Grindr at TD Cowen Conference: Strategic Growth and Innovation

On Thursday, 29 May 2025, Grindr (NYSE:GRND) presented a robust strategic vision at TD Cowen’s 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2025. The discussion, led by CFO Vanna Krantz, highlighted Grindr’s strong financial performance and future growth strategies. While the company is optimistic about its expansion and monetization efforts, challenges like App Store fees remain on the horizon.

Key Takeaways

• Grindr raised its 2025 revenue guidance to 26% growth, with stable EBITDA margins.
• The app’s user engagement is high, with 31 billion chats and over 60 minutes spent daily per user.
• Strategic investments focus on AI, machine learning, and international expansion.
• Grindr is exploring direct pay options to mitigate App Store fees.
• International markets offer significant growth potential despite lower ARPUs.

Financial Results

• Revenue Guidance: Increased to a 26% growth rate for 2025.
• EBITDA Margins: Expected to remain stable due to strategic initiatives and AI-related costs.
• Long-term Targets (2024-2027): Anticipated revenue growth of 20% to 25% annually, with EBITDA margins between 39% and 42%.
• Payer Conversion: Continued increase observed through 2024 and into Q1.
• Advertising Revenue: Projected to comprise 15% to 16% of total revenue.

Operational Updates

• User Engagement: In 2024, users sent 31 billion chats, with the average user spending over an hour daily on the app.
• MAU Expansion: Focus on serving the gay and bi community, enhancing features, and international growth, with 75% of MAU being international.
• Product Roadmap: Plans for 30-40+ new products and initiatives in 2025.
• Headcount: Hiring efforts concentrated in AI, machine learning, data science, product development, and engineering.

Future Outlook

• Value Proposition: Aiming to enhance the user experience to drive payer conversion.
• MAU Expansion: Optimistic about growth through relationship features and Gayborhood initiatives.
• International Monetization: Despite lower ARPUs, international markets hold long-term potential.
• AI Investments: Ongoing development of external features like Chat AI and internal efficiencies.

Q&A Highlights

• App Store Fees: Grindr is exploring options to alleviate these costs, including direct pay and negotiations with Apple.
• International Growth: Significant opportunities exist due to evolving attitudes and the app’s community role.
• Economic Resilience: The user base’s demographics provide some insulation against economic downturns.
• Product Development: The "Right Now" feature is in early monetization stages, with potential bundling adjustments.
• AI Testing: Chat AI is currently being tested with 20% of unlimited users.

For a deeper dive into Grindr’s strategic plans and financial outlook, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - TD Cowen’s 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2025:

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Good morning, everyone. I’m John Blackledge, Internet analyst here at TD Cowen.

We’re happy to have Vanna Krantz, CFO of Grindr, which has been a great story coinciding with around the time that you got there ish. So that’s always good. So I have a bunch of questions. Maybe towards the end, it up if folks have questions. But thanks for coming.

Appreciate it.

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: Thank you.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Maybe just start on the overall kind of online dating category. And could you just talk about how Grindr differentiates versus the other popular dating apps? And broadly in the space, some of the bigger leading apps have faced headwinds, yet Grindr has continued to grow at a really healthy pace. Can you just talk to that dynamic?

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: Sure. So first off, I’d say Grindr’s use case is just a lot broader. It offers connectivity to the gay and bi communities globally. And that connectivity really translates into our metrics. So our metrics specifically with respect to engagement are quite off the charts.

We we sent in 2024, our users sent a 31,000,000,000 chats and the engagement time per average user is over sixty minutes. So I think the fact that our use case is not only for casual and long term relationships, but also broader with respect to travel ideas, local discovery, networking, even health awareness and health information, that translates into much better metrics with respect to engagement which transfers into time spent on the app. The design of the app actually promotes this because it’s not a swiping app. When you open up the app, it’s a grid with a hundred profile users. You can chat to anyone.

I think that really helps build the sense of community and the belongingness for everyone on it. And then also our brand awareness is quite spectacular, I’d say, globally. So it’s very high in domestically, also very high internationally. And I’d say that brand awareness allows us to have this constant inflow of users when they turn 18. So when they turn 18, we don’t spend any real money on marketing as you know, but we continue to have this inflow.

