Thanks, everyone. Final session of the day today. Thanks for joining us. Ygal Arounian, and I'm on the Citi Internet team. Really pleased to have with us Grindr's CFO, Vanna Krantz. Thank you so much for being here with us, and excited to close out the day with you.
Yeah, thank you. Great to be here.
All right. We'll also do some Q&A at the end if anyone has any questions. But, hey, just to start, so, I think it'd be helpful to just kind of start with how Grindr's evolved over the past few years. You've got new leadership. You're still pretty recent, right? New CEO, new CFO. There's been some evolution. You're recently public. Just walk us through-
Sure
... the kind of path of Grindr from and to where we are today.
Yeah, sure. So, Grindr's been around for 14 years, and really started out as a connection app. It was bootstrapped by a fellow by the name of Joel. He did a lovely job of really developing, I would say, global product market fit for an app that the gay community uses to connect. It really builds community, and so really what we think of ourselves as is a social connection app. We have about 120 billion chats a year, so that demonstrates we really are a social connecting app. In the time that we went public, we've been a little bit more focused on monetization and really have a couple of priorities. One is really providing value to our users in a way that they are compelled that they wanna pay.
We have a very, very robust freemium model, which we enjoy and enjoy having. But clearly, if we offer value, we believe that our users will pay for it, and that has worked over time. And then secondly, we really wanna serve the community, and George, our CEO, feels very, very strongly about that. And we think about the user experience and their ability to connect and enjoy community in the freemium model and in the paid model, and really with the Uber thought of essentially connecting, feeling part of the community, and having a place to call home. And it really has done that.
In fact, we have about 60 minutes a day of engagement from our monthly active users, and I would say that has been our secret sauce since it's been around, and in the last two years, we've demonstrated some nice monetization. We've grown our paid users by about 30%, so from about 850 thousand to about 1.1 million, and in that same period of time, our MAU has increased by about 20%, and we're up to 14.1 monthly active users.
Great. Okay, so you've teed off, I think, most of the things we wanna talk about. Let's start with maybe on the MAU and user side, also in the context of the kinda larger dating app ecosystem, which has been a little more challenged broadly. Growth has been challenged, particularly on the user side and top of funnel. You guys are seeing the opposite. What is it about what Grindr's doing that's letting you kind of buck that trend?
Sure. A couple of things. I'd say on the first side, when guys turn 18, we are a natural place to go to think about their identity and to really build community and to share their experiences and learn about other folks' experiences. So this macro thought that Gen Zers don't wanna use dating apps anymore, that's actually quite opposite for a community-developed app. And so they do wanna feel part of the community, so the top of funnel remains very, very strong. The second thing that really helps top of funnel is the fact that there's more and more acceptance for the community and for people to decide that they could be fluid over time, and so that has also been a natural, I would say, tailwind for our business.
In terms of, I guess, the monetization side, we are very, very early in our journey. I would say, you know, inning two. We've just begun. We haven't launched any particularly new products from a product perspective, but what we have done is we've launched a new duration, and when we launched the new duration, that allowed more folks to come in at a lower price point. The price point for right now. Sorry, our two tiers is $19.99 and $40, so $39.99. Those two tiers are, arguably, could be a little bit pricey for some folks, so having a $12.99 tier really resonated with a bunch of users, and that has been, I would say, the main thing that we did in the last year, in addition to really solidifying the freemium side.
So what I mean by that is, we put a new home screen, and after doing a new home screen, we enlarged the pictures, and we made the navigation a lot quicker and just easier to use. So that is really for everyone that uses the app. We also have an albums feature that we launched, and so when we launched the albums feature, we have 1 billion album shares since we've launched it in the last two years. And so that really fills top of funnel, because to me, that's the cheapest way and the most efficient way of having more and more engagement, just providing a feature that everybody can use and wants to use. So we did albums, and we did the home screen, and we also brought the chat feature onto the cloud.
