Posted 4 hours ago4 hr comment_13207 George Arison is telling me about a hookup. Arison, the 47-year-old CEO of the LGBTQ dating app and social network Grindr, recalls an encounter with a man who ranked low in physical chemistry—“it was in my bottom quartile of hookups,” he says, as if reviewing a spreadsheet of them—but high in intellectual compatibility. That bottom-quartile hookup is now a good friend of his. To Arison, the story illustrates how meaningful relationships can grow from the random connections Grindr facilitates. And if Grindr’s short time as a public company is any indication, solid financials can too. It’s been a rough stretch for dating apps. Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, among others, commands roughly 42% of the dating services industry, according to market research firm IBISWorld. But its earnings—which stood at $551 million in 2024—have been steadily declining since 2022, even amid modest revenue gains. As of February, Match had replaced its CEO twice in the past three years, and activist investors have been pushing it to reverse declines in usage, particularly among Gen Z. Grindr, meanwhile, continues to grow after going public in 2022. The company increased revenue 33% last year, to $345 million, and boosted monthly average users 7% to reach 14.2 million people, with more than 1 million of them paying. Investors have been pleased: At press time, Grindr stock was up 70% over the past year. More importantly, among its core audience of gay and bisexual men, the app—which eschews dating-app features like swiping and matches for a distance-based grid of available users—remains synonymous with hooking up. Arison, who joined Grindr in October 2022 from used-car marketplace Shift, says the company still has plenty of room to grow. The married father of two’s vision for Grindr is for it to become “the global gayborhood in your pocket,” a kind of digital version of the Castro in San Francisco or Boystown in Chicago, where queer people meet up every day for companionship and commerce. The company is taking the next step in building that gayborhood: incorporating telemedicine services into the app. Users in Illinois and Pennsylvania can now sign up with Woodwork, an online service similar to Hims & Hers that offers easy access to erectile dysfunction medications. Woodwork will roll out nationally throughout 2025. Arison’s pitch, in a nutshell, is that other telemedicine services are for straight people. Woodwork, whose website features photos and videos of jacked dudes writhing on beds and grinding on logs, is a service proudly by and for gay men. If it works, Grindr could begin to peel off some of the nearly $3 billion that Grand View Research says ED treatments command. But there are no guarantees. Similar companies have sought growth by exploring adjacent markets—remember Bumble’s app for finding friends?—and discovered that their user base only really wanted one thing from them. (Bumble stock is down roughly 60% over the last year.) But Arison has an expansive vision for building out Grindr to appeal to people looking for relationships while still bolstering the company’s core business as a hookup app. His experimental approach of testing and refining new features—many driven by AI—that could eventually attract paying subscribers is a tall order, and he knows it. Arison pushes employees to work at least 10-hour days and promises that he pushes himself even harder. In conversation, he uses the word hardcore enough that it begs a comparison to Elon Musk’s approach to running businesses. “Elon Musk is the greatest entrepreneur that the world has ever produced,” Arison says, though he allows that “there are a lot of things about Elon that are not great.” Born under Soviet rule in Georgia (he moved to the U.S. at age 14), Arison relishes proving people wrong and pushing for high performance. “The only limitation on your ability to be better is your own belief that you cannot be better,” he tells me. “One of my fundamental mottoes in life is ‘Do impossible things.’ Most people think I’m nuts, but I’m just like, my entire life is impossible. So you cannot prove to me that what I’m saying doesn’t make any sense, because everything I’ve done in life so far has shown that actually it’s true.” Inside Grindr’s San Francisco office—where a neon eggplant emoji radiates on a nearby wall—he discusses Woodwork, the pressure of leading an LGBTQ-focused public company, and why he’s always in “founder mode.” This interview has been edited and condensed. Let’s start with the big news. Grindr is venturing into telemedicine by offering erectile dysfunction pills through a service called Woodwork. On one hand, this move feels obvious. Lots of gay guys use ED medicines recreationally. On the other hand, I never predicted Grindr would have a telemedicine division. How did you guys get here? When I started talking to shareholders, part of the conversation was: What do we want Grindr to be? Just a dating app or something more? Their view was very strong: We want to be a lot more. And so we developed a strategy for that, which was: We want to be the global gayborhood in your pocket. That involves making the core product exceptional, making AI front and center, and building out neighborhood expansion opportunities. What are other things that you get in the neighborhood when you’re there that you might not be getting on Grindr, but we could offer? We wanted to do things that were aligned with what users want and already use. The three big buckets that we thought were worth investigating were health and wellness, travel and luxury lifestyle, and local discovery. Health and wellness made the most sense to start with because Grindr already dabbles