Latest news with #GeorgeArison
Fast Company
a day ago
- Business
- Fast Company
Bumble is stumbling. Tinder is flagging. But this go-to gay dating app is thriving
Dating app Bumble continues to lose its footing. After subpar earnings, sluggish user growth, and internal stagnation, the company has laid off 30% of its staff. Meanwhile, its dating app competitor Grindr is soaring. Among dating apps, Match Group's properties— mostly Hinge, sometimes Tinder—lead the market. The duo's ubiquity frame apps like Bumble and Grindr as boutique alternatives, designed for their innovative features or specialty user bases. That's a difficult market to occupy, especially as dating app fatigue sets in and Gen Z seems to push for more in-person (and sexless) encounters. Those factors are just part of the reason why Bumble and its competitors are falling behind. But LGBTQ+ hookup app Grindr is flourishing—posting solid growth in both user acquisition and revenue. In May, Grindr CEO George Arison spoke with Fast Company about his efforts to build a broader offering on the foundation of its core location-based grid of users—including some popular new features and a foray into telemedicine. He isn't convinced that generational patterns entirely explain the struggles of dating apps. 'This whole 'Gen Z-avoiding-apps' thing makes no logical sense. Gen Z loves TikTok and loves Reels and thinks you can read something online and you're an expert in it, but they're not gonna do dating online?,' he says. 'What I do think and what makes logical sense, is that if you don't build a product that Gen Zers want, they're not going to use it. That's where I think some of our peers have fallen flat.' His vision is still in progress, but here's how the company's constant efforts to test and scale new ideas could serve as a guide to its competitors. Comparing Bumble and Grindr Bumble and Grindr both went public in the early 2020s, when the dating app market was still hot thanks to the pandemic's digital boom. Since their IPOs, both Bumble and Grindr have hit rough waters—though Grindr managed to right itself while Bumble continues to, well, bumble. Bumble's stock opened at $43 per share—a height it hasn't reached since late 2021. In 2025, Bumble's share price was hovering around $5 in early June, jumping above $6 only at the news of layoffs earlier this week. Meanwhile, Grindr—which debuted at $16.90 in 2022, initially dropped to $5, but has been above $15 since November 2024 and exceeded $20 per share since mid-April. Revenue figures have told a similar story. Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returned to Bumble in March on the eve of some sour news: Bumble's Q1 earnings showed an 8% decrease in revenue year-over-year. For the same quarter, Grindr's revenue grew 25% over the prior year. Arison told Fast Company he sees the company's performance as a reflection of the contributions that the LGBTQ+ community—he is gay himself—can make to the business world. 'Part of our mission has to be we do super well as a business and we force everybody to change,' he says. Neither app releases consistent and specific user counts. Grindr appears to be growing its user base as Bumble's gains are slow. In its Q1 earnings, Grindr reported 'more than 14.5 million' monthly active users, up from 'more than 13.5 million' the year prior. Bumble's earnings are split by paying users, a focus for former CEO Lidiane Jones. While the company grew its paying app users by 11% in 2024, it has since shed 100,000 of those subscribers in 2025. What should a dating app look like? Under Arison's leadership, Grindr has turned into an innovation powerhouse. In his May interview, Arison emphasized the creation of Albums—bundles of photos sent via chats and not directly displayed on a profile—which debuted in 2022. In 2024, Grindr users sent over two billion albums. He also pointed toward the app's new Right Now feature, which lets users search specifically for more immediate action. In D.C. and Sydney, two of the feature's trial markets, Arison said that '25 to 35% of our weekly active users were regularly going into the Right Now experience at least once a week.' Grindr's new features are available for all users, though paid subscribes receive additional uses. For example, free Grindr users get to post to the Right Now feed three times a week. Down the line, the company plans to make sessions available for purchase. That's part of Arison's strategy: Opening new features with limitations as a bridge to paid customer conversion. 'I don't want Grindr to end up like some of our competitors, who hollowed out their products focusing only on monetization and building nothing,' Arison told Fast Company. 'We are doing product-led processes—it's not just monetize, monetize, monetize. We're saying: Build new things, and those things will lead to revenue.' In contrast, Bumble has moved slowly with their feature rollouts. The 'Opening Moves' feature debuted in 2024, allowing users to list prompts for new matches to respond to. The feature undercut Bumble's initial mission that women should message first. Since then, they've also instituted ID verification and date-sharing safety features. Many of the app's most compelling features—like backtracking left swipes, Travel Mode, and Incognito Mode—are only available to paid users. With dating app fatigue on the rise, both Bumble and Grindr have also expanded into alternate markets. Both have emphasized the role of friendship and platonic encounters on their apps, with Arison promoting Grindr's ongoing effort to become the 'global gayborhood in your pocket,' noting 'Our younger, 18-plus cohort wants to be in an environment where there are older people as well. Friendships between younger and older people are much more common in our community.' Bumble launched its friend-focused Bumble B.F.F. in 2016, and broke it out into a stand-alone app, Bumble for Friends, in 2023. While Bumble for Friends doesn't release stand-alone user numbers, its million-plus Google Play downloads is dwarfed by Bumble's more than 50 million downloads. Grindr's 'gayborhood' model also flows easily with the original app; users have been employing Grindr for non-dating activities since its advent. By spinning their Friends function out into a separate app, Bumble must seek out an entirely separate user base. In this area, Grindr is making a similarly big bet on how it can show up in different ways for its users. The company recently launched Woodwork, a telemedicine company selling erectile dysfunction pills, in Illinois and Pennsylvania. Arison also predicted that Grindr would expand into 'haircare, skincare, and other things of that nature.' 'When I started talking to shareholders, part of the conversation was: What do we want Grindr to be? Just a dating app or something more?' Arison told Fast Company. 'Their view was very strong: We want to be a lot more.'
