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SPEAKER_05: I remember people always telling me, you know, hey, Joel, nobody pays for apps. Apps are all free. And no one's going to ever pay for an app. And I said, I'm actually not an app. I'm essentially a dating business, and people have been paying for dating for centuries. You're a matchmaker. I'm a matchmaker. And so I expect people will be willing to pay for it because we're providing a lot of value. And fortunately, I was right.
SPEAKER_03: Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Joel Simkai wanted an easy way to meet other gay men. So he built Grindr and helped it grow into one of the most popular dating apps in the world. Grindr changed the way people meet. If you don't know it, it was started as a dating app, mainly for gay men. And today, it's used by around 12 million people a month. In 2009, when it launched, there was no Tinder. There was no Bumble. Yes, there was internet dating, but Grindr was different. First of all, its founder, Joel Simkai, was unapologetic. He called it a hookup app, plain and simple. But secondly, and most importantly, Grindr was the first dating app to use geolocation. It meant you could see how close another Grindr user was in real time on the app. But what's probably most remarkable about the rise of Grindr is that Joel didn't really know what he was doing, at least at first. He wasn't a programmer or a software engineer. He wasn't an expert in marketing. But he was a gay man who knew how hard it could be to meet other gay men. And he wanted to fix that problem. The answer came to him in 2008. That year, Steve Jobs made the iPhone open to third-party apps. And in the iPhone and the App Store, Joel saw an opportunity. Grindr would go on to become one of the most successful, but also one of the most polarizing dating apps ever created. Sometimes it even put its users in danger. But we'll get there. Joel Simkai was born in the mid-1970s in Israel, but his family moved to New York when he was three. And as long as he could remember, he struggled to fit in at school.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so I was mostly friends with girls. And I wasn't very athletic. I was a small kid. I played tennis. My parents were very good in giving me opportunities and encouraging me to do things. But I was not very good at sports. My hand-eye coordination remains to this day not very good. And so it wasn't something that I excelled at at all.
SPEAKER_03: When did you start to feel different from other boys? I mean, you mentioned the sports thing, but did you get teased as a kid?
SPEAKER_05: I did get bullied. You know, luckily I had a great family and my cousins. And so that was really who I connected with. As a child, I didn't quite connect as much with people at school. I knew I had these feelings, but I didn't quite understand them. And I vividly remember once I was part of the swim team in high school. And I was teased and someone called me a faggot. And then I said, no, I'm not, I'm not gay. I'm not gay. And for the first time I said to myself, wait a minute, what if I am? Maybe I am. And so, you know, it took me several years to realize that I was gay. One of the things that was very helpful for me was online. So these were the days of CompuServe and AOL chat rooms. And so I was able to connect with people online.
SPEAKER_03: So all right, so you are kind of exploring your own identity. You go off to college, you went to Tufts in Boston. And while you were there, did you start to feel more comfortable coming out or were you still quiet about it?
SPEAKER_05: So I was pretty quiet about it still in college. I had a girlfriend or had several girlfriends, but I also was started to kind of date guys. And all of this was kind of secret. This was kind of my, you know, I would go on AOL and, you know, meet guys in Boston. And then I would over the summer and I was back home. That allowed me a little bit more freedom where I was going to bars and going to clubs and leading, you know, more of a gay life when I was back home in New York.
SPEAKER_03: When you finished college, I read that you worked very briefly in investment banking and then, and I guess you worked at a dot com startup, like right before the dot com crash in the early 2000s. That's right. That's right. And I know that like after 9-11, you ended up working in media at NBC for a couple of years doing some translation work. So, okay, so at the time you were living in New York and I guess it seems like you didn't quite know like what you wanted to do next, but I guess you'd figured out that you didn't want to work in like a corporate environment. Like that wasn't going to work for you, right? No, not at all. Yeah. But I mean, I feel like in terms of your personal life, you know, this is still early internet era, but you know, internet dating is starting to gain traction. And I mean, how was your sort of social life in New York? Were you dating? Was it, were you having fun? Was it exciting? Was it easy to meet people? Yeah, in New York, you know, right after college, I remember just a great time.
SPEAKER_05: You know, this is, I just come out and now, you know, everyone essentially knew I was gay. I was gay at work, you know, not something I advertised at work. And so I just, you know, would go out, I would go to clubs, bars, restaurants, and would still use online. You know, Craigslist became very popular, personal ads on Craigslist. There was another website called Connection, which was more dating based for gay people. And I met one of my first boyfriends on that. But I kind of had a healthy mix of online and meeting people offline and, you know, being quite social.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Did you always, in your mind, think that you would start a business? I mean, your dad had a business, he sold diamonds. And so, you know, maybe it's in your DNA. But did you see yourself as like somebody who could hang up a shingle and start something? Yeah, I mean, I always thought that I would want to do something on my own.
SPEAKER_05: I remember my dad would always say to me, people out there have become very, very successful in selling shirt buttons. Selling shirt buttons? Yeah. So he'd point to the buttons on my shirt. Yeah. And say that there's millionaires who made their wealth by selling buttons. And it might not be glamorous, but it's a great business for a bunch of people. And so that ethos was always very much part of my upbringing. You know, we were not the lawyer or doctor kind of family. We were a go find your own success. But I had started selling magazine subscriptions online. And so I started, you know, a website that sold subscriptions. Wait, just let me, so how did you find out?
SPEAKER_03: Was this like a multi-level marketing thing? I remember I was, I went to go buy a subscription to something.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And I went online on eBay and I saw that it was like really cheap, cheaper than you would get it if you went and bought the magazine directly. And so I said, huh, how do these people sell these magazines so cheap? And then I found out that you could buy these subscriptions through these clearing houses. The mechanics of the business is these magazines are eager for subscribers because that's how they get their advertising base. And so they often would sell it, the subscription at a discount just to get the subscriber. And so I set up a website, contacted some clearing houses and started selling magazines.
SPEAKER_03: And you would sell subscriptions to which magazines? All kinds of magazines, almost all of them. Time, Newsweek, whatever, The New Yorker.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And so the business grew. I mean, it was, you know, I don't remember how big it grew to, but this was my main business for a number of years. And you know, it grew to a point where I actually couldn't handle it anymore. Because it was just you, right? I know I actually had other people. There were, you know, there's a marketing component to it. So we had people helping with the marketing and then people, some people helping with the customer service and the operation. So it wasn't a very complex business, but you know, I was able to work from home and run my own business.
SPEAKER_03: All right. So you're doing this magazine subscription website. But I guess I, from what I understand, the business kind of plateaued around 2008. And you decided to close it down and make a major move to Los Angeles. Why LA? What were you going to do when you got there?
