Morning, everybody, and thank you so much for joining us. My name is Nathan Feather, and I'm Morgan Stanley's Small & Mid-Cap Internet Analyst. I'm excited to be joined by George Arison, Grindr's CEO, and Vanna Krantz, Grindr's CFO. Thank you so much both for joining us today.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Okay. Now, before we begin, quick housekeeping item. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. With that, let's begin. So wanna kick it off a little bit more high level. For those that may not be familiar, can you talk through the Grindr story, market positioning, and your strategy?
Sure. So Grindr is the largest dating app for gay and bi people in the world, and we have about 13.5 million monthly active users. Our product has been around since 2009. We're coming up on 15 years in the market, and it's a very simple product. There's four main pages. You see a group of people that you can interact with. You can have favorites. You have a chat function, which is extremely active. Our users send a lot of messages a day, about 111 billion messages sent in 2022. We've not released 2023 numbers yet. So that's the kinda basic feature of the app. It's global. We're in 190 countries, and it's ubiquitous. Like, everyone knows us.
In the community, about 85% unaided brand recognition in the United States. The product, as I said, has been around for a long time, and it really is an interconnector of gay people in the world. So people use it for a lot of things other than dating. People are obviously there for a casual date, people are there for long-term relationships, and our research shows that about four in ten gay relationships in the U.S. originate on Grindr. And then people are there for networking, social engagements, like, "This is my layer of my Grindr friends." It's a very common kinda phenomenon among our users, as well as things like travel.
P eople frequently might use Grindr to figure out where they should stay, where they should eat, what activities are happening in a given market before they go to that location. And then health information as well. So, like, I think it's pretty undisputed that had Grindr not done the things that it did, monkeypox would have been a much worse of a phenomenon, you know, 2 years ago than it actually was, because we started to message massively inside the app, telling people: "Hey, go get your vaccine."
We built a little web app that allowed you to look up where to get a vaccine, and over 2 million people in the U.S. looked up where to get a vaccine through that widget that we created. So even kinda on the health side, people obtain a lot of information from Grindr.
W e do all these broad range of things for the user, which is why it's such a ubiquitous product for the community.
Great. Well, that's really helpful and a lot to unpack there, but maybe we'll start with just market sizing. I think online dating, it's always been a bit hard to do a proper market sizing, just given most people don't really have a set budget they allocate to dating. It's much more emotive. So how do you think about the market opportunity, both in terms of users, but then also spend?
Sure, so here's how we think about it: We are actually a beneficiary of what we call social secular tailwinds. And, as you can imagine, there's lots of the word sex in our daily jobs as well, so I'm getting mixed up. So the social secular tailwinds have been around for a little bit of time, but they're actually accelerating their pace. And so what we mean by that, maybe to provide a little more context, is that in 2018, it was illegal to be gay in India, and recently it went to the Supreme Court for marriage equality. Now, it didn't pass, but the fact that even that conversation is happening five years after it was legalized really demonstrates the acceleration of this acceptance globally. That's first off.
Second off, what we're seeing is all the younger folks that are coming into our app. You can come into our app once you turn 18. There's a lot more fluidity in their sexuality. And so what we're seeing is not only is the macro trend from a global perspective providing more acceptance, you also have the entire community user base kind of feeling more open. And so those two things kind of are translating into our MAU growth. And what we're trying to do now is to really take that MAU growth and think about our users and convert them and develop products that they are interested in having, and that would really is the beginning of our monetization journey.
Okay, great. Well, you've both been at Grindr now for about a year and a half.
Mm-hmm.
What have been your key learnings over that period? And where do you believe that Grindr does particularly well, but conversely, the biggest areas you really need to improve?
I mean, I think for me, the biggest learnings probably was validation of the opportunities that we have as a business. You know, I downloaded Grindr for the first time after I actually went and bought an iPhone in order to download Grindr in 2009, because I was working on a company that was building another mobile app on BlackBerry, and so I was using primarily BlackBerry. And then a friend of mine showed me Grindr, and I'm like: "Wow, I gotta go, like, go get an iPhone," for that reason. You know, in some ways, the app hasn't really changed at all from what we had then.