And so one of the largest complaints we had from our users was that if they switched phones, they would lose all their chats. Chats is an important part of the app, and so now we're bringing that onto the cloud. We've kind of eliminated that problem. So we've done things for the freemium tier, as well as, I would say, providing value and some sort of pull towards also increasing paid.
Okay. Come back to the Freemium paid model or components in a second. You're talking about some of these things, but on the engagement side-
Yeah
... what's driving it? But I wanna elaborate on that a little bit more, 'cause that's also really different. You're talking about 60 minutes a day, that's more along the lines of, like, a social media type of app than it is, a dating app. So what is it? Is it the community that's different in the way they're using the product, or are the features different? How are you getting that type of engagement when all the other large apps are just a much smaller,
Yeah
... minutes per day?
The first thing that, maybe is a differentiator is that we're not a swiping app. So we're really a geolocation app. So because you're a geolocation app, what happens is when you open up the app, you see the... for free, you see the first 100 people that are around you, and you can chat with any of those folks. If you wanna pay for a tier, then you can get 500 at our lower priced tier, and then an unlimited amount at a higher priced tier. Of course, you could also close the app and move, and then you would have, because it's geolocated, you could have a new 100 users. So to me, that is really the fundamental feature that's very different from swiping. I don't know how you could swipe for an hour. It feels like a long time.
But you could look at your, I guess, your grid, and you could start chatting with people, and that can lead. That engagement, I think, really is what is driving it. And then the underlying factor of that engagement is the fact that it's a sense of community. Everybody that's on that app, certainly everybody has something in common, and that really, I think, helps.
Got it. Okay. Yeah, that certainly feels different than on the geolocation-
Yeah
... space.
We certainly monetize through casual dating, but I wouldn't say that's our primary freemium component, and even, honestly, even for people who are paid. Yeah, it may end up in a casual date, but I would say that it's really about the community, and the connection, and the chatting, and the getting information, and so maybe we'll talk about it later with respect to some of our expansion opportunities on why that's so important.
Okay. I mean, we could pull it up and talk about it now. I think it's a good segue, 'cause it sounds like the use case is a lot more than just for dating purposes and on that sense of community. So what's the split? How much is dating versus community, and what are some of the efforts you're doing around that to build that out?
So what I'd say is, it's kind of all co-mingled. The one thing that I would say is that we are talking a little bit about Roam, and right now, those are our next two products that will come out in 2025. We've talked about them at our Investor Day. We actually shared a pretty extensive roadmap. But those two products would be a nice example of folks talking about, essentially talking about travel. So Roam is, you're allowed to put yourself in a new location. So let's say you live in New York, and you're going to Madrid for the weekend. You can now take your profile, move it to Madrid. That would be a paid feature, and once you move it to that location, you can start chatting with people around there. That might be to figure out what restaurants to go to.
It might be to figure out the safest areas to walk around in. It might be to figure out what hotel you wanna stay at. It could be for a multitude of reasons. It also could be to what we lovingly call pre-game or pre-hunt. It might be that you wanna start meeting up with guys, and this gives you a head start into meeting guys there, so it's a different location. So to me, that's Roam. It's based on potentially a hookup, but also potentially just community connection, talking about being in a new place, because what we've heard from many of our users is they don't necessarily feel welcome or safe in every part of every city. So it's nice to have the inside track with folks from the community on what the best place is for them.
To me, that's a dual purpose for Roam. For right now, I would say that is really for setting up a date or a hookup, either right now, so that would be an intention, that you would change your intention to say, "I'm actually looking for right now," and that would be a separate screen. You could maybe be a bit more flirtatious on that screen, and that would also be a paid feature that we're thinking about in 2025.
Okay. So that's a couple of the products aimed at driving better conversion. Your free-to-paid conversion is 7.5%?
Exactly. Yep.
That's below, you know. I'd say-
Yeah
... let's just say Tinder. Tinder is, like, around 20%. So walk us through the path from where you are today. You know, like you said, Grindr has been around for what-
14 years
... 14 years.
Yeah.
Right, so, but you're now more focused on monetization. Where do you see the kind of end-
Yeah
... you know, target that you're trying to get to, and what's the path to get there?
