Tinder founder and CEO Sean Rad discussed the dating app’s impressive growth rate at the Upfront Summit in Los Angeles today. The Upfront Summit is a swanky morass of venture capitalists, and after hearing what Rad said in his speech, it’s likely Tinder won’t have to worry about reaching out to investors. Tinder is hotter than a microwave oven dipped in capiscum powder on the sun.
People are swiping right and left on Tinder… well, right and left: The app gets 750 million swipes a day, with 10 million matches made a day. That’s a huge jump from December, when Tinder was matching 5 million people. And it’s a massive leap from the numbers Tinder released in July: At that point, the app had matched 75 million people total. Now that kind of activity happens well within a two week period.
Rad told the Wall Street Journal that Tinder saw a 400 percent day-over-day spike in growth during the Sochi Games. Many of the athletes used the app as a way to hook up at the Russian resort town.
Even though the Games are over, this impressive hot streak has continued. In that way, the Sochi Games are to Tinder what SXSW circa 2007 was to Twitter: An inroad to mainstream adoption on another level.
Tinder does well when a bunch of young people gather together in dense areas, which is why it exploded at Sochi. It’d make sense that the app would experience more growth during festival season; if only we could measure how many people are going to swipe their screen during the Outkast reunion at Coachella this April.
In addition to the numbers report, Rad gave the crowd some advice about how to nail the all-important Tinder profile picture. “Headshots don’t work. People like to see personality in Tinder photos,” he said.
H/T Marketing Land | Photo via epSos .de/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)