O ne of the big realizations, like, there's a lot of space here to do a lot of really cool things, both from the product perspective, and also from the monetization perspective. So if you create features that people wanna pay for, they will pay for them. And kinda that was the thesis I came in with into this job. A lot of that has been really validated, and how much opportunity we have is really kind of incredible.
T he other thing that's really surprised me is the fact that you can run a business like this as lean as we do. Right, we are a very lean, lean team, and we are very effective, I think, and get a lot done with a small team, and that's really great.
P erhaps a lot of tech companies are gonna realize that now or are realizing that now. But you know, obviously we are really successful at it, and making that happen has been really good.
Okay, great. And then any areas you think that you might need to improve more?
W e just need to deliver things that we promise our users, right? And, and as long as we do, I think we'll be in a really good place. We have a lot of features that we need to build, and we are working on those. I don't think that's why we need to improve on them, but we need to do that. Historically, Grindr has underinvested in technology, partly because of just kind of the ownership story of, like, owned by a founder who literally filed taxes for Grindr on his own personal tax return, like, no investors. And that's pretty remarkable that he was able to grow the company, I think, grew from there. Then sells it to Kunlun, which, like, stops investment in tech.
T hen, you know, sold to the big shareholders now, who then had to, like, clean up all the kind of technical debt that had been gathered. So, like, that really kind of created a bad situation for us. I think we're past that, but there was a lot of work to do to clean up the technical debt.
Okay, great. Well, you know, continuing that kind of feature set point, you have been expanding the paid feature set since you got there, I think, in particular, Boost. I guess, what have been the key learnings there? And where do you see further white space in that paid feature set to continue to kind of fulfill places where people have been looking for value but haven't been able to get them?
I n 2022, first half, Grindr didn't have basically any add-on products. It was just that these two subscriptions, and kind of that's it. So if nothing else, Boost proved to us that you can have add-ons on Grindr, similar to what you do in Tinder or in Bumble. We have, you know, probably half a dozen add-ons that we believe users really want.
There's probably even more, but these actually make a ton of sense. Many of them are already in test for us, meaning we've built them and we've put them in test. Others that are more specific to Grindr, and probably don't exist elsewhere, we are working on now. Some of them involve AI and kind of how what kind of information you're able to gain about somebody, right?
Like the unique information set that we can provide through things that we know that are not out there. And so we're working on those as well. So I think building kind of that broad feature set makes a ton of sense, and I think Boost gave us the confidence that, hey, yes, it makes sense to invest in these on an à la carte basis. Obviously, we're gonna do a lot of stuff on subscriptions as well, but you know, Boost is the first à la carte. It's been very effective, and we have a lot more that we'd like to launch, you know, in the next 2-3 years.
Okay, great. And I wanna double-click on something you talked about there in AI. And George, you've talked about AI's potential to be really transformative-
Mm-hmm.
-to Grindr in the past. I guess, what do you see as the key friction points here that Gen AI can really help address? And then what, you know, key AI-powered launches should investors be aware of on the roadmap?
Yeah. So when they first approached me on this job, one of the big things for me was that, hey, this is an amazing AI opportunity.
Mm-hmm.
This is back in 2021. I had built a company in AI in 2018, 2019, and so I'm probably a little bit ahead of other business executives in kind of thinking about it. I think AI is gonna transform dating in general. And the reason I said is 'cause most people actually don't share what they're really like in their profiles or in the questions that they answer about themselves. So, but they are very honest or much more honest about themselves in chat. 'Cause once you're in a chat process with somebody, you're actually trying to, like, really see, is there a match here or not? And so like, this is what this person is really like, is in chat.
You couldn't really use chat in matching people before because you didn't have a way to understand what they were. But with NLP, you actually can. Like, I can actually understand who you are. And since Grindr users, in particular, produce so many chats, right, 111 billion chats in 2022, like, that's a huge number.