Bloomberg
a day ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
We Want to be the Gayborhood on Your Phone: Grindr CEO
Grindr, the LGBTQ dating app, has laid out an AI-driven roadmap to fuel growth, with plans for several new features this year. Grindr CEO George Arison says about 35% of current long-term gay relationships in the United States started on the platform. But Arison says the company is expanding beyond dating, and its "strategy is to be the "gayborhood on your phone", offering other experiences and services to users. Arison joined Francine Lacqua on "The Pulse". (Source: Bloomberg)
Bloomberg
11-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Grindr CEO on the Power of AI and DEI
George Arison, the CEO of Grindr, explains how the dating app is leveraging AI to launch products tailored to its community. Arison discusses the company's growth and his personal use of AI with Bloomberg's Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow. (Source: Bloomberg)
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Grindr CEO talks app's new telehealth service, evolving user base
Dating app Grindr (GRND) missed first quarter earnings estimates while raising its full-year revenue guidance this week. Grindr CEO George Arison sits down with Josh Lipton to speak about more about the platform's print, Grindr's evolving demographic, and its expansion to a telehealth service called Woodwork. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here. Grinder reporting first quarter earnings yesterday, missing on revenue, but raising its full-year guidance, and here to break down that report is Grinder CEO George Arison. George, it is great to see you. So let's talk about this quarter, George. So you did report first quarter revenue. Looks like it missed expectations there, though you raised your forecast for full year revenue growth, it looks like, and adjusted EBITDA margins. So so what are you seeing in the business, George? What gave you the confidence to raise those financial targets? Yeah, thanks for having me. We had a really awesome quarter in Q1. Uh, results were really strong. We grew 25%. EBITDA was over 43%. So really happy with how the quarter went. Um, we don't guide on a quarter by quarter basis. We only guide for the full year because I don't think you should be managing a business um, by quarter, um, but rather for the long term. Uh, and we had been testing a bunch of things in Q1 that were meant to help us drive revenue this year, and some of those results came in pretty strong. So that that helped us raise guidance up by two percentage points. Uh, and additionally, um, we recently started to release our new product called right now to a lot more people. Uh, we launched it to about 15 US cities in March and are adding more um, over the next few weeks and starting to monetize that product a little bit more than we had expected. We had initially planned to monetize it in 2026, but we're going to start doing that in 2025. So that also helped with the raise and in guidance. And George, you know, investors have a lot of questions about the consumer right now, their health, their resilience, George. You have an interesting line of sight there. How does the consumer look to you? Yeah, I get asked this question all the time and I have, I don't have a good answer because uh we actually have not really experienced any negative impact from any economic challenges with our users uh at all. Now there are some differences with our users. They come to Grinder for fun, joyful experiences, not for economic issues or for politics. And even if things are bad, um they still need that outlay of doing something fun and enjoyable. Um and so from that perspective, I think we're pretty protected. Uh and then secondly, our, you know, generally speaking, gay and by men, which is like the overwhelming majority of Grindr users, are um more protected, I think, even in a bad economic environment. Um they generally have high disposable income, probably more savings, um more graduate degrees, etc. So I think even if the economy goes badly, they'll be generally protected. So we have no view into anything negative right now. Things are going really well with our user base. That that's interesting, George. So I was going to ask you who is the Grinder demo in terms, George, of broadly age and income and whether that has sort of, you know, evolved over time, George. It certainly has evolved. Um vast majority of Grindr users are gay and bi men. Um I think if you were to go to Grindr in 2009 or 2010 when it first launched and when I was using it a lot more because I was not a married dad at that point, um we had a lot more um just gay men versus today where we have a lot more bi men as well. I think that's one of the biggest shifts over the last decade is people being much more comfortable saying that they're bi. And so a higher percentage of our users are saying that they're bi. But we still are fundamentally a product for gay and bi men. That's what we target and that's what we know really well. From the age demographics, Grindr has been very successful at getting younger people post them turning 18, because we are an 18 and only app, to come into Grindr and become users. Um that's probably because when you first come out and go to college or finish college, being around older gay men is something you want as well, because you kind of learn what it's like to be gay from them. Um and so I think that's probably driven allows us to kind of bring in the 18 plus cohort as they become of age into the app. And then secondly, we are a community. Like that's probably