That Grindr has experienced 3x stock growth while many other dating apps have lost 80%+ of their value makes for a very interesting case study. I've long heard that the ratio of men to women on dating apps creates some weird dynamics that are bad for everyone. Men spam swiping, women being overwhelmed by messages from increasingly desperate men, etc. I was pretty sure this video was going to explain Grindr’s success by arguing that it doesn’t face those same problems because it’s a same-sex dating app. And he does raise that point. Much more interesting, though, is the idea that Grindr’s approach has been to add more features that their users want and keep those features free, only charging for expanded use of those features. Other dating apps have been eroding their free feature sets, gradually putting more and more of them behind a paywall.

Why does this seem super obvious? If you take free things away from people…they hate it. If you give them more free things, they love it. Trick is to design features that work well on the freemium model. For example: it’s free to send one disappearing photo per day, but it costs to send more. It’s free to have one photo album, but it costs more to have more albums or to automatically unshare them after a given time period.

Another reason Ilham explores is that Grindr encourages people to be brutally honest about what they’re looking for, mitigating the need for ambiguous conversations dancing around that topic. So…clarity and setting of expectations up front? Honestly, maybe gay men are better at dating apps.