How Hinge became the dating app for people who hate dating apps
Sitting on a coffee table in his Chelsea office in New York City and surrounded by framed wedding invitations on the walls, Justin McLeod is worrying about AI.
Specifically, the cofounder and CEO of dating app Hinge is concerned that his users—many of whom have asked him to their weddings over the years—might fall in love with it instead of one another.
McLeod has spent the greater part of the past 15 years studying the dynamics of human relationships, including what makes one person fall for another, and he sees that chatbots offer exactly what many people crave.
“Why would I invest in these hard human relationships with people that are not always available or might reject me when I can talk to this thing that is right here and will always say the right thing?” he wonders.
On this sunny afternoon in late September, chatbots aren’t yet upending dating apps, but something sure is. Bumble, once the women-first darling, has shed 460,000 paying users since the end of 2024, prompting the return of founder Whitney Wolfe Herd in March. She’s embarked on an aggressive retrenchment campaign that has included laying off 30% of the staff.
Tinder, meanwhile, has lost more than 1.5 million paying users since its peak in 2022. Its parent company, Match Group, has also recorded steady revenue declines for the past three years for its business unit that includes former stalwarts like Match.com and OkCupid. Match appointed Spencer Rascoff as a wartime CEO in February 2025; he’s slashed head count by 13%.
But one app in Match Group’s portfolio stands out. Hinge, which has 15 million monthly active users, saw its paying users grow by 17% year over year to 1.87 million in the third quarter of this year. The app took in $550 million in revenue in 2024, and more than $500 million in the first nine months of 2025.
“We’re the fastest-growing—and, in fact, the only growing—major dating app,” McLeod says. (That’s not quite true: Grindr, with 1.3 million of what it calls “average paying users,” is also on the upswing.) “Simply put, Hinge is crushing it,” Rascoff said on Match Group’s Q2 earnings call.
Hinge’s competitors are facing problems of their own making. First was their aggressive pursuit of users, favoring quantity over quality, which has degraded the overall experience of many dating apps. Meanwhile, their lax policing of junk profiles and bots—and simultaneous price increases for increasingly important features—has forced users to pay ever more to find decent matches. People are just tired of endless, expensive swiping that doesn’t convert into dates.
And now a rising generation is emerging with an entirely different approach to dating than earlier users, putting apps that don’t evolve at risk of being left behind. Gen Z’s relationships are increasingly mediated—even defined—by screens. They still use dating apps, but they’re skeptical.
Gen Z has “set a higher bar,” Match CFO Steven Bailey told attendees at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in March. “They want [dating apps] to be safe, they want them to be effective, and they want them to drive the outcomes they’re looking for.”
But Hinge keeps growing because it has stuck to its promise that it succeeds only if users end up deleting it altogether. “We want people to meet up and find love in person,” McLeod says. That sounds obvious, but in the world of dating apps, it hasn’t always been a priority.
While other apps favored ease of use (all that endless swiping) over outcomes, McLeod remained relentlessly focused on designing ways to get his users off the app and dating, even if that meant inserting friction into the user experience. “A lot of apps grew much faster than us because they were more engaging and exciting,” McLeod admits. But he was playing the long game.
McLeod is now preparing for the next stage of Hinge. The company has been rolling out a suite of AI-powered features to appeal to users with rustier social skills (ahem, Gen Z).
McLeod is also taking his matching algorithm up a notch, extracting even more information from users to personalize and refine Hinge’s picks for them. To stop people from falling in love with chatbots, he’s fighting AI with AI—and trying to engineer something incontestably human: a messy, authentic love story.
McLeod knows something about the complexities of the heart. He founded Hinge in 2011 while at Harvard Business School to help people find real-world connections. At the time, though, he was recovering from heartbreak.
He had dated someone as an undergrad, but they broke up and got back together several times as he battled substance abuse issues. By the time he got out of rehab, she had moved on.
Several years later, with Hinge starting to grow, McLeod conducted an interview with a New York Times reporter where he recounted the story of the one who got away. That inspired him to look up his lost love, who was living in Europe and engaged. Though they hadn’t seen each other in nearly a decade, something sparked. She called off her wedding, and a few years later she and McLeod married.
He’s recounted this story numerous times. It was even turned into a New York Times Modern Love column and then an episode of the Amazon show based on the column. But as polished as the anecdote is, there’s a deeper truth within it: Vulnerability creates possibilities.
A decade ago, when Tinder, Bumble, and other apps were orienting themselves around engagement—making the user experience addictive but the outcomes questionable—McLeod mapped out a different strategy, aimed at fostering emotional risk-taking. He would require users to put in more work during the sign-up process and would place deliberate hurdles for them along the way, all in an effort to get them to open up, not just swipe.