And then frankly, we really wanna have have the best experience for our users. So we’re constantly updating the app so that the user experience is pleasing And so I’d say those are the reasons why we’re differentiated from what I would call the broad community.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: That makes sense. And at 1Q, you raised your 2025 revenue and EBITDA guidance. Maybe you can talk about kind of the first quarter and the confidence in kind of raising. And then on the revenue side, maybe talk about impact of new products, subscription offerings, FX, top of funnel user trends that funnel into your annual outlook.

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: Yeah, sure. So I think what you’re really seeing and what you’re going to continue to see is as we move forward toward the progress of our greater vision. So in 2023 and in 2024, we had very nice success with our weekly subscription tier and boost. I would say, were absolute home runs. We talked about a broader vision of AI forward and gayborhood expansion.

And you’re just seeing those foundations come through in addition to a far more robust product road map. So 30 plus, 40 plus products and initiatives in 2025. And how that relates to guidance is that our philosophy has always been that we guide to what we have line of sight to. And we had a lot of testing. Some of those have been progressing nicely.

And so that caused us to raise our guide to 26% or better on revenue. And then as it relates to EBITDA, I think you’ve seen that we’ve tended in the past to have higher margins in the first half and held back until we saw really the business perform to the second half. You could see that because our business did perform, we did spend in the second half. This year, given how many initiatives we have on the go and being AI forward with those cloud costs, you should expect our EBITDA margins to remain in this zip code for the entire year, given really everything that’s going on at the company. So we did note that in our Q1 call, but I thought it would just be worthwhile to note again.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah. No, that makes sense. And if we think about your 2024 to 2027 targets of 20% to 25% annual revenue growth and then 39% to 42% EBITDA margins. Should we think about that, you know, kind of that three year guide any differently with the uptick in the 2025 outlook?

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: So it was actually less than a year ago that we gave those. I think it was like June 27 or something. So it’s been less than a year. It is a long term guide. We’re nicely in that range.

Everything is progressing well. Our product roadmap, our AI forward features, as well as I would say the foundation of neighborhood expansion. When there’s time to say something more, we’ll definitely provide that. But it’s very early days and it is a long term guide. So we’re pleased that we’re within those guides, maybe just slightly ahead, but Right.

You know, we’re early days.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: You’re tracking. Yep. Tracking in a good way. Maybe we could talk you talked a bit about the users and that over six over sixty minutes time spent is incredible, generally. But maybe you can talk about the monthly active users, the trajectory relative to the addressable market and how we can maybe think about that going forward?

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: Sure. So about 98% of our monthly active users are gay and bi men. So we believe there’s plenty of opportunity to serve that community even more with new products and services and we’ve started to pepper that in. That being said, we also think we can expand the MAU. And what we mean by that is, for instance, relationships which we’ve talked about.

We believe that that could increase the demographic of what we’re serving now. So predominantly been a casual with long term dating, but if the intention is long term dating, we think that we can provide a product or a feature that actually is more focused on that. And so that would be a MAU enhancer or grower. With respect to TAM expansion, you’ve seen the beginnings of I would say the Gayborhood initiatives. I think that would be a TAM expander.

But right now the other thing also is international. Have 75% of our MAU is internationally. We’ve provided that before. But those markets are growing and the I would say the winds of change may have been the most active in North America but they are continuing to go overseas. So that also could be a MAO extender as we think about localization in those markets that just offer a slightly more relevant imagery or app store work.

So certainly bullish on MAU expansion over time.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Oh, that’s great. And the other kind of piece to rising monetization is of course the payer conversion, which ticked up throughout 2024 and again in the first quarter. I think Tinder at its peak was 21% penetration of MAUs and Grindr at this point is like eight percent, something like So how should we think about that payer conversion trajectory opportunities to kind of push it, continue to kind of push it up as

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: I think you’ve noticed that we’re highly focused on providing value to our users such that they are compelled to want to pay and move from free to pay despite the fact that our free offering is quite generous. And so the product roadmap is fully focused on increasing that value proposition such that more and more people would want to pay. That’s working very nicely. Remember to get to a 21%, you kind of We have an incredible headwind on that which is malgrowth at what did we have 11%, eight %, seven %. I mean we have some nice headwind on that.

So that formula makes challenging for us to move quicker. I’d say we also don’t view 21% as the ceiling because typically I believe at Tinder, and you would probably know better, mostly the men paid. Yeah. But we’re all men essentially. Right.

