Name: Hinge’s CEO on fighting dating app fatigue | Terms of Service
Uploaded: 2026-02-10T17:05:33.000Z
Duration: 19 min 50 s
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Since it's Valentine's Day season, I thought it was time to check in on the state of online dating.

And to do that, I have a very special guest with me today, Jackie Jantos, who was elevated to be the CEO of Hinge in December.

So before we get into the current state of online dating, you actually met your own husband on a dating app.

Do you remember, like, what, your first dating app, Interact?

I had recently moved to Atlanta, a city that I sort of knew no one in, and

my therapist at the time encouraged me to keep the app channel open, just to explore and sort of try everything that was out there.

And my husband at the time was getting a PhD while I was working, and

our paths would have literally never crossed if we hadn't met in that way.

I had always said that I was looking for someone who was really passionate about something, and

I didn't necessarily care what that thing was, but I just love that in a person.

And he fit the bill, and from the get go, it was just a great experience.

Did he message you first or did you message him first?

And he was getting a PhD in communication and philosophy.

And so I was very suspicious about his authors that he had listed as some of his favorites, and

And so this was sort of, you know, a curiosity that I wanted to debunk.

It felt like a very interesting thing for someone to put on a dating app profile.

I feel like this is like, we'll get back to this in the advice section of the conversation.

But the specificity there that, like, gave you a jumping off point, I feel like, is really.

It is very important to building your profile into how our app works.

And, yes, it gives you countless ways into conversation, which is really important.

Okay, so we'll get into a little bit how Hinge is actually not necessarily fitting within this trend, but

broadly, I think in the culture right now, there's the sense that there is serious dating app burnout happening right now.

I talk to friends all the time who are like, I'm giving up on the apps.

Yeah, I mean, dating has always been hard.

people can go into it with a real fear of Rejection and, and

so it's never really been an easy thing to do.

I think what we're observing is that the needs of people have changed quite dramatically, as they do every generation and every decade.

You know, my parents relationship was very different than mine, and

my husband's is very different than what I imagine it will look like for my Gen Alpha children.

And the dating apps haven't really kept up with innovating the product experience to meet the needs of young people.

Sort of on that note, like outside of the tech of it all, we have been confronted in recent years with lots of changing questions and expectations around gender roles and how men and women relate to each other.

As women advance in terms of education and earnings, do you see that showing up in terms of how people behave on the app?

We do see the evolution of each generation being more gender fluid and, and

fluid in how they think about their identity and the relationships that they want to be in.

And so four years ago when I joined Hinge, we made a very strategic pivot to focus on Gen Z.

And with that comes all of the conversations around the needs people have in what kind of relationships they want to be in and the fluidity of those.

You know, when you look at, for example, the LGBTQIA spectrum, the largest growth within that umbrella is really coming from bisexual folks.

And, you know, the makeup of the audience on Hinge is more than half representative of Gen Z.

And so we see all of that fluidity and, you know, the makeup of our organization as a company matches the makeup of our app.

And so I love learning and seeing how all of these things are evolving over time.

Hinge recently surveyed more than 30,000 users looking for connections on the app to learn more about Gen Z's dating habits.

Yeah, we do a lot of research to understand where relationship needs are going so that we can meet those through the product experience.

And this report that we recently put out was really about the communication gap.

So, for example, we know people want to have rich and deep conversations, but

that's really not meeting their experience on the app or when they meet in person.

So we really started to identify all of these gaps and what people's wants and needs are and what they're actually experiencing and getting.

Hinge has bucked the dating app downturn trend.

You're bringing in paying users at a time when many other platforms are losing them.

What are you doing differently that's working?

Yeah, we have this expression that hinges the dating app designed to be deleted and what that means is we are focused on getting people off the app and integrate dates, and

that outcome is what we measure within the entire app journey.

The organic growth and all of the business success comes from actually serving the need of daters.

And so I think that singular focus on the outcomes of people using the app is a huge point of differentiation for us in the category.

And I also think how we look at culture and the needs of emerging audiences and how we design with those audiences in mind is the other point of real differentiation.

We have this principle to design with, not for.

And this means that when we're designing a product experience, we are bringing people into the conversation very far upstream, looking around the room and saying, who are we designing for?

And are those individuals represented in the process of doing this work?

And if they're not, we widen the room and we bring partners in.

I mean, this is sort of like, off topic a little bit, but

it's just fascinating to hear at this moment where so many companies are kind of moving away from inclusivity efforts in this political moment that we're in, because maybe it seems politically advantageous.

But so it's interesting to hear you talk about why that is so important for your business.

Yeah, I think if you're building a product that is in service of Gen Z, you are really missing an opportunity if the people you're building for, who are representing year over year, a more diverse group of individuals, if they're not in the room, helping guide those product decisions.

You know, we're working to build an app that is sustainable for the long term.

And when you look at hinge, sort of going back to when we made this pivot around building for data outcomes, since then, we have been very specific, and

our growth has been steady, you know, and up into the right.

And so you have to bring your core audience into the room.

I want to talk a little bit more about how you design the app for that, those data outcomes, getting people off the app.

How do you decide what kinds of potential matches to show any given user?

Our recommender is really built to find an individual who you would be interested in, who, importantly, may also be interested in you.

So when we talk about how the app is built, onboarding is the first part of the app experience.

And our onboarding is longer than the onboarding in other dating apps.

By design, 20% of people decide not to complete onboarding because it's asking for too much effort, and

You know, we want this to be a community of people who are highly intentioned and share that sense of wanting to find someone to be in deep partnership with.

So the algorithm is built leveraging all of the information that we know from you, all the signal we get in how and who you interact with on the app, and

ultimately trying to match someone you would like with someone who would like you.

For people who have found successful matches on Hinge, do you have any data on how long they spend on the app before they find that successful connection?

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Hinge’s CEO on fighting dating app fatigue | Terms of Service

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