‘Mamdani found love on it’: Hinge CEO Jackie Jantos reveal secrets to finding success on the dating app

In this interview with HT Lifestyle, Hinge CEO Jackie Jantos talks about future of dating, finding love on dating apps, and why she wants you to delete her app.

In the past decade or so, dating has become a completely different ballgame, especially in India. While meeting someone organically is an experience people still enjoy and crave, many rely on dating apps to test the waters and find their perfect match. One of these popular apps is Hinge, which has been in the country since 2015. Last week, I spoke with the woman running one of the world’s biggest dating apps, Jackie Jantos, the Chief Executive Officer of Hinge.

I stopped using dating apps a while ago after a slew of bad dates that, like many of you, I'd rather not recall. But Jackie believes one can truly find love and genuine intimacy on dating apps, the rule is that you have to be your authentic self.

Can you find genuine intimacy on dating apps?

Giving me the example of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, artist and illustrator Rama Duwaji, who met on Hinge in 2021 and are now happily married, Jackie insists that Hinge believes it can offer people a chance to find genuine intimacy. In fact, she herself met her husband many years ago through another dating app. She believes that dating apps only succeed when people find love and ‘delete the app’. For Hinge, organic storytelling about real-life experiences fuels the business.

Jackie Jantos became the CEO of Hinge five years ago after working with brands such as Spotify and Coca-Cola.

“We see really fun stories of team members finding love, and in New York, the young mayor finding his partner on Hinge became a global story that everyone was talking about. So yes, we believe we can help people find love,” she adds.

As an organisation, Hinge has 15 million users globally, with double-digit year-over-year growth in users and revenue. Per Jackie, in a category that isn't growing at the same rate, Hinge is a bit of an anomaly because they are focused on outcomes: 'if you promise love and relationships in this category, you better deliver'.

‘Designed to be deleted’

But in a fast-changing world that feels heavy and uncertain, where dating app burnout is a reality, how can Hinge ensure that people will find meaningful connections? Jackie underlines that Hinge was built around the philosophy of being designed to be deleted, which means that “the experience itself is oriented around ensuring that the community of singles who are there for love and long-term relationships” find it.

How do they make it happen? With some unique features that Hinge offers:

• “First, we have a really rigorous onboarding process because we want people to put in effort as they're coming onto the product.”

Hinge has a multi-layered onboarding process.

• “We also have these prompts, which are sort of icebreaker questions that we ask people to fill out to share more about themselves. Those are intended not so an individual can say yes or no to an entire profile, but so they might find an interesting piece of content or a photo or something someone said about themselves to engage with more deeply—not just liking that piece of content, but starting a conversation right then and there in that profile experience.”
• “We also have a feature like ‘Your Turn Limits’, which basically only allows you to have eight chats open at one time because we don't want people to start collecting chats. We want people to always feel like there's another human being on the other side of the experience who you're engaging with in a very intimate and honest way.”

She adds, “The entire experience from beginning to end is really built around getting people off the app. When singles are successful on Hinge, Hinge is successful as a business; our entire model is built around the organic growth that comes when someone finds a partnership.”

What do Indian singles want?

Though the app is not specifically tailored for Indian singles, Jackie shares that India has the second-largest monthly active user base outside the US. Therefore, she shares that Hinge has introduced ‘a number of really incredible privacy and safety features to help Indian daters’, including:

“We follow up with people when we know they have exchanged personal information, such as a phone number. We're able to follow up with them with a survey that we call ‘We Met’. And if they met, we ask them, ‘Do you want to meet up again?’ If they say yes to that question, then that's what we count as a great meetup, and that's what fuels the organic growth. This is where we know that we have achieved a specific high-quality meetup, and that is what we're tracking,” she explains.

While these features do offer some autonomy, the dating space in India is quite different from the global market—there is more societal judgment, traditional expectations, gender roles, family approval, caste and religion, among other things. But amid all this, Jackie told me that the most unique difference in India is a newfound, expressed desire to find love with more independence and personal agency, which is really special and quite different from 10 years ago.

As folks usually don't want to bump into friends, family, or colleagues on the app, there is a blocklist feature.

And Hinge is focusing on this aspect more—hoping to help fuel more agency in finding love and finding what people are looking for. She adds, “Of course, family and parents play a huge role in that as well, but that's probably one of the largest differences. We also, anecdotally, see the importance of the role of family in a market like Mexico. Similarly, there are many parts of the world where young singles live with their families until they're in a relationship and then leave home.”