So we don’t view that as a ceiling. That being said, we actually don’t have that in our model as an input for our three year guide. It was basically an output and you don’t have to get anywhere near that number to make that work.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah. Yeah. We

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: Nowhere near.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah. I think in our out year of our model we’re 10 or 11%. It’s not, yeah. So there’s a

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: Yeah. There’s a lot of

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: room It’s a really incredible long term opportunity for the company.

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: We couldn’t agree more. I mean, there is an incredible long term opportunity and we are in the early days of our monetization journey of just learning, you know, what’s really resonating with our user base. And I think so far we’ve been pretty successful and we expect to continue to be so.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: That’s great. Maybe talk about, we can talk about some investment areas. You’re growing headcount but it’s not off a huge base. Think under 150 people kind of exiting the first quarter. But as you grow headcount, have you seen a positive change on like product development and on roadmap?

And how should we think about headcount growth as we get through the year?

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: Sure. So yes, when we joined, the headcount was like I think in the neighborhood of 220, 2 20 5 in that zip code. And as you noted, we are not nearly at that number yet again. I would say that the RTO so we had returned to office in the fall of twenty twenty three. We saw massive attrition.

That is what happened. We decided to we decided it was just better for our our our employees as well as our users to be in the office two days a week. So that was a a very thought out and good decision, I would say. It’s also turned out that we’ve been we’ve been really focused on where to hire, meaning in what areas. And so as you mentioned, AI forward, ML, data science, product, engineering, those are all areas that we expect to continue to invest in as we’ve built out the roadmap and we wanna put the talent in place to do it.

I’d say the talent that we brought in to date has been outstanding, really, really outstanding. Think having a company that’s public that you can see all the data on has been helpful for us in terms of getting talent. It certainly makes us more confident and bullish on being able to execute on our roadmap. I’d say that we are focused on productivity. I think you’ve seen our talent density and our focus on performance is pretty serious at our And that means that we can we don’t know what number, don’t have a full target but yes, we are hiring this year.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah.

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: And we are hiring, I’d say, to make sure that the product roadmap is executed well on and we’re well set up for the future. So we’re not holding back on hiring in any way. We’re we are we are interested, but finding the right talent takes a minute.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Is it with the performance of the company since you’ve been there and frankly the stock performance, is it a little bit easier now to attract talent or is there more demand from your vantage point or?

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: From from where I sit, just you know, not a scientific answer but

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Right.

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: But a qualitative one. It certainly is helpful to have all your 10 q’s, 10 k’s out there to have a bunch. We have an investor day that is pretty, I would say fulsome. So anyone who’s interested in the company can learn a lot about it from a public information perspective. And then as they interview, I would be surprised if they were not impressed with the talent that they’re interviewing with.

So for me the answer is yes. I think it’s hard to deny that it wouldn’t be more attractive for a lot more people to want to work at the company.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Makes sense. Just in terms of other investment areas, and you talked about like a really large product roadmap, but like product investment. Obviously, is industry leading from ad expense as a percent of revenue by a wide margin. But how should we think about investment in product, maybe cranking up the advertising relative to kind of maintaining the great margins that the company has?

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: So we said in our Investor Day that we always wanted advertising to be around that 15%, sixteen % of total revenue. We’re keeping track with that so far. I don’t think we’re looking for it to outpace certainly the direct revenue. So that is a nice healthy area in our opinion. There’s two levers for advertising revenue, right?

Quantity and price. And I would say that what you’ve seen is that when we joined, it was probably a little under invested in and we’ve been investing in our ad tech that is just starting to bear fruits with rewarded video and native ads. The other side on the quantity side, we have opened up the funnels and brought in ad partners for third party advertising internationally. So the international ad load is increasing but still far below any other social messaging or social internet company. I’d say that we It’s still new for people so they’re getting used to it.

But it’s still within very healthy ranges. I think advertising, we offer a very very robust free product and I think advertising is part of our business profile but not to get over at skis. Right. You

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: know. And and it’s a luxury to have users spending at over sixty minutes a day. Yes. You don’t have to necessarily crank up the ad loads too high We don’t. To you know, kind of disturb the user, you know, the user experience.

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: Yeah. We’re not looking to cause too much friction with the user, that’s for sure. Yeah. We enjoy the healthy ecosystem of keeping people in the app and being happy with the app. So that’s also a very important priority for us.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah. And you mentioned AI a couple times and we’re focused on AI broadly. And so I’m just kind of curious what are the biggest opportunities in AI for Grindr for external products? And also for internal efficiencies? If you can just kind of address this.