We have incredible knowledge about the user that we can utilize to understand who they are better. So that's a huge opportunity for us. Obviously, we'd only do that with user consent, right? So we would never go do that to you without you telling us, "Yes, it's okay to do," but that's an opportunity. Secondly, in the gay community, the single biggest challenge with long-term dating is lack of density.
Because in most places, other than maybe New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., there's not a huge density of people that you could interact with, even in large cities. And so but you're fishing in that pond of local kind of people because that's how dating normally works. But if we can really understand you and what you really want and what you really like, and we can then find five people that are compatible for you anywhere in the country, that's actually pretty appealing. But it has to be a really good match, and I think that's something that we can now do on a go-forward basis once we build the technology for it, versus you couldn't do it before when AI was not kind of at this stage.
Okay, great. Now building on that, you currently say the payer penetration rate about 7%.
Yeah.
Now, that's up from, you know, call it 5-6 when you joined. And granted, even with attraction, that's still well below a lot of other, you know, mobile-first dating brands. I guess, what do you see as the potential opportunity to continue expanding payer penetration and the roadmap to get there?
Right. So Grindr launched about 15 years ago, 15 years, actually, next month, and it was all about connection to the community, like George started off, in terms of what we're all about. And you could argue it was extremely successful. So successful that we are the number one app in probably 180 out of 190 countries that we operate in. And so monetizing the experience actually wasn't part of its initiation.
That is really only something that we started in this, I would say, management era of being a public company. So we started with our lower priced tier, because as soon as we came in, we thought, "$19.99 is a pretty expensive entry point." And so we started with the weeklies at $12.99, and we were pretty pleased with the new payer growth... with the weeklies.
That's the first subscription tier that we've entered into since we joined. We also, I would say, continued the Boost. So we have two à la cartes and one change in duration of an existing subscription tier. If we look at the marketplace, they tend to have about 10 à la cartes and certainly more subscription tiers. So we are literally just getting started on both of those levers.
I can tell you that we have lots of ideas on what we're gonna do. And as far as, like, the cap, I would say our hypothesis is, let's say the other dating apps are around 17%, which is about, in round numbers, where they're at, and we're at 7%. We don't see any reason why we really shouldn't be higher than that, and there are really two reasons for that.
1, monogamy is not a value for the community, and so once you're in that relationship, it doesn't mean that you would come off of Grindr. In fact, you would stay on Grindr. You could actually stay on Grindr in multiple ways as a single person and as a couple. And then number 2, in lots of dating apps, only the guys pay.
Here, we have both sides of the equation paying. So we actually really believe that 17% is achievable. That being said, should be even higher and will take years. I mean, these guys have been doing this for a decade, and we've really just begun.
Okay, great. Well, I want to talk a little more about the weekly subscriptions you noted there.
Sure.
I think there's been a lot of questions about the incrementality of that and, and how much that's been able to kind of contribute to revenue growth. I guess relative to a monthly subscription, can you talk through the net impact of the increased conversion, but offsetting the lower individual payment? Then how does the LTV of a weekly subscriber compare to that, if somebody comes in at monthly or longer?
Sure. So what we've actually seen is... You saw we put out our guidance, initially at 25% or higher revenue growth, and we've been taking that up, and we reaffirmed it this morning in our 8-K that it's 31% or higher. And so what essentially that means is the weeklies pretty much turned into a home run for us. And when I say home run, I think on multiple vectors.
Number one, payer growth, double-digit payer growth in the neighborhood of 15%-20%. Number two, ARPU. And so why do we have even higher ARPU with a $12.99 product? Cheapest product we've got out there, cheapest tier. And that is because they tend to renew. The renewal rates are high enough that it actually turned our ARPU higher.
W hat that all translates into is our LTV for our weekly being within the same zip code as our LTV of monthly, but actually increasing the number of paying users, which is really our ultimate goal. Now, one thing I just want to mention here is that we have yet to calculate reactivations in that figure. And so what I mean by reactivations is, we have an app where there's lots of in and out of the app.
