Tinder: A Growth Hacking strategy

Tinder: the power of Growth Hacking

Companies like Tinder, Dropbox, Hubspot, Airbnb or Uber are great growth hacking examples that helped to increase business sales and grow customer base. At the beginning, they were facing budget constraints which were supposed to be a complete challenge to boost growth.

Tinder is a mobile dating application that matches prospective partners with one another by using an excellent interaction design. It is a great product that is very simple to use since the user has to swipe left to dismiss the potential partner, or swipe right to suggest interest. If the other person also swipes right, people are matched and can start talking and coordinating a date.

Tinder was launched in 2012 and in just two years the company reached 10 million users thanks to a growth hacking strategy based on the following techniques:

• Creating the offer and relying on the power of word-of-mouth marketing
• Improving the User Experience Design
• The social network effect
• Gamification
• Outsourcing the app with new extensions
• Monetization
• Influencer Marketing

What is Growth Hacking?

Growth Hacking refers to the strategies that seek, with the minimum possible budget, to quickly increase as many users or consumers as possible. The concept is usually used in relation to early-stage startups because they are looking for growth opportunities but can not follow high-cost strategies.

The idea of fast growing and acquiring new customers is also attractive for organizations not only for startups.However, growth aims to be sustainable in the long-term, not just a short-term gain. Instead of buying advertising in traditional media like the radio or the television, growth hacking uses low-cost alternatives including viral marketing, A/B testing, and social media among others.

What is a Growth Hacker?

A Growth Hacker can be defined as a person who is able to implement creative low-cost strategies to help a business grow. Growth Hackers are curious people who know how to take advantage of market trends and also are good with data. They combine creativity and curiosity with analytical thinking as well as elements of marketing along with technology and technical strategies.

Growth Hackers can be considered as a multidisciplinary profile, in fact, in a Growth Hacking team, there are people from different disciplines like marketers, developers or product managers.

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In conclusion, Tinder has been a successful example of Growth Hacking in a relatively short period of time. The application takes into account human behavior and encourages people to keep coming back. With currently more than 50 million users around the world, Tinder is one of the fastest growing applications. Another relevant fact to highlight is the algorithm used by the application which is based on an ELO rating system.

The higher your score is, the better the profiles you will match with. The score is generated in a more or less secret way, based on several variables like the percentage of people who like you, the profiles you like or the percentage of people who like you back. 

Luis Gasca | Professor of the Online Master in Digital Marketing