Tinder CEO Explains What Gives It An Edge Over Rivals In The Dating Market
Tinder CEO on what makes India swipe right.
Tinder said availability of cheap data and increasing use of smartphones triggered the growth of the dating platform in India, making it the Texas-based company’s most successful market in Asia.
“It’s just the beginning,” Chief Executive Officer Elie Seidman told BloombergQuint in an interview.
Tinder has about 4.1 million paying subscribers globally as of November 2018, as per its parent company - The Match Group Inc.’s earnings filings. Though the basic app is free, it’s the extra paid features that drives the company’s revenue, Seidman said. Nearly 95 percent of the overall revenue comes from paid services, he said.
Tinder is the second-most grossing app in India, he said, without revealing the number of users in the country who are paying for its features. The app, that made “swipe right” and “swipe left” to like or delete a potential partner part of the millennial vernacular, is present in Hindi, Telugu and Bengali. Seidman said the smaller markets are growing faster than the bigger cities.
Over the last couple of years, dozens of dating apps like TrulyMadly, Woo and Bumble, among others, have emerged in the country. Last year, Facebook, too, announced its foray into this market.
Yet, Seidman remains confident of Tinder’s growth. Its ability to understand and learn what members want is helping the app maintain an edge over rivals, he said. “It’s about writing software, but it is also about understanding people, and what they want and innovating accordingly.”