Y ou come in, you might be a paying user, then you become a, a non-paying user, and then you reactivate. Our reactivation rates are extremely high, I can assure you. And so once we do the LTV with reactivations, when you have a one-year LTV, we'll know if there's a real spread there. But so far, we haven't seen anything. It's all been upside.
Great. Now, flipping, I guess, historically, advertising had been the primary monetization driver, especially given the strong engagement of the platform. You know-
Very early days.
Yes.
Like back in-
Yeah, yeah, early. Given you've seen a lot of success shifting more to direct revenues and launching these paid features that we've talked about, where does advertising fit into the business model long term?
A dvertising now is about 14% of our total direct revenue. That's higher than all the dating peers. And as you said, and as George has said, it's really due to the fact that our users are incredibly engaged. We've put out time stats of, you know, around 60 minutes on average for our users, so that's, like, a good amount of time.
W e're kind of hoping and expecting that that advertising ratio stays in pace with our subscription growth. And now, it didn't happen this year. And because that isn't been the case so far, year to date, we are really investing in our advertising, and so we're doing that across three vectors. Number one, we're really gonna change the ad formats and make the ad formats far more useful to our advertisers.
Number 2, we really are kind of up-level the team and the talent, so folks who have done this before and really know how to do it. And then 3, really introducing video. And when we think about advertising, there's two segments of advertising: one, the brand side, and two, the programmatic or the TPA side. Right now, the programmatic and the TPA side are the heavier part of our advertising revenue.
We're looking to flip that over, let's call it a 5-year timeline. And the reason is because it's gonna take time for us to toggle down our TPA and toggle up brand. Brand is gonna take work in terms of, yes, we have the users, we certainly have a cohort that lots of brands would be interested in with respect to potentially men's health, maybe some men's fashion.
Like, I think there are brands that are a natural fit, and we also tend to have higher disposable income. I think once we tell that story, you know, it's gonna take a minute to tell the story, but we really believe that advertising can keep up with our overall revenue growth of the company.
Okay, great. And, noting one of the things you talked in there, in the employee turnover. So you've had some employee turnover the past years. You've shifted to a hybrid work environment. I guess, have you seen any near-term disruptions in the pipeline from that? And then how far are you from fully staffed back up, and, and what is kind of, the impact on that and kind of near term, even a margin?
Yeah. So just to step back for a minute, Grindr had hired 75% of people who were there when we showed up during the pandemic. I think we all know that pandemic hiring was a totally unique beast. And, you know, I think most companies don't want to relive that again. And it had gone 100% virtual, hired people everywhere imaginable across the country, which frankly, was not conducive to a performance-driven culture.
I think, you know, a lot of people talk about performance-driven culture, but, like, I'm probably on the extreme side of performance-driven culture. Like, my expectations are generally very high. I'm a founder. I've built 3 companies from scratch. Accountability is, like, very natural to me, and people who work for me tend to work very hard and long hours.
That performance-driven environment, which, by the way, includes at least being in the office sometimes, so you can, like, talk to each other and know who you are, and, you know, work on things together, is a mandatory thing, not a, not an optional thing. It's also not something that is for everybody, right? I tend to make work be one of two primary things in my life.
I n a performance-driven environment, that's the kind of people you attract who do that. But people don't make work one of the two primary things in their lives. And so the result was that some people, as they saw the culture we want and the culture we're going to, decided they could not continue with the company. We appreciate their contributions, but that's the choice they made.
It has allowed us to then attract more people who are in line with the culture that we want. We are going after some really amazingly audacious goals for a user base that has been historically massively underserved by products. And so I think you should be excited on this mission of making the world more equal, more fair, more just, and coming along the journey. But because you're doing something so audacious, you need to work really hard to achieve that.
The exciting thing has been that we actually attracted really amazing talent over the last six months and have had no trouble getting people to come and join us. We've been very deliberate in how we hire. We're not gonna grow too quickly or go back to the levels we were at too quickly.
