They Nailed It From Day One. It Still Didn't Work.
Chen: The first version of Tinder had everything. All the elements you would think of as Tinder. They just nailed the product idea from day one. Sometimes that happens. The first version of Instagram just nailed it. The first version of Tinder just nailed it.
Chen: John Badeen, their iOS engineer, had a deck of playing cards he would fiddle with while coding. The very first version just had an X and a check mark. Then he was like, 'Swiping is fun, it's a new iOS thing,' and he added it in. Boom -- off you go, this iconic thing.
They nailed the product idea from day one. Sometimes that happens.
Texting Your Friends Felt Like an Insult
Chen: They went on their address books and started texting their friends. This is at a point where online dating is a little bit of a stigma. Imagine -- you're texting your friends and you're almost saying, 'Hey, you seem kind of lonely. I feel like you need a boyfriend.' It's a little bit like an insult.
Chen: The Tinder atomic network is not two or three people. It's also not thousands of people. It's probably hundreds of people. You can swipe through a couple thousand people a day pretty easily, so you actually need hundreds of profiles to make it interesting. That was their cold start problem -- how do they get enough people in it at once?
Chen: Even though they had all the right features, when they told their friends about it, it was not working. Sometimes you actually have all the right features. You just don't have the right network.
Sometimes you actually have all the right features. You just don't have the right network.
The Birthday Party That Changed Everything
Chen: They realized -- how do we get everyone in the app at the same time, all in the same geography, all in one go? They could throw a birthday party. They sponsored this birthday party from one of the really popular people on the USC campus.
Chen: It was at an amazing house. They bused people from the campus. But they required you to install Tinder and show it to the bouncer to get in. You wouldn't use Tinder at the party. But after the party, the next day, there were people you saw from across the room that you didn't have a chance to talk to. So you'd check the app, and off you went.
Chen: If they could get 500 people at a party together -- 500 of the most desirable, hyperconnected people from the Greek system -- they could take over the whole USC campus. Then they picked another school, and another. They went after southern schools where the Greek system is very powerful. Once you get USC and UCLA and Loyola, it seeps into LA. Once you get LA, you get New York and San Francisco.
They required you to install Tinder and show it to the bouncer to get into the party.
Tinder Is a Network of Networks
Chen: I don't think of Tinder's network as a super broad monolithic network. It's a network of networks -- all of these individual schools and neighborhoods. Even in San Francisco, you're not going to date somebody from deep South Bay in San Jose. That's an hour and a half. That's too far.
Chen: It's a very hyperlocal experience. You can win and lose these hyperlocal networks. It was important for Tinder to be able to win piecemeal.
It's a network of networks. You can win and lose these hyperlocal networks.