Yeah. So we put out some numbers for our three-year plan. We don't show. We don't really have a payer penetration plan, and the reason is because we are so far below the numbers that you suggested, which of course, we've looked at, too. We don't think of that as our cap, but we do think that would take some real time to get to, because we have a natural, what I would call, headwind with growing MAU, right? So if you've been growing MAU at, I think last year we grew it at 8%, the year before we grew it at 11%. These kind of growth rates are essentially a drag on getting your payer penetration up. At the same time, payer penetration. We have increased the number of users by 30%, so it's not like we haven't made some real progress.
So what we really think about is how to provide value to different cohorts inside of our community, and so we had our marketing team did some really, really nice work on the different cohorts inside the gay community, so there's seven different cohorts. As you can imagine, working at Grindr, we have some nice, loving names for these different cohorts. One of them are called, you know, like, they're called the social skimmers or different names for where they are in the app. Social skimmers would be people that are essentially looking all the time for new hookups and new people to connect with. There's other ones called the rose-colored romantics, and those, that cohort is really looking for real relationships.
As we've done this work of understanding the cohorts inside of our app, we've also developed a roadmap that makes sense for that. To me, that goes to your how do you get more paying users question. How do you get more paying users? We haven't been focused yet on long-term relationships. Long-term relationships, you might have seen George, our CEO, you know, talk quite a bit about AI, and the reason that we talk about it so much is we are really focused on serving the community, on getting matches faster and arguably better. To me, that matching or the, the relationship tier would be another paid tier, another subscription tier, and would likely bring in more MAU.
What I mean by that is, if we look at our cohorts of age groups, in fact, folks after the age of 35 are considered old.
Right.
And I know, gosh darn! Yeah. Gosh darn. So after the age of 35, you're considered old, and we wanna bring those folks back into the app a little bit more strongly, and we think that the relationship-type sector would be helpful for that. Just like we just talked about the Right Now possibility, I think the Right Now is a little bit skewed more towards the younger profile. So as we look at the different cohorts and what they're looking for from the app, we are devising the product roadmap to meet those needs, and it's really about pricing and packaging now. So we have the three tiers like I talked about, the $20 and the $40, and the real difference between those is not huge. The real difference is really how many profiles you see.
There's also some other ones, like Incognito, so you can't see, you know, exactly who they are, but essentially that's the biggest change, and what we'd like to do is to make those the differentiation bigger, so when we provided the eight new products that will roll out in the next three years, what we didn't provide, because we don't know yet, is would they be bundled into a subscription and tier, or would they be an à la carte, or how do we just think about these in the best way to provide the most value to get higher conversion?, so I think that's how you should think about it, the different cohorts inside of the community and what kinds of products would be attractive to them.
What is the à la carte split right now? Is it, are you guys mostly subscription, or are people spending à la carte?
So we actually don't provide that split yet-
Okay
... but we've heard that that split for other dating apps is quite a bit higher than ours. We've heard 25%, is that what you've heard?
Yeah, sounds right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we're not there.
So, you know, but the goal is to get a greater à la carte mix?
To me, it means that there's opportunity there. If that's the market standard-
Yeah
... then we're not there yet, and there's probably room.
Okay.
We only have one à la carte. It's called Boost. So again, you can imagine that there's room for more.
Okay, so we're talking about ways to increase payer penetration. How does that translate into ARPU? I think your ARPU is around $22-
Yep
... right? So, is the goal to increase penetration and increase ARPU? Is there, what's the, how does the mix shift change-
Yeah
... as you get that penetration up?
Yeah, another great question because we actually think of ARPU as an output, not an input. And so what I mean by that is, when we launched the weekly tier, it was $12.99, it was cheaper. I have to say, I really honestly didn't believe that people would renew it, and so, because it was about immediacy. It was about, like, it's Friday night, and I just wanna pay for a little few more profiles and let me just do that. Turned out that there was a fairly high renewal rate that ended up making our ARPU higher. And what I mean to say really from that example is that we don't think about ARPU when we think about increasing our number of paying users, which if we're at 7.5%, we believe we can be a lot higher, then that's our primary focus.