We'd rather be pacing carefully and getting the right people slowly versus trying to hire everybody very quickly, meaning don't repeat what happened during the pandemic at Grindr and everywhere else. Lastly, you know, we've found some contractors across engineering and some of the other areas that are supplementing us in a really good way. So we don't have to pace hiring quickly because we can use contractors to supplement. And so nothing's really fallen behind.
Frankly, some things are ahead of where we thought they would be at this point. I think the fact that we raised guidance in November last year, and now we just reaffirmed those numbers and are in really good shape for the year to come, kind of speaks for itself.
Yeah. That's great. How should we think about any near-term EBITDA margin impact, given you are using some contractors, and kind of the pacing of that as we think about 2023, 2024, at least in kind of the salary and stock-based comp perspective?
Yeah. So, from an EBITDA perspective, we did pay a very, very healthy severance payment to lots of these folks. And I would say that we've kind of kept the EBITDA margins relatively even in the zone. Any EBITDA uptick is really coming from the... what I would say, the benefit of the weeklies, because so much of that drops to the bottom line.
It really isn't about cost savings, and in fact, these contractors that we've got on, in place right now are not, you know, they're high caliber, high cost. So what you'll really just see is us flipping the contractors into FTEs, and there really shouldn't be any real noticeable change in EBITDA because of that.
Okay, great. Now flipping to another cross line, marketing, not something the company historically had done much. And so that's quite unique for a platform at your scale. And so how should we think about the opportunities you see to lean into marketing in kind of targeted areas and the benefits that can bring?
Yeah. So I mean, it is a remarkable story that Grindr has become as big as it has without a lot of marketing, and frankly, in some ways, in the last few years, I think we've been successful in spite of our marketing or because of it. You know, that was one of the kind of aha moments for me when I joined. We've brought on board a new leader for brand marketing and communications, who is member of the community, has a lot of experience in dating and in other similar products. And so, you know, that was a big hire for us. And we actually moved him from England, because he was so unique in his expertise, and also knowing the product because he's used the product a lot, et cetera.
W here we are thinking about it is the following: number one is we need to make Grindr marketing be very fun and sexy for people. And that's in the social kind of sphere, right? Like, how we communicate what we are about.
We have a lot of people who follow us on social. We can have a lot more engagement, and we're doing that. And some of the things we've launched in the last 3 months, kinda, you can go look them up, like, are speaking to that. We have a new podcast, for example, that Tristan launched that has gotten really incredible following very, very quickly. It's like now a big thing in the gay community, and, like, a lot of people are talking about it.
T hat kinda speaks to the things that kinda can do, very like, become very viral. So we'll continuing that. And then secondly, you know, we know that there are a lot of historical assumptions about Grindr. Some are driven by things that happened in the past that have long been corrected but are still kinda out there.
Some are unfortunately prejudices that people have, that they might not even know that they have, but they still influence how they think about our product. And so we need to invest time, resources, and effort into telling the story of the amazing things that Grindr does for our users to counteract those historical inaccuracies. And that's not because it's gonna help us attract users, that's not the main focus.
W e do need to do that in order to have better advertisers on our platform, in order to have better partners, whether it's financial institutions or others, and frankly, for our shareholders as well, right? Because the questions that they might, like, people in this room might have the answers to those questions, but your, you know, kind of partners in investment funds might have those questions and might not know how to answer those.
W e do know we need to invest time into telling our story really well. Right, let's emphasize the fact that we launched HIV testing being ordered on Grindr mid-year last year. 235,000 people in the U.S. have since ordered an HIV test through Grindr, and a third of those people had never had an HIV test in their lives, which is utterly incredible.
T hat's just one of probably 50 things like that that Grindr does that we don't talk about as much, and we do need to talk about it a lot more. So our marketing spend will go up a little bit. It will still be tiny, comparatively speaking, but we think it's money well spent for the right storytelling.
Okay, great. And I guess adding on to that, are there additional markets where Grindr's maybe a little bit less penetrated versus the US, where you see some opportunity to do a ton more marketing there to help drive that initial flywheel?