SPEAKER_05: I had no idea. But I remember at this point, you know, I had for a number of years been kind of trying to think about how can I meet guys in a more efficient manner and how can I use technology? And I remember the founders of Foursquare before they started Foursquare, they started a company called Dodgeball, I think, and it allowed you to connect with people using SMS. And so I remember I reached out to them and I said, hey, can I use your platform? And I thought this would be a great way to meet guys. This was something that you'd been thinking about, like while you were doing the magazine
SPEAKER_03: subscription business. You were thinking, I have a hard time meeting other guys. Because presumably, like, you know, you might meet somebody or see somebody and you wouldn't know if they were gay, they might be gay, you wouldn't necessarily know, you wouldn't know if you could approach them or talk to them, right? I mean, there are probably things like that, too. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, that's, I think every queer person walks into a room and, you know, wonders who else is just like them in the room. And so, yeah, that's our big challenge. I mean, I think for straight people, you just assume that. Exactly. Yeah, just you just assume and so this nagging problem was always there. And then right, you know, a few months after I moved to LA, Steve Jobs announces the second generation iPhone.
SPEAKER_03: And remind me what made the second generation of iPhones special.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so this iPhone now would have three things. One was the App Store. And so now developers could develop third party apps. Secondly, they could distribute those apps in the App Store. And third was that they would add GPS to the iPhone. In some ways, I felt like Jobs had built this phone for me, because it was exactly, you know, what I needed. There was no hesitation in my mind. This was the moment I was waiting for.
SPEAKER_03: Almost immediately you think this is a platform that I can build something, some kind of dating or meetup app on.
SPEAKER_05: It wasn't almost immediately. It was immediately. You know, the second he said this, I said, I need to build an app that lets me meet guys on it. Yeah. So I had this idea. The big problem is I had no skills to make this happen. You were not a coder.
SPEAKER_03: This is you did not study computer science.
SPEAKER_05: Not a coder. And, you know, I don't have any design skills. I don't know how to build, you know, I don't know, I don't know technology. And back then there was no ecosystem for iPhone developers. Not clued into the tech community. I wasn't clued into development and anything like that. So what I did was I went to, you know, the first generation iPhone had a jailbroken app store where third parties would develop software for the iPhone. And this was sanctioned by Apple. And just to clarify, these were apps that people developed for the first generation
SPEAKER_03: of iPhones. But I guess the phones had to be, as you say, jailbroken. They had to be like internally hacked in order to run these applications? That's right. OK. And you knew that there was a website where you could like download these apps. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: So there was an app store, the jailbroken app store, I think it's called or was called Obsidia, and they had, you know, a number of different apps that you could download. What do they have? What do you remember? Well, the ones I remembered were some mapping apps. This was, again, before any Apple maps or Google maps. And so I reached out to each of those developers and I said, hey, I'd like to develop an app myself. And I was wondering, you know, would like to hire you to build this app for me. I think I said it was an app for, you know, dating. I think I probably had said it's a dating app, but I was a little bit cagey about what it was because I didn't want them to steal my idea.
SPEAKER_03: And how long did it take before you got a response?
SPEAKER_05: I don't remember how long, but I didn't get many responses. So a gentleman out of Denmark, Morton, got back to me and I think we had gone on the phone and I kind of pitched him my idea and he was all very excited. What did you tell him on the phone? Well, at first I was kind of, I didn't mention the gay part right away, but eventually when I told him, you know, I want to build an app where I can meet people using location, I want to see, you know, who's nearby. By the way, you know, I'm gay and I think this would work really well for the gay community. And so I'd like this to at least initially focus on helping me find other gay people. And what did he say? Great. It was perfect. And he was, you know, very excited by it. And he's thought that that made a lot of sense and he thought it would be a great market to launch with it.
SPEAKER_03: All right. So let's just for some perspective here, we're 2008. You get in touch with this Danish guy, Morton, who knows how to build an app. First of all, how are you going to pay him? Did you have any money to pay him?
SPEAKER_05: No. And so that was the other part I said to him, and by the way, I don't have a lot of money. And he said, OK, well, we'll figure it out. This sounds like a very good idea to me. I think it's going to do well. We'll figure it out.
SPEAKER_03: Did you design what you wanted it to look like or did you like what kind of direction did you give this coder in Denmark?
SPEAKER_05: So the other thing I did at this point was ask a lot of my friends for help. I said, you know, I need a name. I needed, you know, I need a logo. I needed to design this app. I need there's a lot that needed to happen. And I reached out to my friend Scott Llewellyn, and he was a graphic designer. And he, you know, we were friends. He had a full time job. I asked him to help me and he was excited by the opportunity. And the three of us worked on this app. And I remember, you know, one day looking at my photo album on my phone and I said, hey, wouldn't it be great if these were the guys around me? And so that was really the inspiration for the user interface of Grindr. And it still remains today is it's a grid of people. The first person would be me. And then the next profile to the right would be the closest person in nearby. And then the next person to their right would be a little bit further away. And that's how we would display all these profiles of the people nearby. All right. So you're in LA and the plan is to launch this app.
SPEAKER_03: And like, did you think of this as a fun project or did you think of this as a potential, like, significant business opportunity?
SPEAKER_05: I thought of this as something that I needed in my life and that put me at the center. And I remember many times talking to people online and they would say, yeah, I'm going to, you know, you hit it off and say, OK, great. When can you meet? And they'd say, oh, yeah, I'll be in town in a few weeks. And with the power of GPS, I wanted to meet the guys who were nearby. All right.
SPEAKER_03: So you're working on this idea and the name, you come up with this name, Grinder. So tell me about that name.
SPEAKER_05: So we came up with the name, you know, kind of brainstorming various names. And we didn't want it to be something that was all about being gay or queer. But we wanted it to be something distinctive. We wanted it to be something that was unique. And Grinder was one that we liked. We also looked at, you know, Mixer and Blender. And we really liked this idea of mixing people together. We chose Grinder because, one, I liked that it was edgier. And I also liked kind of these, it wasn't quite sex, but it was sexual. And I thought it was unique and, you know, and masculine also. So was this all you were doing?
SPEAKER_03: Was it like your entire focus? Or were there other things you were doing? Were you like doing a day job, for example?
SPEAKER_05: I didn't have a day job. We were just working on this. This there was a lot to be done. To me, this was a race, a race to launch first because I thought to myself, you know, if I have this idea, I'm sure there's lots of other people who have this idea. I don't remember quite because, you know, the iPhone was announced in June. I don't quite know when the App Store and, you know, the distribution started. But it was starting already. And people were starting to get these new iPhones. And so I realized it was just a matter of time before, you know, someone else would do this. And so, but the challenge was, you know, Morton and Scott were both full time jobs. And that made things to go very slowly. Yeah, at least in my mind.
