Hinge CEO bribed students with KitKats to sign up to his app

Hinge CEO Justin McLeod went from bribing fellow Harvard students with chocolate to having 14 million people signed up for his dating app.

Transcript

00:00Hinge CEO Justin McLeod was so desperate for people to sign up for his app that he even bribed them with chocolate.

00:05McLeod was just a Harvard Business School student in 2011 when he came up with the idea for Hinge.

00:10It's now the second most downloaded dating app in English-speaking markets, right behind Tinder.

00:14At the time of the launch, online dating largely took place on desktops, and swiping on your phone was a foreign concept.

00:20So convincing fellow students to sign up for Hinge was challenging.

00:23The opportunity was actually, originally back in 2011 when I started, it was really trying to solve for online dating stigma,

00:30because it was something that was on desktop, you filled out like very long, intense questions, usually paid a lot of money,

00:37and just people in their 20s and 30s really weren't doing that, or if they were doing it, they weren't talking about it.

00:42McLeod told Fortune he remembers the days of bribing kids with KitKats to come try my app.

00:46Financing Hinge also required a lot of scrappiness, with McLeod recalling he had to beg and borrow a lot to get the app off the ground.

00:53However, by 2015, Hinge had raised $26.35 million and had an estimated valuation of $75.5 million,

01:01before Match Group bought the company off McLeod for an undisclosed amount.

01:04Hinge now has more than 14 million people signed up and brought in $396 million in revenue last year.