Tinder: Not just a flirting tool

Application name: Tinder (http://www.gotinder.com/)

Release time: 2012.10

Product Type: Social application

Financing: Unknown, under the IAC hatch.

A number of dating sites and applications have sprung up in the past few years, but few have been able to maintain exuberant popularity for a long time and many have been eliminated. And the Tinder seems to be able to break the trend. The company has grown wildly since its inception last October.

This is partly because of its dating attributes, partly because Tinder is based on a common retro pattern, drawing on some attractive elements of hot or not. Hot or not is essentially a more casual, mobile app that connects Facebook, and Tinder doesn't promise to introduce a real soul mate or life partner, but just to make it easier for people to flirt and get to know each other in real life.

Tinder focuses on reducing the "creepy" factors that are common to dating services in applications, removing junk information and targeting young people. It gained exponential growth, not surprisingly its initial growth came mainly from college campuses, with an average user age of only 23 years.

Tinder is also relatively easy to use and is currently available free of charge. It does not focus on allowing users to build traditional personal pages, but to collect basic information from Facebook. It is based on location and can be paired with users who live in close proximity and have similar living habits or interests. However, if there is no interest in Tinder's pairing reminders, users will ignore them. If you are interested, you can establish contact with other users, chat and arrange offline meeting.

Tinder co-founder and CEO Sien Rade (Sean Rad) revealed that, benefiting from these, the app has grown quite as early as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Tinder the number of paired and individual page scores was only 1 million and 35 million in early January, but today the two figures have soared to 50 million and 4.5 billion respectively.

The Tinder team declined to disclose the amount of downloads and users, although it is estimated that both data should be millions of. It should be noted that the application was not launched until late October last year.

Tinder also does not seem to have high downloads like some popular mobile apps but low user stickiness. According to Rad, 50% of users open Tinder applications every day, and the proportion of users per week and monthly is also up to 75% and 85%.

The company did not disclose its current funding amount, but the IAC, which is known to have hatched its main investor, holds a minority stake and is the sole investor in its seed financing and a-round financing.

Enter the international market

Tinder has begun to focus more on product development and critical international markets. It currently has 15% users from outside the United States, with the highest penetration rates in Canada, Australia, Brazil and Ireland.

Tinder's 13-person team will start to enter the UK, Australia, Latin America, Germany, France, China and other international markets. Rudd believes the company has a great opportunity to grow in Asia, and Tinder is seeking some cooperation to gain access to Asian markets and localize the Tinder experience.

Tinder has also been committed to developing tools to continue its mission to address social, discovery, and network issues beyond the scope of appointments. For example, it today unveiled a new feature matchmaker that allows users to pair two Facebook friends for any purpose.

Once the user is paired successfully, the two friends can chat in Tinder without sharing their contact information. This feature is designed to create a casual and simple way to introduce friends to each other, whether you want them to date or engage in business or professional dealings. Rudd revealed that matchmaker Anonymous, to solve the usual introduction of other people's understanding will appear embarrassing problems.

Tinder is also improving on the experience of less desirable features. For example, many users complain that the application's classification algorithm paired them with teens or underage users. So Tinder has added age filtering to the new version, allowing users to choose the age group they want. It also improves the accuracy of the pairing algorithm and the flow of chat in the application.

Tinder is currently offering only the iphone version, but according to its CEO, the team is developing the Android version, which is expected to be launched in the next few months. The team also plans to develop a tablet version, while the web version is not expected to be released so soon.

International expansion will be the key to Tinder to maintain high growth and avoid a flash in the pan, but it remains to be seen whether users will see it as more than just a tool for easy flirting and dating.