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: So I’ll start with the external side. You may or not have noticed, we put out a little video on our chat AI. We’re really proud of it. We think it’s remarkable. We think it could be really helpful to our users.

It basically summarizes all their chats into quick sound bites so they they can you know quickly have a jog of their memory on when they might have spoken to the person last or seen the person last or there or you know what really happened in that interchange. It is out for test with approximately 20% of our unlimited users. We haven’t really received any data yet but we’re pretty hopeful that that’s something that really resonates with our users and then we’ll take it from there. But really proud of the work that the team has done to date on on that. So the Discover, sorry, the Chat AI is something that we’re really proud of.

With respect to internally, George is a big advocate of AI. And so the engineering teams are using it to as great an extent as possible. We have all the tools available. I for one am keen to see how we can use it in finance. I know that in the legal department with respect to trust and safety we’re interested in it.

So it’s something that we have open arms with and it could also help with our level of productivity in the company. Think from this company’s perspective, we are all in.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Are are the just one more on the internal. Do do you see, like, are are the big cloud companies, do they are are they actively pushing products for you guys, like productivity products across different departments? Do see that? Or is it kind of not there yet? I mean, the promise is there, but maybe the product isn’t totally there?

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: I think that there’s lots of baby steps, for sure. And we’re pretty interested in also taking some baby steps because in the scheme of things, although we’re a company that’s been around for sixteen years, in the scheme of things there’s lots of re platforming and rework that we’re doing to enhance our infrastructure. So this might be a good time for us. Like the timing might be right from a lot of perspectives. So, you know, are all the products perfectly set up?

I don’t I don’t think it’s a plug and play like NetSuite. I’ll just use, you know, something that I’m more familiar with. It’s not quite there yet, but I think lots of companies are also, dare I say interested in building out their products and defining their product use case pretty nicely. So it’s a good time to be where we are with respect to our infrastructure and given George’s, our CEO’s keenness on it, think I think and our ability to fund it, quite frankly. I think it’s it’s it could all come together very nicely.

We’re pretty bullish.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Great. Maybe just talk about pivoting to the product side. Right now, that product rolled out, I think, in 15 cities in March and then plans for further rollout. Just can you talk about that product and the uptake and what you guys are seeing there?

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: Sure. So it was part of the reason for our uptick in our guide at the Q1 print. So we it’s a product that’s been out there for a minute and we George is absolutely right. He’s been really focused on engagement because part of the secret sauce of Grindr is that everybody’s on it. Like there it’s so integral to the community that the engagement becomes, you know, it’s almost taken for granted.

So if right now didn’t have that kind of engagement, it wouldn’t have a chance to be So we took our time to allow for that engagement to happen. And now we think it’s the right time to start to monetize and to decide how best to monetize it. It’s what we think is a very good feature and should deserve to be monetized. It started off with 10 free sessions in a week and now I think we give three to four depending on the city. And that is to keep the engagement alive And I think that makes sense just like we have, obviously we have 92% of our people that are free, right?

For our whole app. So this is like following that same kind of idea. We give three or four for free and after that you pay, it’s $4.99 and I think monetization as we did with Boost, you know, over a few versions that will also happen with right now. This is our first test case, let’s see how it turns out. We might change it a little bit, we might bundle it, like the jury’s out, but there’s lots of opportunity here.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah, that sounds like an optionality, yeah, for sure. What about other products as we round through the year? Anything that we should think about in terms of either driving MAUs and or the payer conversion?

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: So there’s lots on the roadmap when we have thirty, forty products and initiatives. All of those are there’s so many of those that we’re quite excited about. But we’ve always been relatively, I would say fortunate and cautious on monetizing any of them too early or too much. So I think the only one that we’re really talking about is from a monetization perspective is right now. From a perspective of excitement, I think we’re excited about Chat dot ai and the future that that could hold.

We’re also excited about the discover tab. So I think the discover tab is also using AI because you can get better recommendations and we think, you know, we’re continuing to evolve to have the best meetups. So that’s what Discover is all about. Recommendations and and really getting the right getting the right folks together and and seeing how good it all works out for everyone. That’s what it’s all about, right?

