Grindr CEO谈AI功能与裁员：工程效率提升2.5倍

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Well, shares of the LGBTQ dating app Grindr fell on Friday after the company's improved full-year revenue forecast still trailed the average analyst estimate. The company said it now expects full-year revenue to be about $540 million up from the $535 million and adjusted EBITDA about $232 million up from $227 million. It also said it expects to finish the year with quote meaningfully fewer employees than we had originally planned.

We've got George Harrison with us, the CEO of Grindr. He joins us here in the Bloomberg Businessweek studio. Hey George, welcome back. Um, you're about 5 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. Um, that's very premium focused. Small number of 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? We tested 80 bucks as the baseline price and that did very well.

Annually?

Uh, no, monthly.

Monthly, wow.

Yeah, which is 2x our previous highest price point. Um, we've tested prices all the way up to 375. Um, and there's a broad range of where it might land. We'll 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?

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. Mhm. This one gives you a lot more information about 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 short list of people you should be talking to, and summaries of all the conversations that you've had with them, which is like a short list 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, I'm I'm 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 than we thought it would be, which is great. On the price point, obviously there's elasticity between higher 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. 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 want to make from it in total.

And for us, you know, we've said publicly this is going to 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 during November. You know, 46% of our users are under 29, so in that kind of 18-29 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, their pay rates increase significantly and kind of peak at that, you know, 40-plus age cohort.

This product is very much targeted at the older user who wants

more money.

Yes, cuz [laughter] they have a lot more disposable income. Exactly.

I'm 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.

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 Grinder. 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 in a 46% of our users are under 30. That's not even like Gen Z is even bigger than that, but just that small cohort of Gen Zs you know, 50% of the product.

So we have no issues with getting Gen Z onto the product. It's actually there's a ton of opportunity with the older user base to get them re-engaged with the product versus worrying about is Gen Z going to be coming to Grinder 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 Grinder is about. That said, density is an issue for all gay people cuz 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 a risk on meeting somebody further away because they know a lot more about what that person is about, then I think AI really helps.

So I think AI is going to be ultimately a big benefit to products like us. Obviously there'll be some growing pain along the way cuz you'll make mistakes and things will happen that people don't expect, but ultimately users 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 head count 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 uh you're doing that.

Is it AI?

Well, AI has been incredible for coding. We have increased our eng productivity by minimum 2.5x with a 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 AI 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 want to go release it?" All while he was still walking the dog.

And a human being was walking the dog, not a robot walking the dog as you were saying. That's the only part of this equation that's missing. Okay. So, does that mean fewer engineers?

Well, I think we just need less people overall in in the company. So, we're going to we haven't fired anybody, but we're going to hire roughly 20 less engineers than we had a plan this year because we are getting so much productivity from the