‘The muse of Hinge’: Justin McLeod on his own love life, and creating the dating app

Justin McLeod has had his fair share of falling in and out of love, and it was those experiences that led to him creating the dating app Hinge, writes Andy Martin

The app was ‘designed to be deleted’ (Getty for Inc)

Justin McLeod fell in love the old-fashioned way – by getting drunk first. And then fell out again. But finally back in. All of which helps to explain how he came to set up Hinge, the contemporary dating app for people in search of a happy ending.

The first time he set eyes on Kate, one night in the early noughties, he was not seeing too clearly – since he was being carried back to his campus room in an inebriated state by a couple of friends after escaping from rehab and celebrating with a few stiff drinks. The next time they met was in a class on mathematical economics at Colegate University in upstate New York. Romance finally sparked when they were thrown together by a Middle Eastern Politics seminar.

One night McLeod was trying to revise for an exam. Kate was at a party next door. She stopped by and asked him to walk her home. When they parted, they had their first kiss. “For 30 blissful days we were inseparable,” McLeod says. After which the summer vacation kicked in and he went back to full-time partying and decided he didn’t really need a steady girlfriend.

Justin and Kate had a “tumultuous on-off relationship” until Kate finally left Colegate to go to a women-only college. She had had enough. McLeod vowed to relinquish the demon drink and other addictive substances after being turned down for a job at Goldman Sachs. “My life had gone off the rails,” he says.

McLeod came up with the idea for Hinge when he was doing an MBA at Harvard Business School in 2009. He wrote a whole dissertation, arguing that existing lonely heart websites were clunky, clumsy and long-winded, plus they carried a stigma. They were “uncool”, so unless you were desperate “you wouldn’t be seen dead using one”. So, he reasoned, the market was crying out for a decent dating app for young people. His professor gave him a C for his efforts and said it was a dumb idea.

Meanwhile, on the romantic front, McLeod wrote to Kate telling her he realised he had behaved badly but now – four years on – had cleaned up his act and maybe they could see one another again? But she was now in London, where she had opened a bakery shop in Kensington, and she told him flat out that it was too late. “I was heartbroken,” McLeod says. “That’s why I started Hinge.”

Despite that thumbs-down from Harvard, he worked on Hinge through 2011, pushed out the boat in 2012, and “the real launch” took place in February 2013, with the new app. “It had to be faster, using Facebook profiles, and giving the user a laid back discovery experience. So you wouldn’t have an excuse not to use it.” Still, it was not very successful, McLeod says.

Then Tinder happened and there was explosive growth. “Before that I’d been trying to convince venture capitalists that there was a market. After that they were coming to me.” Hinge was focused on young professionals who really wanted to find a partner – “more intentioned people” as McLeod puts it. But he was concerned that all dating sites looked too similar and that Hinge lacked differentiation.

At the end of 2015, he effectively went back to the drawing board, sacked half his team, and started again

It was at this point, in 2014, that McLeod was interviewed by a reporter from the New York Times, Deborah Kopaken. She had used Hinge, gone out on a date with the first man to pop up on her screen, and had fallen in love at first sight. She asked McLeod if he had ever been in love himself. Which is when he mentioned Kate. He hadn’t realised it was love, he said, until it was too late. “Don’t give up on your true love,” she urged him, turning off her tape recorder. “If you found the right person for you, you shouldn’t let her go.”

It had been eight years since they split up. Even after she told him it was all over, four years before, Justin had written to Kate once a year on her birthday. She had never replied. Now Hinge was about to launch in London. So he sent her one last message, saying he was coming to London and would love to see her again, if only for 15 minutes, and get some closure, as he puts it.

She wrote back to say that she was no longer living in London. After time in Cape Town and Paris, she was now living in Zurich, and engaged to be married in a month. Her fiancé would be around, but she was willing to have a chat online. Impulsively, in February 2015, he got on a flight to Zurich, tracked down Kate, and persuaded her to ditch the fiancé, call off the wedding, and go back and live with him in New York.

Justin McLeod is clearly a very persuasive guy. “She was having doubts,” he says. It was like a fairy tale. And then a degree of reality started to creep back in. They were sharing a 350-square-foot Manhattan studio apartment. McLeod realised that he had been deluded. “Up until that point, my perspective was that the hard thing was finding the right person and after that it was easy. After Kate came back to me, I realised it wasn’t like that. We had a honeymoon period. But then we were a real couple. I’d never been in a serious relationship before.”

In his revised way of thinking, it was only 20 per cent finding Mr or Miss Right,  “but 80 per cent is how you approach the relationship. You need to learn how to be a good partner. Chasing after your long lost love is not enough. I’m still a romantic but the real magic of the relationship is in recreating that magic every day.” Then he read an article in Vanity Fair by Nancy Jo Sales that spoke of “the dawn of the dating apocalypse” and denounced the kind of superficial hook-ups that dating tech was encouraging. “I knew that wasn’t what I wanted,” McLeod says.

At which point, at the end of 2015, he effectively went back to the drawing board, sacked half his team, and started again. Hinge became unhinged. The new app was not built to generate greater traffic, it was “designed to be deleted.” The point was not to keep on dating over and over again, but to develop a strong and sustainable relationship with someone. “That was the beginning of our real success story.”

The culture had shifted. Hinge mark II put the emphasis squarely on quality over quantity. More signal than noise. They had to focus on what really matters. The question was how many good dates a week were they creating. McLeod says, “We are the only app that asks, How did the date go?” They have limited the number of “likes” you can have in any one day. There is no more manic “swiping” – you have to engage with people and strike up a conversation. The different approach attracts a different kind of user. “They’re dramatically more selective, so our algorithms get better.” Hinge now sets up a date every three seconds.

Justin and Kate were married in 2017 and they have a little boy, Oliver. Amazon Prime has turned their story into an episode in its Modern Love series and it’s about to be made into a movie. Is it pure Hollywood? “The irony,” McLeod says, “is that I have a fairy tale story – but it taught me that love is not about fairy tales.”

In case you’re wondering what happened to him, the guy Kate left high and dry is happily married with three children of his own. And Kate may be the “muse of Hinge”, but she has started a successful company of her own, Kate McLeod, selling body stones – smooth moisturising blocks blending cocoa butter with other oils, which she originally made to give out as gifts at her wedding.

@andymartinink