Here's a couple of things that I think, how I think about ARPU and how, what might be helpful, which is, if you put out a matching tier or relationship tier, might make sense that that's more expensive, right? It's just a higher value, kind of more complicated and potentially better product. So that might be more expensive. We've also been talking about, like, a VIP tier. George has been already talking about that. That's probably on the more expensive side. On the less expensive side, what I would say is that would drag it, is if we end up having a lot more growth internationally, where ARPUs are naturally a little bit lower, and so that might take us down. At the moment, we've provided guidance for a three-year guidance revenue number and a, our margin number.
I would say that I'm not seeing ARPU being a massive driver in that. I think there could be a lot of flux-
Okay
... in how it all shakes out.
Okay. I wanna go back to a comment you made about a natural headwind to MAUs. And I'm assuming there's some investor viewpoint, at least, that you're... I mean, for the space in general, right, there's already some sentiment that there's kind of a limit and market saturation, particularly in the US. International is a different case, but with your kind of, you know, more focused demographic-
Yeah
... does that come up often, and how do you kind of work through what might be a smaller addressable market?
We actually don't think about TAM that much.
Okay.
The reason is, I mean, we look at external data, and that external data would tell you that the gay to bi population is somewhere between 5%-10%, right? In some countries, it might be higher, and in some countries, it might be lower. We also have to look at, like, how many cell phones are out there, and, like, 'cause you can only use us on a mobile device. And so we have a TAM number, but we don't focus on that. We're really focused on growing our monthly active users. And that growth, like I said, we got a nice lift from albums, which is, to me, an internal method of growing our MAU.
I think we're gonna get a nice lift when we put out a matching, or a relationship-oriented, which will kind of go for the higher, older folks. So from a MAU perspective, we don't see any headwinds in MAU. What I meant was that our MAU is a headwind to our payer penetration calculation.
Got it.
That's it.
Great.
Because even I look at the payer penetration, and I think, gosh, we've been doing all this work, and we've just gone up 80 basis points. Like, how about, like, 150?
Right.
But if I took out the MAU growth, it would be much, much higher.
Okay. I hope I'm not off base here, but the app is just for gay men, right?
Gay and bi. It's not really directed towards anything other than gay or bi or trans.
So why not expand to other parts of the LGBTQ+?
'Cause I think we think we can do this really well. Like, I think this is our sweet spot. This is where when we, you know, came into the business, this is about 95%-90% of our population. And we also found out from... I think George talked to the CEO of HER, that a lot of women can get everything they need from Bumble because they can get everything they need for free. So that it's, it's just a different... They can just go somewhere else for, for good value and, and a nice product. Ours is really very focused on the gay and bi men.
Okay. What about the competitive environment? I don't think there's another app. I mean, I know, Match just launched one recently with Archer, but-
Yeah
... I don't think there's one that's nowhere near the similar scale that you guys are at. What's the competitive environment like? Is it less competitive for you, and how do you think about that?
So, you're right. Archer came out, and we haven't, you know, we've been obviously monitoring things, and we haven't really seen a change. What I would suggest is that, at my last company, we really didn't worry about our competitors because the way we think about it is, people have multiple apps. This is quite common, in dating and streaming and lots of different things, and our goal is to be first in wallet, meaning you open our app first. And so we, based on those two criteria, we are number one in most of the countries that we operate in. There might be 10 or so out of the 190 that we're not number one, but most countries that we operate in, we're number one for our community.
But where there is an opportunity is that, our unaided brand awareness is 85% here, but it's only 60% internationally. And what we also did work in the marketing team was to say that, actually, if they know who we are, they would open us first. Now, because we're still more prevalent than anyone else, we still are in first place, but the truth is, we're the difference between Grindr and potentially Tinder in some markets isn't as great as it is in the United States, and we think that's due to, they just don't know who we are. So we are putting some effort towards that with respect to, just making sure that we're more known out there.