the biggest place to find other people like you um in the world for any single gay individual. And so being part of that community is is really critical for a lot of people. And I think that helps us with younger users as well. We probably do have some opportunity in being able to keep our users longer in the app as they get older, right? So they kind of reach that 35 or 40-year-old cohort. We probably don't get as much engagement from them as um we would want. Uh partly because we don't do as good of a job in dating features um versus more immediacy features. And so one of the big things we're working through now, and that's probably more for 2026 versus 2025 in terms of when it comes into market, is features that will help our users with finding their long-term partners. One of the things we're learning about our demographic is that a lot more of the people in our cohort want to be in a monogamous relationship over the long term versus used to be the case 10 or 20 years ago. And so we need to help them find their partners um as they seek them. And George, let's talk about what's new at Grindr too. Tell me about woodwork, which I guess, George, is this new telehealth service. Walk me through it. Yep. So Woodwork is a completely new new thing that we launched. It's uh we are building what we call the gayborhood in your pocket, um where we offer a lot of the, we can offer a lot of the things that happen in the gayborhood to everybody on their phones. Um and this is our first gayborhood expansion opportunity that kind of takes us out of the core dating and social connections set of products that we've offered before into something new. Um we are starting out with an ED medication that you can buy um from us in partnership with our partner called Open Loop. Um and so far it's only available in two locations. Um we very much think of woodwork as a startup inside Grindr. So think of something as like zero to one. It's an angel round funded company at this point. Um and so we're not really going to be giving a lot of updates on woodwork in the immediate term while the business kind of learns what it should do and how to do it best, because we do want to give them the time to do that. But I think it's a huge opportunity. You know, 30% of users on Grindr have used ED medications. Um 60% have told us that they've concerned them. And so from that point of view, offering ED medications and later on other additional products that are kind of tangential to that um is a huge opportunity for us. And obviously, our whole concept is we use Grindr, the app, as a primary distribution engine for the woodwork brand, and that would drive, you know, CAC significantly down because we wouldn't be spending all this money on advertising. And then it's also a product built by gay people for gay people. So if you go to you'll see that the branding is very different than everybody else. And that's also I think something our users would very much appreciate. George, it is always good to see you and to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
Fast Company
06-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
‘Users want it': Grindr is now selling erectile dysfunction drugs
Grindr is expanding its scope in a way that is entirely on brand. On Tuesday, the company unveiled Woodwork, a telehealth service that will help users access medication for erectile dysfunction. Currently available to Grindr users in Illinois and Pennsylvania, Woodwork will expand nationwide throughout the rest of 2025, according to the company. Grindr CEO George Arison says the company performed internal research that found more than a third of its users take erectile dysfunction drugs. 'That gave us a very clear opportunity,' he tells Fast Company in an exclusive, in-depth interview on how he's growing Grindr's scope. 'Users want it, but they're buying these products from companies that in no way speak to who they are.' With Woodwork, Grindr is working with telehealth provider OpenLoop to connect users to clinicians who will prescribe compounded versions of common erectile dysfunction drugs tadalafil (Cialis) or sildenafil (Viagra) that dissolve in the mouth. The company said OpenLoop clinicians have received inclusive care training and Grindr offers educational materials tailored to the LGBTQ community. 'There's a set of warnings [with Woodwork prescriptions] that are actually very specific to our users,' Arison says. 'I don't think most services like this would say, 'Do not take this medication with poppers.' We do.' Woodwork is Grindr's first foray into telemedicine, but it's part of a push from the company to add a host of features—including several powered by AI, like a chatbot for improving messages—to show that it can be more of a social network for LGBTQ users. Arison has called this his effort to make the app into a 'global gayborhood in your pocket.' In the past few months, Grindr has expanded its 'Right Now' feature (which lets users signal to each other that they're looking for a quick hookup) to 15 additional markets, including London, New York, Paris, and Chicago. Arison also told Fast Company he wants to add more standard dating features to the app to satisfy users who are looking for relationships. 'For our users' sake, we need to offer them better dating experiences and better dating features to satisfy their needs,' he says. In March, Grindr reported a 33% year-over-year increase in revenue in 2024. Its share price is up 70% over the past year. That's as companies behind more traditional dating apps—in particular Match Group—struggle, especially among younger users.
