Grindr推出AI功能与高端订阅，月费80美元测试中

You're about five months into the debut of some of these new AI features, some of these new subscription tiers that you're testing out. Can you just update us on on how that's going? So the tests are going really well. The product features are quite popular with users and they work really well. The product itself is very tested. We're now trying to figure out what the price should be. We've never launched anything at this price point before.

That's very premium focused. Small number users will ever use this product. And so we've been iterating on what's the best way to position the product and explain it to them. What are you thinking about right now? Well, we tested $80 as the baseline price and that did very well. Annually? No. Monthly. Monthly. Wow. We just two x our previous highest price point. Mhmm. We've tested prices all the way up to $3.75, and there's a broad range of where we it might land.

We will see. That is extremely premium. Very premium. Tell me about the $80 though. What will that entail if I am paying $80 a month? What am I getting out of it? So historically, Grindr's premium or paid tiers have given you access to more people. You would see more people based on how much you pay. Extra gets you 500 people. Unlimited gets you unlimited number of people. This one gives you a lot more information with the people you see.

So on the profile you have now AI generated information about a person. We go through all your messages and we create a shortlist of people you should be talking to and summaries of all the conversations that you've had with them, which is like a shortlist of kind of your prime targets. And then we also give you recommendations of people you should engage with based on what we know about you and we know about them. So it's a very different set of features that we have previously.

Yeah. When you're testing out the different price points, what are you noticing about the way that that people are I don't know. The way that they're thinking about the stickiness of it or just how receptive they are to it? I mean, does it change based on location? Well, this product is more sticky than other things we thought or than we thought it would be, which is great. On the price point, obviously, there's elasticity between high the price, less people try it, but there is also some no elasticity at the at the top because some people just don't care.

Mhmm. And I think that's kind of part of this, like, how many people do you want in the product versus how much revenue do you wanna make from it in total. And for us, you know, we've said publicly this is gonna be the driver of revenue growth in '27 and '28. And so it's a balance of finding like what's the highest price point for the total number of users you want to be in the product. So when you think about the user base and you dig into those individuals that'd be willing to pay that price, what demographics come up?

Are we talking about younger users, older users? Where does it fall? So Grindr released some demographic data last year in November. You know, 46% of our users are 29, so in that kind of eighteen to twenty nine age range in The US. And their pay rates are actually quite low. But we like keeping it that way because we want them to have a really awesome experience in the free product. And then as users age, the pay rates increase significantly and kind of peak at that 40 age cohort.

This product is very much targeted at the older user who The ones with more money. Yes. Because they have a lot more disposable income. Exactly. I'm curious about the way that that Gen Z is interacting with the app and the way that you've had to make changes to have Gen Z interact with the app. And we actually haven't changed anything specifically for Gen Z. We have tried to innovate a lot more in the app overall. My general view is that Gen Z actually is totally fine dating online.

They just want products to be innovating and creating new features. In in what way though? So we added things like albums. We added saving all your messages so they don't get lost from phone to phone which was a big deal on Grindr. We added ability to send pictures that disappear as soon as they arrive. Just a few examples of kind of what's happened. And I think people, know, 46% of our users are 30. That's not even like Gen Z is even bigger than that.

But just that small cohort of Gen Z is you know, 50% of the product. So we have no issues with getting Gen Z under the product. It's actually there's a ton of opportunity with the older user base to get them reengaged with the product versus worrying about, hey, is Gen Z going be coming to right or not? So how are you thinking about AI? I mean, when when you think about AI, is it something that you believe can meaningfully improve the dating experience or do you think that too much AI will actually make that dating experience a little bit more less lifelike, I should say?

Look, we are a product that aims to connect people digitally so they can then meet in person. Right? So we don't want the in person thing going anywhere. That's ultimately the core of what Grind was about. That said, density is an issue for all gay people because outside of New York, you don't have enough people to really match with. And if we can do better matches in a broader geography and people are more willing to take risk on meeting somebody further away because they know a lot more about what that person's about, then I think AI really helps.

So I think AI is gonna be ultimately a big benefit to products like us. Obviously, there'll be some growing pain along the way because you'll make mistakes and things will happen that people don't expect, but ultimately users will get to decide this kind of stuff. What about AI and coding? This is something you've talked a lot about. You've written a lot about it. You've communicated with investors a lot about it. The the thing that struck me in your most recent earnings report last week was your talk about headcount and the way that you you said you're going to end this year with, quote, meaningful fewer employees than we had originally planned.

Give give us the numbers here, the details, and and why you're doing that. Is it AI? Well, AI has been incredible for coding. We have increased our edge productivity by minimum 2.5 x And with that team only growing 15%. So it's like an incredible change. Now, like, I mean, I had an example that I got in my Slack this morning where an engineer saw a bug come in while he was walking his dog, told the Devon, which is one of the eye coding tools we used to, go look at the bug.

Devon looked at the bug, replicated the bug, wrote the code to fix the bug, and sent the engineer a message saying, hey, it's ready to be checked in. Do you wanna go release it? All while he was still walking the dog. And a human being was walking the dog, not a robot That's walking the the only part of the equation that's missing. Okay. So does that mean fewer engineers? Well, think we just need less people overall in in the company.

So we haven't fired anybody. Yeah. But we're gonna hire roughly 20 less engineers than we had planned this year because we are getting so much productivity from the team. Do you think you will fire or have any layoffs? I don't think so. Not because of AI. We are always performance managing, but not because of AI. But we will grow slower than we would have otherwise. You've also invested a lot in product development, especially around the release of Edge.

So once Edge is actually fully rolled out and driving revenue in 2027, is there room for product development expense to moderate? Not really. I don't think because we want to invest in the future. Mean, Grindr already has incredible margins. I think we're I think we're gonna guiding the year to be like, what, 42 and a half. So can we be a little bit better than that? Sure. But I'd rather take the savings that we see from less people and actually inves