SPEAKER_03: And how, I mean, even things like, even though Morton was working for very little money, but even things like filing for, you know, a trademark and looking for a lawyer to help you do that. And that still costs money, not that much, but it still costs money. How are you financing that? I mean, did you have savings?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I had a little bit of money. I think we'd only spent a few thousand dollars. And you and we say we, it's me and you and Scott.
SPEAKER_03: And do you remember feeling stressed out at that time at the pace of things? Yeah, I was very frustrated with the pace, you know, because Morton was working part
SPEAKER_05: time and I, you know, or actually, you know, he had a full time job and understandably not his first priority. And I wasn't really paying him that much. So I wasn't in the position to be very demanding. But fortunately, there were no other apps. And I remember I would check off and to see, you know, I would type in gay into the App Store to see what would come up. And I remember the time also before we launched, I reached out to some of our competitors. So I said to myself, how am I going to get this? And how am I going to distribute this? How am I going to get people to know about this? Yeah, I don't have the money to do a marketing campaign. I just don't know how to do that. And so my idea was, you know, why don't you go work with the incumbents and private label what Grindr was like white label it for match.com or one of these other who was out there?
SPEAKER_03: Do you remember?
SPEAKER_05: So Manhunt was the big incumbent. They were the dominant player in the United States, a multimillion dollar business. You know, that's the website that gave me I would use. And I remember I went to them and they called me actually the day we launched and said, we're not interested in doing a partnerships, but we're interested in buying you.
SPEAKER_03: So this is March 20, I think you launched March 25, 2009. That's right. The day you launched, you got an acquisition offer. Was it a significant offer? $25,000. And so that wasn't going to happen. And just to be clear. Well, it was a lot more than I had.
SPEAKER_05: It was a lot more than I had spent. I'd spent probably a few thousand dollars. So it would have been a decent return. And I remember him calling and saying, Manhunt calling and saying, you know, we just commissioned a study. You know, we spent a few hundred thousand dollars on this study. And we asked our users and location was not at the top of their list of importance, but we're still interested in buying you. We think it's interesting. Let me call you back tomorrow. I want to talk to the boss and call me the next day and say, no, we'll pay you. Actually they said $25,000 to $35,000. And I said, you know, listen, I think that's very nice of you, but I'm going to turn you down. And many years later I told them, you know, hey, had you offered me the $200,000 that you had paid for the study of yours, I would have taken your offer.
SPEAKER_03: When we come back in just a moment, why Grindr began to blow up, even though it was prone to crash and kept getting one star reviews. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This. This is the summer to explore. Before you set foot out the door, set foot in the ultimate travel shoes from Allbirds. Allbirds are versatile enough to go with any outfit, durable enough to wear on any terrain, and lightweight enough to make packing a breeze. I actually have a pair of the Plant Pacers, which are made with 100% plastic-free vegan plant leather. And I absolutely love them. They're super stylish, they're comfortable, they're durable, they're basically everything you'd want in a shoe. I would also recommend checking out the collection of Allbirds tree shoes. They're all made from insanely comfortable, breezy eucalyptus fiber. There's the Tree Dasher, which is a running shoe with extra grip and responsive foam. The Tree Lounger, it's a super packable slip-on with a minimalist design and maximum comfort. And the Tree Skipper, it's a silky smooth boat shoe that fits naturally into any situation. Get in vacation mode before you even leave the house with Allbirds tree shoes. Find your perfect pair at Allbirds.com today. And use code BUILT for free socks with a purchase of $48 or more. That's A-L-L-B-I-R-D-S dot com. Code BUILT. As a business-to-business marketer, your needs are unique. B2B buying cycles are long, and your customers face incredibly complex decisions. Isn't it time you had a marketing platform built specifically for you? LinkedIn Ads empowers marketers with solutions for you and your customers. You'll have direct access to 930 million members, 180 million senior-level executives, and 10 million C-level executives. You'll be able to drive results with targeting and measurement tools built specifically for B2B. In technology, LinkedIn generated two to five times higher return on ad spend than other social media platforms. Our team uses LinkedIn all the time to research potential guests for this show. It is an invaluable resource. Make B2B marketing everything it can be and get a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com slash BUILT THIS to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com slash BUILT THIS. Terms and conditions apply. One more thing before we get back to the show. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And it's totally free. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's March of 2009. Joel has just launched Grinder. He's turned down a bargain-basement offer to sell it, and he's now anxiously watching the App Store to see how it's doing.
SPEAKER_05: I remember I was alone in my house at the point. I had no marketing plan. I had no budget. I had—there was no launch party. There was no celebration. There was no champagne. It was almost just like any other day except for this phone call I got.
SPEAKER_03: So before you hit the launch button or, you know, whatever, the proverbial launch button and it went live, what was the plan on how it would make money? Was there a plan? So we added ads.
SPEAKER_05: There was the provider AdMob, which would serve ads.
SPEAKER_03: And that would just suck in whatever ad, you know, the algorithm pulled in, and you would get pennies on that ad or something like that. Yeah, that's right. So initially, when you opened the app on March 25, 2009, tell me what you would see. What could you do? I open it up, and then what's the first step?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to sign up and to get onto the app. So we didn't even require an email address, no phone number, nothing. It was just we had used the device ID. You could log on and you didn't have to even create an account, which later became a problem. But initially, you could just log on and photos were not required. They were optional. And so the idea here was two things. One is that, you know, not all gay people are going to be comfortable. So let's not make a lot of requirements. Number two, let's make this as frictionless as possible and very, very simple and straightforward.
SPEAKER_03: And it was just going to be free. There was no paid model initially, right? That's right.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so it was just like, you know, grid, just like your photo album. The first photo essentially was the closest person. You would look at their profile and it would say, you know, so and so is, you know, 500 feet away, you know, five miles away, whatever the distance was. And then you could chat with them. And so you would hit the chat button, send them a message. I think at the time, you might have been able to exchange photos. I can't quite remember if we launched with that or not. But eventually, you'd be able to exchange photos and chat.
SPEAKER_03: So when you launched the app, I mean, this is a time where there were probably only like 10,000 apps in the App Store total. So discovery was just much easier. And was it just discovered? I mean, was it pretty soon after you launched it? Did people start to find it because there weren't many, first of all, gay hookup apps if any, and probably not even that many dating apps yet. There was a few other apps.