Today, Hinge requires users to upload a minimum of four photos and fill out at least three prompts about themselves. The process is designed to get users to slow down, think about what they really want, and present a more unfiltered profile. McLeod says the app tries to give users tasks that “signal a level of intention and create a level of vulnerability so that you can actually create connection between two people.”
The longer sign-up process has made a difference: Hinge has found that users are 47% more likely to go on dates when they engage with the written answers on someone’s profile rather than simply the photos.
Last year, Hinge introduced another hurdle—a feature called Your Turn Limits—to curb ghosting. Now Hinge users with too many unanswered messages must send a reply or end the conversation before they can resume swiping. The company even gently nudges users into the real world: Its AI will invite users to set up a date if they’ve been chatting online for a couple of weeks and seem compatible based on their conversations.
Hinge also uses AI to scan the content of messages and deploys a notification to double-check with a user before they send a message that might not be well received.
That’s all well and . . . millennial, but the app’s newer challenge is helping Gen Z users—who make up 56% of Hinge’s overall user base—find value in the app. CMO Jackie Jantos sees a generation that was isolated during the formative years when relationships develop, and that often reverts to interacting on social media rather than in real life.
Hinge’s Gen Z users tend to be uncomfortable with small talk and hyperfocused on “digital body language,” Jantos says. “So there’s a lot of reading into the speed [with which] someone replies, how long the person’s message is, and what type of emojis and punctuation” they use.
Match CEO Rascoff puts it more succinctly: “They have atrophied social skills and need more help showing up and connecting with other people.”
Hinge’s first feature for younger users, launched in 2021, was inspired by TikTok voice-overs. Instead of making users write out their responses to profile prompts, Hinge now allows them to record a 30-second audio introduction. “It hit the sweet spot of willingness to do it if I’m the person who’s posting it and extremely informative if I’m the person [experiencing] it,” McLeod says.
With more than one in five Gen Z adults identifying as LGBTQ, according to Gallup, Hinge has also given users an expanded menu of gender and sexuality identifiers to choose from as they set up their profiles. “Gender, relationships, and relationship types are being redefined,” Jantos says.
In February, the company added Match Note, which allows users to privately share information with matches before chatting with them. People have used it to disclose their STI status or gender identity. (McLeod says single parents also use the feature to let matches know about their kids.)
Hinge is tuning its marketing for Gen Z as well. The company has long featured real couples in its campaigns. But Hinge is now focused on stories that showcase all the intricacies and uncertainties of real relationships to show Gen Z that they don’t have to be perfect. For 2024’s “No Ordinary Love” campaign, Hinge enlisted writers like Roxane Gay and Hunter Harris to tell the nuanced, real-life stories of people who connected on the app, then published the essays in a zine.
This year, Hinge followed up with a second collection, released as a printed book and on a dedicated Substack—supporting it with a flurry of ads in major cities.
In one, a couple meets, hits it off, then breaks up for a few months before getting back together. Another tells the story of Lia and Ole, a couple fighting against their preconceived ideas of what they want from a relationship (“Lia had imagined a romance with someone more established, more mature”). Spoiler: Five years after their first date—when they jointly deleted Hinge from their phones—they’re still together.
Despite his fears of AI keeping Hinge users from meeting real people, McLeod is embracing it to help improve their prospects.
In January, Hinge launched an AI-powered coaching tool to help users refine their profiles. Instead of just asking users to type in their response to a profile prompt, an AI chatbot can now interview the answer out of them. If a user says they like to travel, the chatbot might ask them for their best travel story to add to their profile. Those interviews serve an additional purpose: helping improve the app’s matching algorithm.
Until the advent of generative AI, Hinge’s algorithm primarily considered the profiles that users liked as they swiped and tried to surface similar ones—but it never really understood why a user might have certain preferences. Now, McLeod says, the algorithm can take in the content of a user’s profile to deliver better matches.
“It’s thinking about what you’ve said, what they’ve said, what your prompts say, what your photos are, and using it to predict whether you might like someone,” he says. “It’s not waiting for you to send a whole lot of likes for us to learn your taste.”
If McLeod succeeds, he could lift the fortunes of Match beyond just Hinge’s revenue. Match’s data shows that Hinge subscribers already tend to use the app alongside one or more of the company’s other apps. Rascoff now wants to encourage that behavior, letting users populate their profiles across other apps with one tap.
“From a financial standpoint, we’ve found that it’s additive,” he says. “The user spend on the second app does not detract from their spend on the first.” Rascoff envisions that the matching algorithm behind these apps could also be standardized.
“We don’t want to do AI stuff for the sake of it,” McLeod insists. Even so, he’s staking his app’s future on it.
McLeod anticipates that within five years Hinge will work more like a personal matchmaker. Users will spend less time on the platform sifting through profiles and sending messages. Instead, they might provide more information to the app on the front end and simply trust it to show them fewer, better matches.
That would represent a sea change for the entire industry, McLeod says: “We’ll think of swiping through endless profiles to find dates as a bit archaic.”