there; we were instrumental in making PrEP [pre-exposure medication to prevent HIV infection] acceptable and popular. We went to users and asked, “If we were to do things in health, what would you want?” One of the first things that came out was that a third of Grindr users actually use ED medications. That gave us a very clear opportunity. Users want it, but they’re buying these products from companies that in no way speak to who they are. Like, I’ve never seen a gay ad for a competitor product. How are you thinking about what other telemedicine services you could provide? Can you imagine offering PrEP or post-exposure medication to prevent STIs [DoxyPEP]? We already partner extensively with PrEP providers. But I don’t think ED meds will be the only thing. It’d be logical to extend into haircare, skincare, and other things of that nature. One area of health and wellness I’m hoping we’ll get to is helping you find the right physician. I used to go to the Stanford LGBTQ clinic and had a very good doctor there, but then he stopped doing clinical work. I really wanted a gay doctor, purely because it’s an easier conversation to have. I could not find a doctor I liked who was available in the Bay Area within 20 minutes of where I live. So now I have a straight concierge doctor, who’s very nice, but I do cringe about certain conversations that I have to have with him. If I, the CEO of Grindr, who, frankly, has a lot of financial means, have had such a hard time finding the doctor I want, then everybody else probably has the same experience, except it’s a lot worse. That feels like a unique opportunity to create access to medical practitioners, especially in a telehealth sense, potentially for people who are in rural communities. It’s been a tough year for dating apps, with lots of talk about Gen Z avoiding dating apps altogether. But Grindr stock is up. How are you bucking the trend? This whole Gen Z-avoiding-apps thing makes no logical sense. Gen Z loves TikTok and loves Reels and thinks you can read something in Google and you’re an expert in it, but they’re not gonna do dating online? What I do think, and what makes logical sense, is that if you don’t build a product that Gen Zers want, they’re not going to use it. That’s where I think some of our peers have fallen flat. Grindr is fortunate. Our younger, 18-plus cohort wants to be in an environment where there are older people as well. Friendships between younger and older people are much more common in our community. Secondly, we have a robust free product, which benefits younger users. And thirdly, we are doing product-led processes—it’s not just monetize, monetize, monetize. We’re saying: Build new things, and those things will lead to revenue. Do you see dating-app fatigue at Grindr? Is Grindr in a different business than Hinge? We’re partly in the dating business, but we’re actually a social network. So we don’t see dating fatigue here. What I do see is we need to do a much better job of making it easier for people who want to date to date. If there is one thing that people try other products for, it’s dating—and then they come back to Grindr. But they tried those other ones because we don’t have dating features like Hinge or Tinder. We have something that they don’t have, which is a critical mass of users. So for our users’ sake, we need to offer them better dating experiences and better dating features to satisfy their needs. We did a big survey of gay and bi men right before the election, mostly for our education. One of the most striking numbers was that for people 35 and under, 50% of gay men want to be in a monogamous relationship at some point. And 25% said they wanted to have kids. When I wanted to have kids, I was like 1 in 100. So to now be in a place where you have 25 of 100 people saying they want to have children is a game changer. Andrew Sullivan, back in the day when he was making a case for gay marriage, a lot of it was like, if you normalize gay marriage, then a lot of gay men will actually move more in the direction of wanting to be in monogamy. And I think the reality is proving him out to be correct in that sense—and I think that’s really encouraging, but also a message to Grindr that we do need to have a much better set of dating features. Let’s talk AI. You’ve talked a lot about building an “AI wingman” in Grindr. How’s that coming? So, I want an AI chat inside Grindr that is basically the wingman for your Grindr user experience—that can help you in any of the things that you’re doing. It’s composing the messages that you’re sending, or helping you find the right people to talk to, or helping you make your photos better. So that’s the goal. Given where the technology is right now, to make this be good is actually really hard. And so you could either say, okay, it’s gonna take me two years to make this be as awesome as I want it to be. Or, I’m gonna build a bunch of little things, and each of them is going to then create the circle that is the AI wingman. We’re building these little agents, and as we build more and more of them, they will kind of unify into one big tool. Most of the road map for this year is around using AI to create really unique and new experiences in the product. One of the things that I’m super psyched about, and we think will be really awesome, is what’s called A List. This looks at your entire chat history—obviously, with users’ permission—and comes up with people that we believe you should reengage with based on your past conversations and then over time, based on your other conversations as well. It is now in beta testing, live to a set of users. It’s for [$40 per month] Unlimited users only at this point, partly because it’s all AI and running it is actually quite