Finding love is not easy: safety measures for women and the LGBTQIA+ community

But, in India, the desire to find love often finds itself being roadblocked by reality, especially for women and the LGBTQIA+ community, for whom dating is essentially more difficult and even a dangerous space. To make the app a safe place for them, Jackie shared that Hinge makes safety and privacy a priority for its success. “You have to feel confident and comfortable showing up as who you are, because the moment you don't, it's very hard to express yourself and engage in the experience as intended,” she added.

Jackie believes that finding love is not an easy task, and it requires the vulnerability of sharing who you are. To make it safer, she shared a few features that Hinge has recently added in India:

• “India is the first market we're launching with a waitlist, which means creating controlled growth, focusing on a bit of slowness, and adding a little friction to the upfront experience. While people are waiting on the waitlist, they are offered an experience of putting more time and intentionality into their onboarding.”
• “One part of onboarding includes ‘Face Check’, a tool that ensures who you say you are matches you being the real person.”

Face check is a part of the onboarding tool.

• “We're also including things right upfront, like a ‘Block List’, as folks usually don't want to bump into friends, family, or colleagues on the app; it's really important people feel their experience is private.”
• “Additionally, we're introducing a feature for Hinge in India where users are unable to take screenshots of profile screens so people feel confident in showing who they are and putting themselves out there.”

Meanwhile, in global markets, there is also a feature called ‘Are You Sure?’. She explained, “For example, when messaging someone, if you have said something that triggers our systems, which could be misinterpreted or hurt someone, we'll let you know. On the flip side, we have ‘Did This Bother You?’ feature, where if you get a message that bothered you, you can share that with us so we can learn.”

She also shared the one safety feature that supports privacy, developed specifically with the LGBTQ+ community, called ‘Match Note’. “If there are things you want to share about yourself that you really don't want to put on your public profile at all, a ‘Match Note’ allows you to share something with a person after matching, before that match is made public to each other. We developed this feature in partnership with a community called Trans Tech Social. For the trans community, sharing that you are trans can be very high-risk in many markets. With ‘Match Note’, one can share something personal before going into the match, and if the other person isn't comfortable, you simply don't match with them, avoiding a situation where someone verbalises discomfort to you.”

Moreover, she adds that the onboarding experience allows an individual to really express who they are and what they're looking for. “The goal is for people to feel safe and confident enough to interact and explore these realities. Our job is to make sure the experience itself allows you to feel safe, private, and empowered to have those honest conversations together, and then meet up in person to see if the chemistry holds. In India specifically, realities around family and parents often come to life when two people begin talking about them in person,” she adds.

Hinge does not allow people to take screenshots on the app.

The AI debacle

With AI being introduced to the market so rapidly, it has become easier for someone to alter their photos or create fake profiles. To understand how Hinge tackles catfishing and identity fraud, I asked Jackie if Hinge is trying to tackle this problem, to which she replied, “This is not just a problem in India, but a category challenge exacerbated by AI. We're just scratching the surface of what AI can offer positively, as well as the real risks it brings. This is why we have ‘Face Check’ and the waitlist in place.”

According to her, these features ensure the community is representative of real singles looking for an intentional relationship, seeking love, and ultimately looking to delete the app. “India is not unique in dealing with these challenges; we see safety and privacy needs in the US, Brazil, and many of our markets, giving us the opportunity to learn at scale and build strong Trust & Safety tooling to moderate consistently.”

The worst date and the future of dating

I could not end an interview with the CEO of a dating app—a woman—without asking her about the worst date she has ever had. So, I asked Jackie if there was a worst date that shaped her journey as the CEO of Hinge. She shared that, though she met her husband on a dating app—Match.com—about a year before Hinge was even invented, he was the second date. The date before him turned out to be her worst experience.

“True to what many people say, I could not have imagined marrying my husband. Sometimes we have an idea of who we are looking for, and then we get out into the world and get to know who we need, someone who is quite different and shares our values. He was actually my second date. My first date was not great. It was someone who really just wanted to show off on our date, which I found very unattractive. I could tell very quickly, and that was the end,” she shared.

She believes that if you are authentic, real, and engaged, you find success, and it is a very special and different experience.

Lastly, for the future of dating, Jackie confessed that it will become ‘even more personalised’. “Today, when you use Hinge or any other dating app, you share a lot about yourself and are met with recommendations in the form of profiles. In the future, there will probably be more ways to get recommendations beyond profiles that have some value to you—by extracting values, interests, or shared contexts—to offer unique recommendations so the experience feels deeply personal. The experience will feel more personal for each individual. Technology unlocks the ability to have more context and more ways in.”