SPEAKER_05: But certainly if you would type in gay into the App Store, you wouldn't come up with much. You know, what we decided to do was to have parties. And we would go to local gay bars in LA and, you know, throw grinder parties. June was, you know, Pride Month. We went to different prides. And I remember going to San Francisco Pride. And what we would do is we would hand out little business cards, you know, download a grinder, and the reaction was very, very positive. Anytime someone at that time heard that there was an app for gay people, they were really excited. It was a free app. And so we got probably about a thousand downloads a day.
SPEAKER_03: At what point, though, did you have to figure out a way to get money? I mean, every a thousand downloads a day, even in the first month, like a certain point, you've got to build out a team to support that. So did you get a loan? Did you go to a bank? Did you ask family, friends? Like what did you do?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I got a loan about $100,000 for my parents. You know, fortunately, I wasn't paying Scott. He was working for equity. Morton was getting eventually what would the deal I had with Morton was a rough share on the ads that come in. So he would get paid as ads would come through. And it was just the three of us, really. So the costs weren't that high other than and the serving costs were not that much at first. But quickly, the complexity kicks in and we needed to find ways to monetize.
SPEAKER_03: So how did you I mean, so I hear this idea of Grindr, okay. And my instant reaction to this is, what a brilliant idea, you know, gay men have a hard time meeting other gay men, and you're going to come up with a solution to it. But I have to imagine that a lot, even me in 2009, if you would have told me this, I might have said, I don't see how this is going to work. You know, from the vantage point of 2023, it looks like a brilliant idea. But did you have other people say to you, you know, I just don't think people are really going to use this. I don't see this working. Yeah, I mean, I was met with a lot of doubt.
SPEAKER_05: And I asked a lot of people to help me. I mean, I asked some friends, hey, would you come work with me on this? A lot of people turned me down. You know, when we were launching this, and I was looking for beta testers, I had reached out to my friends. And I said, Hey, can you help me beta test? A lot of people didn't respond to me.
SPEAKER_03: What was the pushback? Do you remember that people gave you? What was the reason for why this wouldn't work?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean, I think it was, you know, some of the responses that I got from the competitors that the iPhone wouldn't take off that, you know, now we understand how important location is. But back then, that was not the assumption. There was no Uber, there was no Foursquare, there was nothing like that. And so our minds at the time were not oriented around location. My mind was oriented around location, because I was the guy who would go online and would have to talk to people who were nearby. And so for me, my struggle was all about location largely. Now you realize, hey, I want to order some food. Of course, I want to order food to exactly where I am. I want to order a car. But none of that exists at the time. And none of that was done through your phone.
SPEAKER_03: The other question I have for you, Joel, and I'm one of the things that is so hard about starting a business, right, or having an idea is hearing no. You tell somebody your idea and they poke holes in it, or they tell you this is why it won't work. And just in our interaction, like you don't come across as like a hustler or like a wheeler-dealer type. But are you, would you consider yourself to be confident and good at kind of presenting and selling?
SPEAKER_05: JOEL What I do know is that I have one skill, really. I don't know how to program. I don't know how to design. I don't really have any hard skills. The only skill I have is to figure it out and to know that everything has, every problem has a solution, especially with technology. And so surprisingly, to me, that's always been my greatest skill. And the way I'm able to do that is being able to work with people and leverage people and to get people to execute kind of my vision. HOFFMAN All right.
SPEAKER_03: So it's clear after you launch this app, right, that you're getting some traction. People are downloading it, right? And like you said before, I mean, there weren't a lot of people out there at the time who even knew how to make iPhone apps. So this guy you were working with, this guy Morton, I mean, he just kind of figured out on his own how to create this and make it all work?
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Yeah. He's, you know, the beautiful thing is he's a hacker. And so he essentially figured this out. But Morton was a developer, an iPhone developer on the front end. What he wasn't was a developer on the back end. Those skill sets of front end and back end are very, very different. And so that was, you know, soon after launch became our big challenge was how do we scale and how do we deal with all this traffic? Him and me and none of us expected the scale we would get. I remember when I had this server before, I would go on once a day and I'd have to restart the server to kind of flesh out. I don't know exactly why, but it was not built for scale at all.
SPEAKER_03: LOUIS And I mean, I have to imagine that the I mean, at a certain point, like early on, did the ads start to generate some revenue to keep you afloat?
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Yeah, that's how we funded the business was through ads, maybe a few thousand dollars the first month. And imagine the first year we probably made a few hundred thousand dollars in ads. LOUIS And you don't have like an ad sales team.
SPEAKER_03: It was just like whatever would come in through this server, ad server. JOEL Yeah, there was no cost to us.
SPEAKER_05: It's just a check at, you know, wire deposit into your account once a month.
SPEAKER_03: LOUIS A couple pennies every time there was a little ad and it could be an ad for whatever. I mean, this is probably still early days when it came to like targeted ads, like so not necessarily like ads that would be targeting gay men. JOEL Yeah, I mean, I think that this was in the
SPEAKER_05: early days. So these were very general ads. Most of them I don't think even were location based ads at the time. These were just very, you know, ads for other apps too, right? You know, Uber at one point was a big advertiser. So other apps would advertise. LOUIS And Joel, you were very clear.
SPEAKER_03: This was not a dating app. If people met somebody and they dated, great. But this was really, you described it as a hookup app. JOEL Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, various times
SPEAKER_05: I thought of it in different ways. But yeah, essentially, I see it as a hookup app. And even, you know, if you peel it a little bit more, I just thought this is a way to meet someone, right? This is just a way for you to meet someone nearby. And whether you go have sex or you go whatever you want to go do, the whole point is to go meet. And that was something that was not really happening on iPhone at the time. LOUIS So it was probably super viral right away,
SPEAKER_03: right? Because once you're on it, you're telling your friends about it. And then that's how it spread.
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Yeah. So our strategy was twofold. One was these grinder parties, and the other was press and to reaching out to the press. And so, you know, I didn't have a PR firm. I would just pitch them and just send them a short email. LOUIS You would just write to the reporter yourself?
SPEAKER_03: JOEL Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: I would just look up who's covering the space or who was, I don't know, and find any reporter I could, email them. I said, hey, I just launched this app. And that's how, you know, we got the word out. LOUIS So at a certain point, Apple, they enable
SPEAKER_03: you to sell the app, right? And that essentially allowed you to create two tiers, a free tier and a paid version. And what was the difference between those two options? JOEL Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: So the paid version, you could see more people, you could block more people. Because remember, every time we would show you a new profile, that was a call to our server. And, you know, our architecture was not very good. And so there was an added expense for each new profile you saw. So we essentially started charging for that.
SPEAKER_03: LOUIS And did you find a lot of people paying for it?