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah. Makes sense. We have about five minutes left. If folks in the audience have any questions, you can raise your hand. I’m going to keep going, but just giving people an opportunity here.

How about pivoting to within the cost of revenue line, the App Store changes? The other public dating companies have talked about this for years and it’s been, you know, kind of out of reach, but maybe I’m just curious if you in the coming years would expect any relief from App Store fees.

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: So this is for us, I’d say this is a complicated one. Because right now we don’t offer direct pay, so we’d have to build it out. And sure we could do that, no question about it. Other companies have, we could as well and arguably it could be easier now than it has been in the past. So we’re very open minded to that.

But we know that there’s more work involved than just building that out. There’s also the returns and the whole customer service side and yes, could do that as well. But we also get some benefits from being part of the Apple and Google ecosystem. So it might be that it’s better to negotiate with Apple which is what we’ve heard other companies are thinking about doing. It might be that, you know, I think it’s early days.

Should we expect some relief? Maybe. But we don’t have to put it in the model yet and I think, know, give us a quarter or two and then we’ll have a better answer. But at the moment, certainly we’re investigating it, no question about it. Let’s see what the teams come back with with respect to what it’s going to take to build this out and for it to be a positive experience for the user because you could imagine that there could be some friction involved.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Right. Yeah. And you’d have to allocate resources to all that and so Maybe.

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: Yeah. So let’s see how it goes.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: How about, you mentioned international, a big audience and it’s a pretty big part of your revenue. Just curious like how relative to The United States despite it being 75% of your users, it is under monetized relative to The US which isn’t uncommon for a lot of companies that I cover. But the opportunity there is pretty great, maybe expand on that a little bit.

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: So the reason that we are pretty bullish on it is that we think we have a couple of macro things working in our favor. You could suggest that North America has been the most open and welcoming to the community compared to some of the other countries. And that it would be natural for this evolution to continue in more countries. I can tell you that George has some great examples of how much movement and how much progression has had in some countries whereas it took, know, the first time it took like fifteen, twenty years and then over a five year period the changes in India have been quite eye opening. And so I think that macro change of attitude has been quite helpful for us.

And then from a, let’s call it user perspective, we see that more and more fluidity in users is becoming the norm. So that also is a positive factor. Then the other thing that we’ve seen is that our app, because it provides such a sense of community as soon as you open it, it’s actually more vital in countries that are more closed. So countries that are more closed, the only place you can feel potentially at home, not the only but one of the only places you can feel really safe and free could be on the app. So our belief is there is a lot more room in the international monetization journey.

Of course, the ARPUs could be lower and would be lower. So that’s why we’ve been very open with ARPUs and output not an input. It’s gonna be a bouncy ride. It could be that domestically chat AI is very very very very successful and that could bring up our ARPU, but it could be also that the international markets continue to grow at a very healthy pace. Even, I agree, they’re at much lower paid penetration for sure as they are in any app, but there’s room to go there as well.

So we’ll see how it all plays out. I think in the end when you have more payers paying or you have a lot higher ARPU from some very high tier payers, I think it’s all going to work with direct revenue. So that’s what we’re focused on, direct revenue.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Makes sense. Maybe maybe one quick one, just macro with all the tariffs, the up and down nature of it. How does how does Grindr, if there was like a modest downturn with the consumer, maybe just in The US, call it, how does Grindr fare in that kind of environment?

Vanna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: I mean, we’ve only been around sixteen years, so it’s really hard to go back to the old data because there isn’t that much. Yeah. But we have seen that they tend to be more resilient because they tend to have higher incomes, dual incomes with more advanced degrees. So we haven’t got any data to support that, what a number could be for a downtick. And of course we also would assume that we can’t be immune to anything macro, of course not.

So, unfortunately I have nothing scientific to say other than qualitatively, we know this is a community based app, and that there’s a lot of there’s there’s a lot with the time spent. You can see with the engagement. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of love behind it. And so, that coupled with the fact that you could also imagine it may not be the first.

John Blackledge, Internet Analyst, TD Cowen: Good morning, everyone. I’m John Blackledge, Internet analyst here at TD Cowen. We’re happy to have Vanna Krantz, CFO of Grindr, which has been a great story coinciding with around the time that you got there ish. So that’s always good. So I have a bunch of questions.

Maybe towards the end, open it up if folks have questions. But thanks for coming. Appreciate it.

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