expensive. I’ve read complaints about charging for things that used to be free. Cory Doctorow famously called this “enshittification”—the idea that pressure to grow revenues results in a worse user experience over time. How do you think about that? I think about it a lot. I don’t want Grindr to end up like some of our competitors, who hollowed out their products focusing only on monetization and building nothing. We have built a lot of very cool new experiences for people over the last three years. And if you create value for people, it’s a reasonable thing for people to have to pay for those experiences. Albums [which lets users share collections of photos with other users] was not in existence until 2022; over 2 billion albums were sent last year. Every user has access to a free album; if you’re a paying customer, you have access to more. We just launched Right Now [a feature focused on quick hookups], which is available to everybody for free. It’s fair to assume that at some point, some parts of the Right Now experience will be paid, but by no means will all of it be. Maintaining a robust free product is critical. We want free users to be very, very happy. But the way we can afford to have a very strong team to build all these new things is by having people pay for it. You faced a significant backlash in 2023 after you announced a return-to-office policy that led to half the workforce resigning. Was the scale of that turnover intentional? Do you have any regrets about it? It was not intentional. We tried really hard to get people to stay. But people were presented with a choice about how we wanted to work; return-to-office was a small component of that. For a bunch of people who were here before I got here, we’ve become an awesome company, frankly. And for a bunch of people, it’s not what they wanted. Ultimately, I was hired to do something, and that was to take this company public and then to drive incredible growth. For that, you needed people who would be on board and wanted to do that. I think we did the right stuff to make it happen. Transforming the team into one that is much more hardcore—and I don’t shy from that word, honestly—was really important. Working 50 or 55 hours a week should be completely reasonable at a tech company. We pay extremely well. We have very good stock packages. Everyone’s an owner at this company, and I want them to think like an owner. That’s founder mode. I’ve been in founder mode my whole life. What are big misconceptions Wall Street has about Grindr? The first is around people thinking of Grindr as purely a dating app. The biggest question there is around “Is there a significant risk that the same thing [that happened to dating apps] happens here?” Dating products have a shelf life. They constantly go out of favor. But we’ve been around for 15 years. We were here when OkCupid was really popular, and we were here when Tinder was really popular, and we’re around now, when Hinge is really popular. Think of us as a combination of a dating product and a social network. We monetize the dating part of the social network, but we do a lot more. That’s the single biggest area where we need to so some education. As the CEO of one of the only public companies focused on serving gay men, what kind of unique pressure do you feel? It’s a little different from running a marketplace for cars. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve never actually experienced as much homophobia as a lot of people have experienced in their lives. I did a lot of work in places where you’d expect there to be homophobia. When I was doing Shift, I never ran into that; car dealers or car companies were always very supportive and everything. But it was surprising the level of homophobia that I experienced when I took this job—not on a personal level, but in a professional sense. There was a bank that we wanted to work with at one point, and they just weren’t able to do that. I don’t think individually anyone was homophobic, but as an organization, they couldn’t come to a place of saying yes. But now that bank is an extremely big supporter. I think the fact that we were public for a year, we execute really well, we’ve shown what we can do—that changed the organization’s mind and made a lot of people inside the organization extremely happy. To me, that has created incredible motivation, because part of our mission has to be we do super well as a business and we force everybody to change. Given that, how do you think Grindr should navigate politics at this moment, given that LGBTQ+ is inherently political? Our policy is we’re not in politics. We are in the business of creating a space for our users to have fun. In some ways, our users want to forget about politics when they’re in their app. Secondly, our user base is not monolithic. It’s actually far broader in its point of view than most people would expect. So I think my job is to do everything I can to create a safe, fun, happy space for them. There are some things that it’s actually very important for us to be very loud on, and they involve human rights and access to healthcare, especially internationally. We have Grindr for Equality, which does a lot of work around human rights and health access abroad, working with organizations in those different countries and giving them access to the Grindr app for advertising. We do similar stuff in the U.S. We do that generally under the radar and don’t talk about it, but we do a lot of messaging around issues inside the app. Where we know our user base is fully in alignment, we’re actually very willing to take a position. What are users aligned on? Gay marriage. So if that ever comes under threat, we will be very, very loud about it. View the full article