Okay. You're hitting on international, so let's talk about that. Again, broadly, in the dating app space, there's always, you know, the debate about what the international market opportunity is like-
Mm
... and that maybe that might be different for you guys, so just first, just kind of to level set, where are you internationally? What, what's the mix? What markets are you in?
Yeah.
How different are those markets for you to operate in, and what's your strategy?
Yeah. So our monthly active users are kind of evenly distributed, about a quarter in North America, a quarter in Europe, a quarter in LATAM, and a quarter in Asia-Pac. So we're fairly well-distributed globally. From a paying percentage, we're I think in our Investor Day, we provided domestic versus international, and so we do have a slightly higher domestic payer number than we do internationally. However, what I would say is, our growth from a MAU perspective has been growing faster internationally, probably given to the fact that we do have a better penetration of MAU to TAM domestically, and there's room, more room internationally because of this unaided brand awareness space. So from an international perspective, we think we have excellent global product market fit. That has not been an issue at all.
I think our pricing could be a little bit more scientific, so that could help with the payer ratios a little bit more. The way that it was done before we got here, and we haven't changed yet, was purchase price parity compared to the United States, but it was not based on, here's what Tinder charges in these countries, and here's, like, a ratio.
Right.
So I think we need to probably coalesce around a methodology that makes more sense for lots of different places.
Okay.
The other thing internationally that we have to think about and that we are thinking about is the localization of the app, and what I mean by that is simply the imagery, so right now, if you opened up the app in, let's call it somewhere in Asia-Pac, you might get a very US-based looking person on the app, as opposed to, not on the grid, but just on the app when you open it, and I think it could look more localized if it just was tweaked a little, and with respect to the translation, translation has not been perfection yet either, and so I think the translation, somebody told me that the weeklies it just didn't translate very well in Spanish, and it came out as, like, the one-week or something incorrect.
I think the translation coupled with the localization and the app store optimization would be the three levers that we would pull to increase, I would say, our international presence.
Okay.
from a paid perspective.
Okay. What about just growth, like new market growth? Where are you, and is there a focus on expanding into new markets right now?
Right now, the way we launch products is we just launch them all globally. So what we've found is, like, we launched the Weeklies in 2023. No, in 2022, sorry. No, 2023. In 2023, and it's been out for about a year and four months.
The weeklies are the weekly subscription tiers?
Yeah.
Okay.
We launched that globally, and we've done some work to understand how did that do, domestically versus internationally, and we actually found that they did equally well, not only from a sign-up and activations perspective but also from a retention, churn, reactivations perspective. So right now, when you think about an international market, it's really not based on how you roll out the product. It's really just based on those three things that we think would make a difference, which is simply localization, translation, and app store optimization. I don't see us changing our product yet for any particular country. Maybe in the long term, but they're... I think we're so early in our monetization journey that there's time for that-
Got it
... if needed.
Okay. Let's talk about the marketing strategy. I think Grindr's been more on the viral side-
Yeah
... of dating apps. There's, you know, I think you're stepping a little bit more to marketing, as you mature a little bit more. Just what's the strategy and the right spending mix, the right channel mix?
Sure.
How are you approaching that?
So we don't use paid marketing in the general sense. So when I think about paid marketing, I think of, you know, thinking about LTV to CAC ratios and that. There's none of that that's happening at our company, and I don't think that we need to do that for quite some time. So that's not on our roadmap. What is on our roadmap is the, I would say, the brand debt that we feel like we had, and we've made a lot of progress even this year on, I would say, making the brand evoke a feeling in folks that is more, just more positive as opposed to, at times, being mixed. And so that brand strategy-
Sorry, among the gay community?
Yeah, among the gay community.
So can you talk about that for a sec, the brand debt? What-
I think that what we saw in some of that work that was done by the marketing team was that Grindr, at times, was thought of as a something that you had to have-
Right
... as opposed to something that you were dying to open in the day. And what I mean by had to have was that was how you stayed connected with the community. Like, so you, if you wanted to feel connected, that's what you had to open. Now, what we've been really focused on, it's fun. We've been putting out a lot of podcasts on, like, it's literally called Who's the Asshole, and it's absolutely hilarious. And then there's a podcast on travel that is really fun. I've been watching them, and it... I mean, it really evokes, like, this sense of, like, sex-positive, sex-forward, and, and really embracing who you are that I think is really resonating with the community. And I think they've been winning awards, and we've been getting lots of positive feedback.