SPEAKER_05: JOEL We got a good amount. And I remember people always telling me, you know, hey, Joel, nobody pays for apps. Apps are all free. LOUIS Yeah. JOEL And no one's going to ever pay for an app. And I said, I'm actually not an app. I'm essentially a dating business. And people have been paying for dating for centuries. LOUIS You're a matchmaker. JOEL I'm a matchmaker. I'm not an app. And so I expect people will be willing to pay for it because we're providing a lot of value. And fortunately, I was right.
SPEAKER_03: OK, what about let's go back to the sort of the technology side. I mean, getting a thousand downloads a day and then just the virality of it. Well, that's putting more and more pressure on the back end. So from what I've read, the user experience in the first couple of years sucked. Like it would crash all the time. Right. Like what was going on?
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Yeah. Our app store ratings were one star. We had horrible reviews. LOUIS It doesn't seem like it affected downloads.
SPEAKER_03: JOEL No.
SPEAKER_05: And user time. I mean, people were using the app for hours. LOUIS But giving you one star reviews.
SPEAKER_03: JOEL That's right. LOUIS And why were they giving you one star reviews? What would happen?
SPEAKER_05: JOEL The app would crash. You would have to wait for the profiles to load. It just wasn't a very good software. But my real problem was I didn't have a technical co-founder. So I didn't have anyone who had a deep understanding of what was going on technically. Morton probably at this point had left and I had hired someone else. And so I had another friend, childhood friend Yvette Pasqua, who worked at a consulting firm down in Costa Rica. And so eventually I turned to her. I don't know exactly what, I can't remember exactly what year that was, but it was fairly early on. And through her consulting shop, they developed the app. They had developers for iOS eventually, Android and Blackberry, and also the backend. LOUIS You outsourced the maintenance of the app to this group of code developers in Costa
SPEAKER_03: Rica? JOEL That's right. That's right. LOUIS So that was very efficient. But did you ever think, you know, I just got to get an office. I got to get everyone in this office. I got to have all these people here, staff, employees. Or was it just, did it make more sense to you to just kind of do patchwork like a, we'll outsource this, we'll outsource that. We'll, you know, just patch these holes like that.
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Yeah, for, you know, I was very reluctant to get an office. I was working from home. I was very happy. I would, you know, I remember I had maybe eight people. They would come to my house. I had a very small house. The neighbors would complain with all the people parking on our small street.
SPEAKER_03: LOUIS And how were you as a, even with a small team, I mean, how were you finding yourself as a boss? I mean, did managing people and projects come easily to you?
SPEAKER_05: JOEL No, I was not very excited about managing. But at some point it became a business. And I was kind of reluctant for it to become a business in some ways. I really kind of loved it as a small project, something that was, that I could kind of do from home. I remember at this point we were getting people interested in investing because we had been getting quite a bit of attention. And they wanted to see my financials. And so we didn't, I said, well, financials, I don't have financials. I don't have projections. I don't know what, who knows.
SPEAKER_03: LOUIS You had not, you had investors coming in wanting to like look at your data room. JOEL Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: I said, data? What are you talking about? I don't have a business model. I don't have a business plan. I don't have a marketing plan. I don't have a data, nothing. You know, you see, what you see is what you get. And you know, I, my collegehood friend, her husband was, wasn't working at the time. And so Carter McJunkin, who ended up being our COO later on, he came in and he helped me put my projections together. And so he would consult and I said, how much do you want? He said, $100 an hour. And I almost fell off my chair. LOUIS Because you thought that's crazy expensive.
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_05: JOEL That's a lot of money. LOUIS Yeah. JOEL And then so a few months into the project with Carter, I think he understood that this was going to take off. And he called me and said, listen, I need to move from, he was out in Maryland at the time, I need to move in Los Angeles. I need to work on this full time. And we need to build a business here. You could tell that this was on a good, very good trajectory. I remember when I went to San Francisco Pride in June, three months after we launched, I was out in the heading out cards and someone said to me, Joel, Stephen Fry mentioned you on Top Gear. JOEL Stephen Fry, the great, obviously British comedian.
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Yeah. And I went back to my hotel room and we got 10,000 downloads. JOEL Stephen Fry was on Top Gear, obviously the
SPEAKER_03: racing show on BBC, and he talked about how he had Grindr on his phone.
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Yeah. So Stephen Fry went on Top Gear, which at the time was the number one show on the BBC. And Stephen Fry is a bit of a tech geek or tech lover. And so Jeremy says to him, oh, do you have any favorite apps? And he says, yeah, I have two apps. One is this app where you can play music on it. And the other app is this app called Grindr. It's a gay cruising app. And they pan to the audience and you can see their reactions. STEPHEN That voice going, like clutching their pearls,
SPEAKER_03: going, oh. JOEL Exactly.
SPEAKER_05: And he then goes out and takes out the app and he basically gives a demo. STEPHEN Wow. JOEL And so that was a huge moment for us where everyone in the UK at this point knew about Grindr.
SPEAKER_03: STEPHEN And this was, and it was possible to download it in the UK too, like the location service would work just the same?
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Absolutely. So we launched, we launched around the world and it was available everywhere.
SPEAKER_03: And one of the things about, one of the early criticisms that you got was critics writing, oh, this is so superficial. It's just like torso shots of guys with six packs and, you know, bulging muscles. And it really is all about looks. And your response to that was, yeah, that's right. That's exactly what it is.
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Yeah. I mean, I think that, yeah, that's right. I mean, I think the way I had always thought of it was, you know, you walk into a bar and what is it that you foresee as you foresee that person? You walk into any situation. And so that is actually mimics real life in some ways. STEPHEN That humans are superficial initially.
SPEAKER_03: We do just look for looks.
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Well, that's what you see. When you see, you don't know anything about the person before you meet them. All you know is what you see. And so for me, this was not very inconsistent with how we meet people normally.
SPEAKER_03: STEVE Now, one of the things that the app did not have was like any kind of sexually explicit photos. Like the photos were, if they were real, but there were no, they could not put any, no one could put like a sexually explicit photo up there.
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Well, so the way I viewed this was, what I tried to do with Grindr was I tried to mimic real life as much as possible. And so what we thought about is that there is a public space and there's a private space. And so with Grindr, there's the public profile and in your public profile, you have to keep it PG-13. In your chat, which is a private chat, you can discuss whatever you'd like and you can exchange whatever photos you'd like as long as it's legal because those are private. And so that's how, if you wanted to exchange explicit photos, you could. And that was a very, very popular feature. And that was in our private space and that was in compliance with Apple and Google's guidelines. And that's what people did. STEVE So, I mean, it sounds like you guys started to bring in revenue, maybe even profit,
SPEAKER_03: even if it was small from ads, pretty soon after you launched in 2009. JOEL We didn't bring in profit.
