Tinder's Ultimate Success Story: Milestones in the History of Tinder
- Mahima Gupta
- Nov 30, 2021
- 3 min read
With a vision of becoming a famous platform for the young generation to meet and spend time with each other, Tinder was founded in 2012 by 6 people in a startup incubator called Hatch Lab and the first version of the application was released on 12th September but it was available only for the IOS users for that moment.
Perfectly tuned with its mission statement, Tinder aims at connecting like-minded people who never met before just by swiping left and right.
During its initial months only, Tinder became a huge buzz among the young US population and showed a very high growth potential by achieving almost 1 million matches by the beginning of 2013. It also won the Best New Startup award for the year in the same year and became one of the widely used applications in such a short span of time.
Seeing the huge popularity of the app, the founders decided to come up with the Android version too and with the vision of “Think local and Flirt Global” , they started focusing on entering the international markets including UK, France, Germany, Australia and Canada.
In 2014, Tinder continued to grow and was on the path of becoming the biggest dating app in the world. The founders thought of adopting the freemium model so they developed the first subscription package “Tinder Plus” for its premium customers and tested it in some selected markets.
After the successful development, it was finally launched worldwide in 2015 and without any doubt, it was a big hit because of its “Super Like” and “Unlimited Liking” features. However, they limited the number of swipes free users could make in every 12 hours
Obviously it made sense for them.
With the “Super like” function, premium users could see if someone had super liked their profile even before swiping right. It will appear with a bright blue star and banner, and if you swipe right on your super like, it will be an instant match whereas this was the first premium feature that was available for the free users too but they could super like only one profile per day.
By 2016, the company started charging for their services with the release of every better updated version of the application and this was definitely a cornerstone in the history of the brand as they started making a lot of money. They also did some of the major acquisitions and released many new paid features in the application.
Some basic features which were available for all were:
Users were allowed to send Giphy gifs within tinder chats and link their tinder profiles to their Instagram and Spotify accounts.
Tinder Boost, a paid tool that allows users to jump the line for 30 minutes and become the top profile in their neighborhood for that time, was also announced.
In 2017, the company launched its desktop version and it was considered as a smart move as they were some countries where the users were struggling to access their Tinder profiles through their smartphones.
In order to stay ahead in the competition, it kept on releasing updated versions of the application which included “Tinder Gold” ,“Tinder select” and “Tinder U “ with some more premium features such as: “ Tinder’s Top picks”- where users were shown the top attractive profiles from their nearby locations.
Later, the emergence of Covid-19 pandemic acted as a boost for the platform. It recorded a large number of daily swipes but also on the other hand, since large number of people lost their jobs so there was a decline in the number of premium memberships but the brand kept on adding better services and features to its bundle.
Mahima Gupta
613 words
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