So that's what I mean about it is, like, you know, like, sometimes if you, it's just a different feeling. Like, you know, I think sometimes if I go to a less fun gym, I'm like, "I gotta go to the gym today," as opposed to if I go to a gym class where, like, I really love the instructor or love the music.
Right
... I'm like, "I'm dying to go to the gym." It's something like that, that they've really, I would say, I would almost say they've really turned the corner on.
Okay. So, you're trying to shift on the brand bet, less on the direct marketing?
Yeah.
I mean-
It's not that. It's about social media.
Okay.
'Cause the social media also can be more viral for the community, especially when we put these little podcasts on that are really fun, and that's also increasing our international brand awareness because people are sharing them. I mean, there's an incredible amount of sharing that we're seeing in our Instagrams, and that's because it's generating fun and laughter and just positivity.
Okay. The other side of marketing is the advertising revenue that you guys-
Yeah
... generate, and that's much different also than the rest of the dating app ecosystem, where advertising is much smaller-
Yeah
... percentage of revenue. It's in the low teens for you guys, right?
Yeah, mid 14%, 15%.
What is it? Why is that, the ad strategy working for you guys?
Yeah.
What's different about Grindr that allows for that?
The ads have always been the main part of how it was monetized in the past. So ads has been around in Grindr since the beginning of time. We reinstated the bottom banner in 2023. That's had no negative impact with respect to, like, just the feeling on the app. What we've also been doing now is that we've been looking at our ad formats that you could argue were not as sophisticated as they could have been, and so those ad formats have been improved. That has caused, I would say, better engagement with our third-party advertisers. We have new talent that's come in that I would say has just upleveled and professionalized our advertising team.
So that 15% or so of our total revenue, we intend on keeping it about that ratio for, you know, the foreseeable future, and we think there's a real path for that... and the path is that it's sort of actually related to our brand strategy of positivity and just positivity, so that positivity, we expect, will also eliminate some of the brand debt and will allow brand partners, which we have very little of right now, to be onto the platform. 'Cause right now, I would say it's very focused on health and wellness, so there's a drug called PrEP, and that is used prominently by the gay community, and there's advertisers for that. But we haven't really branched out enough, as much as we would like to, on other brands.
Okay. Back to products for a second. So you talked about Roam and Right Now, and you talked about products in general. That was a big focus at your Investor Day.
Mm-hmm.
Other than those two, are there any that you think are particularly notable, higher on the list in terms of focus or impact?
I think I really do think the dating and the AI-enhanced sort of matching for the dating could be very important for the community, and therefore, also monetize very nicely for us.
Yeah.
I do think also that just the wingman and everything sort of AI-related could be pretty innovative and might be fun for our users to enjoy. I think that's our goal, is that it should be fun and compelling for our users to enjoy, and until we get that, like, until we feel good about that, you know, it won't get launched. So we've given ourselves some real time to do that.
Okay. You've also talked about expanding beyond just the dating ecosystem.
Yep.
Tell us about Gayborhood, what it is, and what the implications of that is, just in general, what that opportunity is for you guys?
Yeah, so when we coined the phrase Gayborhood for ourselves, I think, the thought was that, right now, like if you think about New York City, the Gayborhood could be Greenwich Village, or if you think about San Francisco, it could be the Castro, and this is, for us, Grindr is the Gayborhood digitally, and then if you think about taking that kernel just a little bit wider, it's a lot more than just talking to folks and hooking up. It's also about health and wellness. It's also about travel, and those partnerships, because our users are already on our app talking about these things, could make a lot of sense for us to be the point where people come to for those things.
