ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
There's a startup in the dating and romance industry that promised to help people find real relationships. But, as with so many things in love, it didn't go according to plan. It became yet another hookup app. Today, after 10 months of soul-searching, the startup's directors are making a very public commitment to change. NPR's Aarti Shahani has the story.
AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: Hinge is based in Manhattan, the Flatiron district. And back in January, the startup was in crisis.
KATIE HUNT: We started saying things - on dating apps, on Twitter, everywhere - that we would never say to someone in person.
SHAHANI: That's Katie Hunt, part of the leadership team, giving a presentation in an all-staff meeting. I'm joining via Skype.
HUNT: Walking up to a woman in the street and asking her to show you one of their boobs - like, it doesn't happen.
SHAHANI: Only online, it does. Hinge conducted market research on its far more famous and infamous competitor, Tinder.
HUNT: Sixty-seven percent of women have received a sexually explicit photo or message on Tinder.
SHAHANI: Sixty-seven percent. But it's not just Tinder. It's Hinge, too. And it's not just men behaving badly. It's women, too. Hunt reads an actual conversation that happened on Hinge.
HUNT: This is a guy who just got out of the military. And he matches with this woman.
SHAHANI: Guy sends a message.
HUNT: His first message says (reading) I got out as staff sergeant, E6.
SHAHANI: She doesn't know what E6 means. He explains it's mid-level. And her very next response is this.
HUNT: (Reading) OK, so this is going to sound absolutely terrible, and feel free to judge me or tell me I'm a terrible person, but I don't date people who don't have grad degrees.
This person just served our country. Like, he just got home.
SHAHANI: Awkward laughter. The point is not the woman should've liked the guy. She can like who she wants. The point is that Hinge, which has more than $20 million in funding, promised to be different, a place where people treat each other with basic human kindness. The app was built on top of Facebook. You'd meet the friends of your friends, so community is baked in. And when you matched with someone, you'd get each other's real full names, not aliases. That wasn't enough.
JUSTIN MCLEOD: Essentially, we realized at a certain point that the path we were on was pretty unsustainable.
SHAHANI: Hinge CEO Justin McLeod de-briefing with me right after that all-staff. By unsustainable, he means as a business. Too many users were playing games - let me swipe right to see who likes me or whose pants I can get into. And if games were the point, Hinge could never be number one. The app had 2.3 million installs. Tinder was processing more than 1 billion swipes per day.
MCLEOD: We were just going to lose out essentially to Tinder over time as it swallowed us because we weren't different enough and our product wasn't living up to our vision.
SHAHANI: McLeod decided to reboot. He let half his staff go. He let the original Hinge app fall apart - the reviews in the app store are terrible because of it. And he took the startup back into stealth mode.
MCLEOD: OK, what's going on? Do you want to chat or...
SHAHANI: Yeah, I think I...
I got to watch the process up close this whole year - dropping in and out of the office, sitting in on meetings with users, investors, a Madison Avenue ad agency. McLeod is finally ready to show me the new Hinge app, which is different from competitors.
MCLEOD: On current apps - right? - you come in and there's, like, you know, swipe right on this person, swipe left on this person. And it's always about your next connection. It's not about your existing connection.
SHAHANI: So when you open up Hinge, you land in an unusual place, the people you've already matched with. By design, the app is encouraging you to converse, not swipe. And if you want to meet new people, OK.
MCLEOD: You get dropped right into people's stories, which is a series of questions that they've answered and photos that they've posted.
SHAHANI: This is interesting. Hinge created an in-house lab with thousands of users to test alternatives to swiping. The startup ended up with an interface that looks and feels a lot like Instagram. You don't like the person. You like or comment on specific things in that person's story.
MCLEOD: I'm trying to create a service for people who are interested in finding a relationship find a relationship. I'm not trying to create an addictive game that people spend all day on.
SHAHANI: The cost of the new Hinge is $7 a month, not free, and it's too soon to tell if it'll work. Today is just the product launch. Hinge has made a commitment to NPR to share internal data in the coming weeks so we can see if they're succeeding or failing. We'll be back with updates. Aarti Shahani, NPR News, New York.
Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.