SPEAKER_05: I don't think we were profitable maybe until year, maybe three or four. But revenue did come in, maybe 2010, we probably did a few million dollars in revenue. But it was break even and trying to grow the team and pay for the servers. Those were our two big costs. We ended up using Google App Engine and at one point, this is later on, they increased their pricing and it almost killed the business because... STEVE What's the Google App Engine, sorry? JOEL Google App Engine was our hosting provider, was the Google web cloud services, essentially. STEVE Oh, and they raised the prices and you did not, and that almost killed the business?
SPEAKER_03: JOEL Well, because our costs went up dramatically and we simply couldn't afford what they were
SPEAKER_05: going to charge us. Eventually we went on, we moved to Amazon because they became so expensive. But largely because we had implemented them in a not a very efficient way. So we weren't profitable for a number of years, but we were fortunately making revenue. STEVE So that could float the business for a while. JOEL Yeah. Our ability, we were able to achieve everything we were able to achieve because our marketing costs were virtually zero. We had a number of people who helped with these Grindr parties. But our marketing spend was essentially zero, so our cost to acquire new users was essentially zero. I mean, that's what allowed us to grow. If I had to spend money acquiring users, we would not have been able to achieve what we achieved.
SPEAKER_03: STEVE You were spending no money on user acquisition. JOEL That's right. STEVE I mean, it's like a dream business. JOEL Absolutely.
SPEAKER_05: Initially, I think ads were 80% of our revenue and the subscriptions were 20%. Eventually it would flip to the opposite, where most of the money came from subscriptions. We had a lot of users. For me, this is a network product. So from my perspective, we wanted to have a lot of free users because we wanted the network. And that's the power of the app. You go on and you see someone nearby. And so if we had to charge everyone, it simply wouldn't have worked.
SPEAKER_03: STEVE I have to imagine that not that long after you launched it, there were competing apps that would pop up. JOEL Oh, yes. Absolutely. STEVE How did you kind of create the moat around Grindr, given that the user experience was so bad in the first year or so? If other competitors were coming on board, I have to assume that some of them might even have had a better app. How did you guys... JOEL They all had a better app. STEVE So how did you manage to compete against them? What was the reason? JOEL It's the size of the network. STEVE Just because you were there early. You were there first.
SPEAKER_05: JOEL Yeah. You know, size matters. I think that even was our tagline for a while. And you know, for a location-based service, when you're meeting people, it's really, you know, all about you want people nearby. And if someone's not nearby, that's not a great experience. And so we had the first mover's advantage. We had the network. And we were growing very quickly. And so that was fortunate for us that we had the network and that was our moat. STEVE And in that sort of year, first year, year and a half, I mean, you know, you come
SPEAKER_03: across as a very kind of quiet and even-keeled guy. Do you get stressed? Did you get angry? Would you like, you know, with the team around you, would you like, we got to fix this? Would you ever panic? I mean, tell me a little bit about just kind of step outside of yourself for a moment. Who was Joel at that time? JOEL Well, I remember the first phase of the first
SPEAKER_05: year was actually quite a lonely time, you know, starting for the development until maybe after launch, until I actually had invited people to come work, you know, physically at my place. It was a very lonely time because, A, I was so busy working on it. So my social life had become essentially nothing. And this is going to sound very cheesy, but I remember I was so, so lonely and I was so depressed and I said to myself, you know what, Joel? I had a conversation with my future self and I had my future self tell me, Joel, keep on going. You need to persevere and you need to just keep on the hard work, keep on the perspective and keep on going. And that was very helpful for me. And you know, I still have conversations with my future self. You know, what advice does he have for me? What perspective does seven-year-old Joel have for current Joel? The other beautiful thing about it is that you can't really argue with your future self because it's yourself. And so it's hard to say, he doesn't know what he's talking about or that kind of thing. And so that's kind of a mechanism that I've employed in my life. So, all right, so one of the things that I think was a really interesting break or probably
SPEAKER_03: the first time that I think I can remember hearing about Grindr was, because I think by September of 2011, you had like two and a half million users all around the world, which is quite amazing. I think it was 2012, right? Summer of 2012, you had the Olympics in London. And basically for some reason, the app crashed at around that time. Somehow a rumor started that this coincided with the arrival of athletes in London at the Olympic village. Tell me the story. Did you plant that story? Did somebody plant that story? Because it's a great story, but what do you remember about that?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. So this was right before the Olympics had started and the athletes had just arrived at the Olympic village and we got an email from one of the tabloids in the UK. They said to us, hey, we noticed that Grindr went down right around the time the Olympians had arrived. Is there any correlation? And I remember I turned to the head of marketing and I said, don't respond. And they ran with the story without comment from us that Grindr had crashed because gay Olympians has essentially crashed the servers.
SPEAKER_03: And said the company had no comment, no response. No response.
SPEAKER_05: And it was ridiculous, right? How many Olympians are there? A few thousand. How many of them are gay? Maybe a few dozen or a few hundred. For them to be able to crash our servers when we had hundreds of thousands of users and maybe daily active users and millions on monthly was simply ridiculous. But that became part of the urban legend, I guess. Yeah. And one of the things I realized also is that our outages actually, we had a lot of outages and we would actually see that any time we would have an outage, our traffic would go up afterwards. And any time we would have a negative news article about outages, our traffic would go up and we'd get more downloads. And so one of the things I realized here was that even bad press, quote unquote bad press, might be good. When we come back in just a moment, Grindr starts to get even more attention for all
SPEAKER_03: the other problems it has, from uncontrollable spam to critical concerns over privacy. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This.
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SPEAKER_03: Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2013, four years after launch, and Grindr has about 5 million total users. And at this point, Joel starts getting calls from people who want to invest in the app. But he says no, he's not interested.
SPEAKER_05: I don't like to answer other people. And I felt that if I would take venture backing, I would essentially become a monkey to them and that I would need to essentially work for them. And a lot of them were straight men who I felt like didn't understand my business and I didn't want to answer to straight corporate America.
SPEAKER_03: And also, I mean, your revenue started to become significant. I think by 2013, it was $25 million. That was a combination of subscribers and ad revenue.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, we had the financial, we could support ourselves. So there were certainly points where we could have used the money. And I was very stubborn about this that I didn't want. And the other thing is I didn't want someone to push me to an exit. I just said to myself, hey, I don't know when we're going to exit and that's not what it's about. This is about building the business. And I think the other part of it is I'm a person who doesn't look for external validation. And I think one of the ways that founders get caught up in validation is with valuations, headcount. And to me, those were vanity metrics and those were not metrics that were important. The only metric that was really important to me was my daily active users and how many messages people sent and what impact were we making. That's what mattered to me.