So we haven't talked about it in too much detail yet because it is still, very, very early stages, so it was not in our guidance for our three-year roadmap. But we are actively thinking about serving the community more broadly outside of just dating and casual hookups. So I mean, stay tuned. I'd say that I think there's really something there. I think that George and the team have a very nice sense and pulse of the market and about what users are wanting and what they would want. So I'm pretty bullish about it, but it's very early days.
Okay. Is the goal for everything to live within the core Grindr app? The portfolio model has been a favorite one within the dating app ecosystem. Is that something that you guys think about, or do you really just want everything to live within Grindr?
So we have thought about it briefly, but the Grindr brand and name is just so prevalent and valuable to us that we pretty much coalesced around everything sits in Grindr. Even the dating app could be a different screen or a different module, but still under the Grindr brand, a Grindr app.
Okay.
That's what we're thinking right now. You know, things could evolve, but that's how we're thinking about it.
Got it. Okay. You guys have pretty healthy margins already. At the Investor Day and the long-term target, you guided to some margin compression. Talk us through the margin profile and where you're investing, how you're thinking about that. What's the right way for people to think about it?
So I think that, yeah, I, I think we guided to 39%-42%, which are some pretty nice margins.
Yeah. Yeah.
And we guided to 20%-25% revenue growth. I think a couple of things at work there. In the past, like last year, we had a return-to-office policy, and in that return-to-office policy, we had many, many people leave our company. In fact, we were down to, like, 101 people at one point. So if you think about that, that's not a sustainable cost base. And we also had, at the same time, a what I would call a home-run product winner with the Weeklies XTRA that generated a significant amount of revenue, and therefore, revenue growth was, you know, pretty high, is what I would say. So I think that, putting that aside, this is a highly leverageable model. We don't anticipate having separate products for separate countries, just, I would say, some nice housekeeping around localization.
Because we don't use paid marketing, that allows our EBITDA margins to be high. What I would say we would invest in, and we are going to invest in, not a lot of investment, is probably talent. We're still, I think, in our last numbers that we disclosed 140-ish, 145 people. That I don't think is the right number either. I think we do need to be a little bit higher than that, so we'll invest in some people, honestly, across the board, engineering, product, data science, HR, legal, finance. Like, I think every department could get hardened a little bit more, be a little bit more institutionalized in how we do things. I do think there will be some headcount that's added, but other than that, we have lots of tools available. We, like, all the right technology.
To me, it's mostly about people and pacing ourselves. Yeah, it's not a very intensive, cost-intensive business, certainly the way we run it now.
Right. Okay, great. A few minutes left. I don't know if there's any questions around.
Mm.
Talk a bit about innovation and AI. You talked a little about innovation and AI. Can you just explain a little bit more what are the new innovations in AI that's coming?
Yeah.
I don't really understand it.
Sure. I would suggest that the Wingman is part of the innovation of helping our users interact with a certain intent. If their intent is to interact with someone to get a meetup or a first date, I think there's, because we have so many chats that we can mine, we can actually define how when you write a certain text, how that might be received, and what the ratios of success are based on that. We've already done a little bit of work in understanding how many interactions, like just text interactions, you need to have before a meetup actually happens. That, even that, you know, knowing the average, I think is also helpful to our users to say, "Well, you know, it really takes about eight texts.
When you have eight texts back and forth, chances are that you're gonna meet up," something like that. That's what I would call innovation, and from an AI perspective, for how do you actually define the match for your relationship? I think that there's some nice work that we're doing there with respect to when people get matched and have a really successful date. They love to advertise it on the app. And so everything is anonymized, and we take the information and put it all together. But so we have a good sense of what even the ratios of success are and also how those interactions should go for you to potentially be more successful with a certain cohort of people. So with the filters, yeah, there's filters on our app in terms of different physical attributes.
With those filters, that also can be helpful saying, "You know, with these six filters, this is what you tend to end up with.
All right, that's pretty much-
Perfect
... we're out of time. Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you, Vanna, so much.
Thank you.
It's a great-
It was fun.
... great end to the day. Thanks, everyone, for joining.
Yeah, thank you!