W e actually have incredible global brand awareness, and so it's really more about, I would say, thinking more about international from the perspective of proper pricing parity and the competitor pricing that's out there. I would say that we have been U.S.-focused in terms of our product launches, and the truth is, it has served us quite well.
We have seen nice growth on our weeklies globally. But we do believe that we could actually do quite a bit better internationally if we're a little more focused on more scientific pricing and providing better translations. And so that's what we'll do, you know, I would say, in 2024 and beyond. But we have been pretty thoughtful, I would say, in 2024, about how we want to think about which markets from a marketing perspective of learning on how we want to do this just better.
I mean, if you look at the world overall in terms of acceptance of gay people, obviously, like, North America and Europe kind of have led the way. Latin America actually has been catching up very quickly and is in a really great place. Asia is kind of next in that sense. So there is a ton of opportunity to be ahead of the curve in that way.
T he majority of the Thai parliament is in favor of gay marriage, which, like, I think if in five years ago you had said that, you'd be like: "What are you talking about?" Like, that's completely unbelievable. But that speaks to, I think, the speed by which change is happening in a lot of places.
We're really well positioned to capture it, right? Because as things like marriage equality in Thailand happen, obviously, a lot of people who might not be comfortable being out until then are gonna become comfortable, and we need to be there to capture them as users. And so I think the same way that we've seen great growth in Latin America, I think we have an opportunity to do the same thing in Asia in the future.
O ne thing people may not realize is that our MAU is actually fairly evenly distributed across the globe.
Okay, great. Well, I wanna touch a little more on the margin side. You know, given the investments you've made in product, and planning to make to drive future revenue growth, you know, EBITDA margin has come down a touch from the highs. I guess, how are you thinking about the right level of EBITDA margin, both near term and then as you kind of build long term?
O ur EBITDA margin last year was 43%, and this year we just put out our 8-K that said 41% or higher. So to me, I'd call that, you know, in the same zip code. What I would suggest is that we are really focused on building our core business, and we are not stopping ourselves from investing in our business in any regard. The truth is, it's a very, very healthy business model, and it potentially is healthier than other dating apps because there is no spend on growth marketing. And we don't need the spend on growth marketing because we can fill the top of the funnel with our viral products.
If you think about albums that went out in 2022, I think there was, like, 1 billion albums made, and it became very, very effective of bringing users in. So a couple of things on EBITDA. Number one, we're highest in the industry right now. We intend on continuing to be highest in the industry. We have the luxury of doing so because we have a structurally more advantaged model.
We can still invest fully in our product roadmap and intend to, and I think that the just the overall profile, we're not even at leverage yet. I mean, we're just not. And so I don't think there's any stoppage or any hindrance or headwind in our ability to keep our EBITDA margins in the medium and long term to at least what you're seeing now.
Okay, great. Now, Grindr is used much more than just for dating. I guess, what do you see as the primary use cases outside of dating, and how do you think about the market opportunities for those areas, the possibility of building products?
O bviously, dating itself needs to be split into two. There's casual dating, and then there's long-term relationships, and those are different things. And you could be in both modes at the same time, by the way, like, it doesn't mean that you're just into casual dating or just into long-term dating. Oftentimes, people want to be able to do both. So that in itself is a pretty big, kind of lift for us in terms of features that we need to build to satisfy both.
We are very good for casual dating. We're good for dating in terms of finding the right partner, but it's frankly kludgy, right? To be really honest about it, like, it's not an ideal user experience. So I think building out the user experience that dating requires is a very big opportunity for us. That's quite table stakes.
W e should do those things really, really well first. Then the next one from there is travel, where we think there's a ton of opportunity because our users travel so much. We've not shared travel numbers, but whatever you think of, double it, triple it, quadruple it, that's kind of the kind of number you'll get to.
