as many people are connecting.
• 5X as many connections turn into two-way conversations.
• 7X as many connections turn into phone numbers exchanged.

PART 5: What’s Next.

Expect more features that support our mission statement:

“Inspired by love and guided by authenticity, we create meaningful connections among those bold enough to seek real relationships.”

Additional updates we’re working on include:

• Richer Profiles. Get a fuller sense of someone’s personality: video, personality profiles, etc.
• Discovery 2.0. Actively search for new people based on shared friends, interests, or experiences.
• Deeper Connections. Improvements to the way you connect with people and take things offline.

PART 6: More About Hinge.

About the Founder

Justin McLeod is founder and CEO of Hinge, the relationship app that helps you discover new people through friends. He grew up in Louisville, KY and studied at Colgate University. After a few years in management consulting, Justin attended Harvard Business School and decided to follow his passion for connecting people. He founded Hinge in February 2011 and launched the previous version of the app, legacy Hinge, in February 2013. As a romantic and protagonist of a real life love story, Justin was upset by the negative swipe culture free dating apps had created. So in October 2016, he relaunched Hinge as the first members-only community for relationship-seeking millennials.

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