After more than a decade shaping modern romance, Justin McLeod is leaving Hinge behind to launch his next venture: another dating app, with an AI twist, called Overtone.
Today, Hinge has more than 30 million users, with a date being set up every two seconds. But in 2011, when it launched, McLeod was just a young Harvard Business School student when he came up with the idea for an app “designed to be deleted.” And the fresh-faced twentysomething entrepreneur was so desperate for people to sign up for his app that he even bribed them with chocolate.
At the time, online dating largely took place on desktops and required real effort. The idea of swiping to find the love of your life (or a one-night stand) on your mobile phone seemed alien.
So persuading fellow students (who had no shortage of opportunities to meet people in class and dorms and at parties) to sign up for Hinge was challenging, McLeod tells Fortune.
“I remember the days of running around the college library in Washington, D.C., at this college, Georgetown, and bribing kids with Kit Kats to come try my app,” he says laughing. “We would get dozens of users a day—maybe, if that.”