There's a lot of reasons for that. You know, we have a user base that is high disposable income, single, and you know, travel's a logical thing for them to do, but also because of the density point that I raised earlier. A lot of times, people have kind of exhausted their dating pool locally, and they're now traveling to other places to meet more, more potential mates.
T ravel makes a ton of sense, and I don't just mean, like, we build a feature like teleport, that allows you to put your profile in a city other than the one you're in right now, so that you can start talking to people in that market earlier. It's also like, "Hey, here's a list of hotels that we really recommend in Los Angeles if you're going to Los Angeles, and by the way, we have really great deals for you at those hotels." Or, you know, "Here are a list of bars where activities are happening, and these three are really impossible to get into, but we've arranged for our VIP customers to be able to get into it," et cetera. Like, there's a bunch of things on travel you can do in that direction.
G oing back to your advertising business, like, that's not really advertising, it's more like partnerships, but it's kinda is revenue like advertising. So that's a big opportunity for us. I think tied to that is local discovery as well, like, what is happening locally for me to do? Who do I go do that with? Maybe I don't wanna go to this party on my own, but if I can find other people on Grindr to go to that party with, I should, and people already do that through chatting, but we can actually build features kind of for that. And then probably even longer term, there's a ton of opportunity, I think, in health. We already are a very important source of public health information for users.
Frankly, in a bunch of countries around the world, the website that we maintain for sexual health information is probably the only place people can access that kind of information, because in those countries, it's just illegal to be gay, and so there's not a lot out there to support people. But even in, you know, the U.S. or Europe, like, a lot of information is obtained through Grindr. We think we can extend on that. Not something we'll kind of do immediately, but over time, there's a lot of opportunity. Whether it's, you know, help me find my LGBTQ doctor, because I prefer to do that. Like, how do you go search for that? It's not an easy thing to do.
We can actually match people in the right way to you know information about medications and what medications you should be on. I don't know how many of you guys know what PrEP is, but you know PrEP has fundamentally changed the HIV risk for gay men in a dramatic way and is like a really big step forward in eliminating this as an epidemic. PrEP's been around for a long time and it was actually not taking off among gay men in the early days, and there was a lot of sadness around that, about like why are people not using it? And then Grindr started in 2016 to message on PrEP in an active way.
We put a field in on your profile where you could say if you were on PrEP or not. Today, if you're not on PrEP, you're not gonna meet people. Basically, like, people will refuse to meet with you if you're not on PrEP, and there's, you know, probably a lot of reasons for that, but by far, the largest reason is the stuff that Grindr did.
Grindr can really move our users in a right direction on public health, and so continuing to do things like that, I think, makes sense as well. So we have an opportunity to be big there as well, but not immediately. So I think kind of, like, dating and casual dating and making that better is the focus for this year, for next year.
Some of these other ones are longer term, but I think they're big opportunities.
Okay, great. Well, got just a few minutes left here, so, close it with a little more high level one. You know, what are the one or two things that you think investors most underappreciate or misunderstand about the Grindr story?
T he fact that we are compared to other dating products is probably one. We are—yes, we are a dating product, but we're still a lot more than a dating product. And so these kind of assumptions that are like, well, you know, maybe Gen Z people don't wanna be on, you know, an online dating product, and that's—they're gonna cause you problems, et cetera.
Like, we get a lot of questions like that, which very much stem from the straight world, and I think understanding the role that Grindr plays in the community better then helps kind of address them. But that is one area that I think people really kind of misunderstand. And then the second one is just the level to which we are not yet penetrated on the paying side, right?
Like, for a company that's 15 years old, you'd think we would have done a lot more of that over time, but we just haven't. So in some ways, it's kind of this, like, interesting combo of, like, a very mature product, but also very early stage product. So this combination, I think, is very unusual and, and fully kind of grasping that, I think, is really important to realize that actually there is many years of extremely solid growth to come by just purely doing basic blocking and tackling. That's already been proven to work in our products.
In a highly, highly profitable way-
Yeah
... because of the 15 years that they've already spent on building connections around the globe.
Great. Well, George, Vanna, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate it. Thanks for coming.