SPEAKER_03: Has the app gotten more and more popular? You also get scammers, people who are trying to get credit card information and all kinds of scams. When you found out about that, how did you handle that?
SPEAKER_05: I don't know that we had a lot of, in terms of credit card hacking and Apple would process our payments so we didn't have any of those types of problems. But we had spam. Spam was visit my website, go download this, go download that. You had spam profiles being set up?
SPEAKER_05: Oh yes, absolutely. And so going back to the initial founding of the app, we didn't have accounts. Essentially anyone could message anyone. And that was because I wanted to make it very easy for someone to be able to use our service. That made it a perfect opportunity for a spammer to be able to spam our users. And so you would go on and you would start talking to someone and they would send you a marketing message. And it was very hard for us to solve this because we didn't have accounts. And so this was one of our moments where I thought I could lose the business.
SPEAKER_03: Because you weren't clear how many accounts were fake.
SPEAKER_05: Well, no, the customer experience was horrible. You would go on and people would spam you. Imagine getting your inbox without the spam filter. It's just impossible to communicate. And so we had to fight the spammers. So how did you do it? Yeah, so it's creating accounts so everyone has to have an account. You have to verify your email address. So at some point if you didn't sign into your email, you would lose access. Which wasn't a problem because people would do essentially anything. They had put up with so much. Giving an email address was not going to be a challenge. But you also go through messages and you do message detection where you look for keywords that people are the spammers and you shut down the spammers. So it's quite an effort to combat spam. How long did it take?
SPEAKER_05: Years. It took us a few months to really solve the crisis. But it's an ongoing battle. It's a whack-a-mole with spammers to fight them.
SPEAKER_03: So there are obviously always unintended consequences to any technology. This is normal. And one of those unintended consequences was that the app did put some people in danger. Especially gay men in countries where homosexuality is illegal. Afghanistan and Ghana, Iraq, Iran. I don't know if it is today still in Saudi Arabia where it's punished. Egypt. And allegedly in Egypt, the state authorities use the app to track and even arrest gay men. I don't know exactly. It's not alleged. It happens. It happens. So yeah. I mean, on the one hand, it was probably this incredible opportunity for these very closeted, fearful men to meet other men. On the other hand, it put them at risk. What could you do to fix that or to mitigate that? Anything?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, well, a couple of things we did. One was we had messaged our users and told them not to put their faces in their profile, not to publicly declare who they were. The other thing is, you know, Grindr is all about location. So you see how far away you are from someone. Well, using that data, the police are able to find where you are. So in Egypt, we turned off that ability so you couldn't see how far you were from one another. You know, it's a tough call when you think about these places and you say to yourself, should we make this service not available? And from my perspective, what I realized is that this was the only kind of gay bar for a lot of people in a lot of places. And to take that away from them, I thought would be the wrong decision. Because for them, that's largely their access to other queer people.
SPEAKER_03: And as this became more and more successful, I mean, your market was gay men, which is a big market, a lot of dollars. But did you think, I mean, I know that there were people coming at you saying, hey, this is exclusionary. It's only for gay men. What about gay women? What about non-binary folks, trans folks, et cetera? I mean, just from a business perspective, and I hope this doesn't come across as cynical, from a business perspective, it might have been a good opportunity to just expand the user base, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: And I mean, beyond that, we had straight people. I mean, a lot of people... Asking to get on it, yeah. Yeah. Hey, this is before Tinder. Hey, why can't I meet someone on my phone? We need a better way. And yeah, so we got that feedback from all corners.
SPEAKER_03: And so one of the ways you addressed this was with another app called Blender that you created. That's right. And was, I mean, to kind of spoiler alert here, but Blender did not do quite as well as Grindr by any stretch. Was it already too late when it came out? Was Tinder already kind of the dominant app? No, we predated Tinder by quite some time.
SPEAKER_05: Our failure was in the architecture of what we did. And so if there was a woman, she would get hundreds and hundreds of messages. We also allowed people to exchange photos. And so women would get unsolicited nudes. That was a problem. We also would say how far you were on Blender. And that made women uncomfortable. So overall, the failure of Blender was the failure of understanding what were the needs
SPEAKER_05: of women. And part of it was we didn't have women. We mostly were gay men on the team, and we didn't have enough straight women. And we thought we understood the market, but we didn't. How did you cope with the occasional criticism or more than occasional criticism you would
SPEAKER_03: get? Media stories about underage boys going on and signing up, stories about men endangering themselves in countries where it was illegal. How did you personally deal with that? Was it just for you, it's just the price of doing business? Or did it ever get to you?
SPEAKER_05: Well, I mean, each of those are different. But I think on the bigger picture, I think the answer is that with every technology that there is negatives. One of the good things we had was we had the location of these users. So if someone committed a crime, we would turn over to the law enforcement and say, here's where you can find them. But this was one of my challenges at Grindr was not taking maybe seriously enough some of the other issues that we could have dealt with, that we could have helped. People spend an hour a day on Grindr. That's a long time. That's not very good for you. And so thinking through how could we have better help without all these negative things, without the racism, without the transphobia, without all these other negative aspects and aspects of the community. And I guess we should mention that there was quite a bit of that on the site too.
SPEAKER_03: There were men who were saying, I don't date this kind of person, I don't date that kind of person, or they were even in chats quite explicit in their racism.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, absolutely. That was a problem. I think it remains to be a problem. And after leaving, I think I now have a different perspective on that. I think we should have had been a lot more involved and guiding of our users and letting them know that certain behaviors was just unacceptable.
SPEAKER_03: In 2016, you announced that you had sold a 60% stake in the company. This is after many years of many suitors and investors coming at you and you turning them down. This was a Chinese video game developer called Kunlun Tech Company. And they took a 60% stake and that deal valued Grindr at $155 million. So you guys got $93 million at that point. What was the reason? What changed? Like why then did you say, you know what, let's bring it on now?
SPEAKER_05: I think there were two main things that were going on at this point. One was the technology, we were still struggling. We were still just dealing with our scaling issues. We were not shipping updates. We were not releasing new features. And so I just realized I was essentially a firefighter and our team was just firefighting. We were fighting fire after fire and we just didn't have the expertise that we needed. And so I thought, you know, what if I can find a partner who can help me scale this and grow this and someone who really understands technology? So that was one part of it. The other part was I had no idea what my business was worth. So I said to myself, you know, why don't we go out there and find out what the business is worth? And then we got to the point where, hey, this is a lot of money and this is life changing amount of money. So we found Kunlun who they had a lot of experience with mobile gaming in China and also China at the time we wanted to break into China. So they would be the perfect partner to help us with the China. And this partner is going to help us where we were weak and this will finally be kind of this technical co-founder that I've never had.
SPEAKER_03: All right. So they come in and they buy 60 percent stake. And the other side to it is did part of you want to just eventually get out? Because when they take a 60 percent stake, eventually they're going to take 100 percent stake.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I mean, and we had a mechanism for that. It was essentially a three year. We know at the time we said ourselves, OK, likely to be out in three years, but maybe not. I think I probably fooled myself in some ways and thought that I would if I wanted to stay, I could stay. If I wanted to go, I would go. And from an external perspective, you're right. Hey, you know, you sell control, you lose control. But I know that I fully understood that.
SPEAKER_03: All right. So now this this Chinese company comes in. And what did that mean? Did that did everything seem to say the same more or less or did things start to change quickly? And why didn't they own a majority of the company now? I mean, I think, you know, things, you know, we didn't have the best relationship.
SPEAKER_05: The honeymoon was very short. We got hacked soon after the deal closed. And I said, great. You know, you guys are not great that we got hacked, but like, you can solve this. You can help me solve this. But you know, they weren't very helpful. And they were very focused on us launching in China. And they wanted us to really become the number one app in China because there was another app that was gaining a very significant traction to China. I try to look at it from their perspective. You know, they're sitting there in Asia. They're seeing that that they're you know, that someone else is becoming the dominant player in Asia. They're worrying about that. But I'm sitting here in Los Angeles and I'm saying, you know, that's not the end of the world. Even if we don't get China, you know, we that's fine. I'd rather I'd rather lose China than lose, you know, have the business be hacked and lose all our data. And so that became very contentious.
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_03: They exercised their option to buy the rest of the company out about two years later, exactly two years later. Bought the rest of the company for $150 million. And I guess at that point, Scott Chen from Kunlun comes to run, comes the head of Grindr, and they sort of politely asked you to step aside.
SPEAKER_05: I'm not quite sure the word polite is the right word. Maybe impolitely asked you to step aside.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, listen, it was it was very contentious and not the way I wanted to go. But you know, we ended up settling it and, you know, we came to an agreement.
SPEAKER_03: Joel, let me ask you this question. I mean, and it may sound obvious to some people may sound just utterly stupid to others. But you know, you've been grinding away at this just to sort of speak since 2009. It's now 2018. And they've asked you to leave in a contentious way. And you are not happy about it. But you're gonna walk away with 100, $200 million of value. That's a pretty great outcome. And you know, you're walking away from the stress of that business too. So I guess my question is, who cares? Right? Like, why did it matter to you? And I'm not saying who cares. Of course it is. But why? Why did it matter to you that it was contentious and you had to leave?
SPEAKER_05: This you know, I think starting a business is a very emotional thing. And I think it is something that I dedicated myself to. And I had many lonely nights, I had many difficult days and nights. You know, it took all of me. And I was helping my community and helping them meet, helping them, you know, find great sex, finding love. You know, there are people who have gotten married because they found someone in Grindr. And so such a tremendous impact and you know, something that I love more than anything is matchmaking. And so combination of all those things, I don't expect anyone to feel sorry for me because I made a lot of money. But kind of ironically, a few months before I finally left, I met a guy in New York. And we started dating and Brendan and I are now married. And interestingly, I've asked him and I said, you know, he said, you know, I don't think I would have taken you very seriously if you were still the CEO of Grindr. I don't know that this relationship would have worked. And I think for myself also, I think I was able to prioritize him and my, you know, relationships in general. And that created the space for me to fall in love and get married.
SPEAKER_03: I know that after you stepped away, Joel, Grindr continued to grow for some time, but it did have some challenges. And I know that the Chinese company that had bought it from you eventually sold it. And then the new owners took it public a few years later. And for a time, the market cap was like, it was over like $2 billion. I think it's dropped quite significantly now. But when you saw that, I mean, at the time, right, the thing that you built was valued at $2 billion. I mean, it must have been quite amazing to see that.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, you know, I was very, that's certainly mixed feelings, right? But the main feeling I had was kind of proud of myself for building something that got acceptance from Wall Street to a certain extent. I was very proud of that. And I was very proud of the queer community that this was a successful business that, you know, served the queer community. And it was a success story of the queer community.
SPEAKER_03: Around the same time that Grindr went public, you launched a new company, a new app called Motto, a new dating app, which you now is out in the world. Tell me about it. What is it? And how is it different from everything else out there?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so Motto is essentially a hookup app for queer people. You have to upload three face photos. And so you see exactly who you're meeting. And we verify every single person. So it's 100% real community. And it's essentially an experience kind of more like Hinge. You get a batch of people every day at 5 p.m. and you get to react to their profile and you get to reach out to people. And it's meant to be a lot more straightforward and a lot of it was built in reaction to the problems of the current hookup apps, not just Grindr, but the other ones as well. But at the end of the day, I think I had this benefit of sitting there and saying, hey, now what does a hookup app look like if you build it from scratch? You know, 2009 and 2008 was Grindr. And that was the app for then. And then Motto was, I think, the app for today.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Joel, when you think about your whole story, you know, you're a guy who is not a computer scientist, not, I mean, obviously very smart, but like you studied international relations and you were not a coder or developer. You had an idea. Lots of people do. They go nowhere. But you turned it into a really big business and you became very wealthy as a result of that and created something that has had a significant impact on culture, certainly on gay culture, queer culture. How much of that do you think is how much time and grind you put in and how much do you attribute to luck?
SPEAKER_05: You know, this is a tough one because it's hard to tell, right? I'm not a huge believer in luck. I don't actually really know or understand what that means. I'm also very fortunate and, you know, I grew up to parents who were supportive financially and emotionally and in many, many different ways. You know, I don't know, is that, you know, luck in some ways? Sure. But I had a lot of people who come up to me and said, hey, I had that idea too. And my response to all of them is always the same thing. It's like, well, what did you do about it? And the answer always is nothing. Yeah. I go back to what I said earlier and that's, you know, I believe in myself. I don't let other people tell me what to do or to validate me. And I figure it out. And just understanding that, you know, I may be right, I might be wrong, but at the end of the day, I'm a happy guy.
SPEAKER_03: That's Joel Simchai, founder of Grindr and Motto. Motto, by the way, is still small. Right now, it only works in New York and Miami, but with plans to expand far beyond in the future.
SPEAKER_03: Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And it's totally free. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Katherine Seifer. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. The production staff also includes JC Howard, Sam Paulson, Liz Metzger, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. Hey, Prime members. You can listen to How I Built This early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus and Apple Podcasts. If you want to show your support for our show, be sure to get your How I Built This merch and gear at wonderyshop.com. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery's podcast, American Scandal.
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