Grindr at The Citizens JMP Technology Conference: Expanding Horizons

On Tuesday, 04 March 2025, Grindr (NYSE: GRND) presented at The Citizens JMP Technology Conference 2025, offering insights into its strategic direction amidst both opportunities and challenges. The company highlighted its resilience in the face of economic pressures and its ambitious plans for growth and diversification, while also acknowledging areas needing improvement, such as payer penetration rates.

Key Takeaways

• Grindr is leveraging AI to improve user experience and personalization.
• The company is focusing on international expansion, particularly in Asia and Latin America.
• Grindr aims to increase conversion from free to paid users through product enhancements.
• The app is evolving from a hookup platform to a broader social network.
• New business opportunities are being explored in health, wellness, travel, and luxury experiences.

Financial Results

• Resilience: Grindr has remained unaffected by macroeconomic pressures like student loan repayments that have impacted other apps.
• MAU Growth: The app boasts 14.5 million active monthly users, with significant international presence (75% of users).
• Payer Penetration: Current payer penetration is at 7-8%, lower than competitors, but with potential for growth.
• Conversion Success: There has been a successful increase in converting free users to paid subscribers.

Operational Updates

• Product Focus: Emphasis on product innovation tailored to user intent, including new features for dating, friendships, and networking.
• AI Integration: AI is being used to enhance user matching and personalization.
• Discovery Tab: A new feature will broaden user connections and reduce geographic limitations.
• A-List Feature: Prioritizes connections based on user history and preferences.
• International Strategy: Efforts to localize products and marketing in key markets, with a push to increase brand awareness in regions like Spain.

Future Outlook

• Monetization Strategy: Grindr plans to prioritize user experience before focusing on monetization.
• 2025 Product Launches: Upcoming launches include intent-based features and AI-driven personalization.
• Growth Engines: Exploring new business opportunities in health and wellness, travel, and luxury experiences.
• India Opportunity: Recognized as a significant market for future growth due to cultural shifts.

Q&A Highlights

• Community Focus: Grindr’s strong community focus is a key factor in its resilience in conservative markets.
• Localization Efforts: Plans to enhance localization in international markets through language and imagery adaptation.
• Data Utilization: The company aims to leverage user data and AI to improve matching and user experience.

For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - The Citizens JMP Technology Conference 2025:

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: All right. We’ll kick this off. I’m Nick Jones, Internet analyst here at Citizens. Really excited to have Grindr here today with CEO George Harrison, CFO of Edna Krantz. We’ll get into it.

I think most folks probably know what Grindr is and has heard of Grindr. But for those who are maybe new to the story, revisiting the story, what’s the kind of the quick overview of the app? Who are the users? Who does it really cater to?

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: Yes. And just one quick housekeeping. We haven’t done earnings yet. Earnings are tomorrow, so we might be a little circumspect in some questions for that reason. Yes, so Grindr has been around for now sixteen years, which is a fairly long time when you think about a product in kind of the Internet age.

It was one of the very first mobile products that took advantage of Apple’s geolocation that became successful and still remains very successful. Grindr’s primary user base is gay and bi men. And when I say primary, like over 98% of people who use Grindr are in those two categories. Buy has grown over time because I think in the younger generations, more people are willing to say that they’re by versus not from previous times. And we are very international, so we’re in 190 countries, obviously in The US First and then grew from there.

In a lot of the countries where we work, we are usually the only way for gay people to connect online to each other because there’s not a lot of options. Obviously, we don’t make a lot of money in those countries, but nevertheless, there’s a public good component to what we do. Grindr historically started out as a hookup product, meaning with this immediacy of, like, satisfy the need to meet somebody very, very quickly, and it became very viral very, very fast as a result. Over time though, as its user base grew, people came in with different intentions, right? So some people might have an intention that I’m looking for a long term partner versus other people are here for a hookup still, Others are actually networking for totally other reasons.

Or people could actually be in multi intention at the same time, right? You might be looking for a long term partner, but you’re still not averse to to a hookup. But what what we found is that now we need to make it easier for people to navigate the different intents that they’re in to actually get the benefits from the product that they want, and that’s a lot of what we’ve been working on to make that a lot easier for them. And we don’t really think of Grindr as a dating product anymore. We tend to think of it as like a social network, which is monetizing the dating component of what it does, but it does a lot of other stuff at the same time.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: So there’s a lot of dating apps out there today. What really stands out against what are the really competitors and what makes Grindr unique from, you know, I think people when they think dating apps think swiping.

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: Yeah. So Grindr’s architecture is very different. It’s an open architecture product, where you see people that surround you within a certain amount of miles, and depending on whether you’re a paid subscriber or not, you see more or less people, right? So our unlimited subscribers, which are higher tier, see unlimited number of people. Our extra subscribers, which are middle tier, see 500 people, and then non paying subscribers see 100 people around them.

But if you move around, the number of people meaning the people you see it changes, so I actually can see more people by just kind of moving around from location to location even if you don’t pay. And then we have a very open chat infrastructure, so anyone you see you can message and start talking to them, and anyone that sees you can message and start chatting with you. So Grinder users send a ton of chats every day. We produced 130,000,000,000 chats last year on 14,500,000 active monthly users. So like the amount of chatting that’s going on in the app is very, very high, and that’s a core part of kind of what makes Grindr really awesome.

And that’s a big thing that leads to us, our users being in the app for about an hour a day.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: Let’s talk about the, grid interface. You know, at the product level, how does that help create a unique user experience? Why is that such a key feature?

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: Yeah. So this is kind of the thing where you’re not looking to be matched with somebody to chat them. You can chat with anybody you want, and that’s very different from any of their bigger products. Now there are a couple of smaller products like Grindr that have kind of mimicked Grindr’s grid, but but of the big companies, we’re the only one that has that, and, you know, that that is partly why people are there for many different reasons. Right?

So you might not have a, a relationship situation with somebody because it’s just not a match, but there might be something else that you wanna talk about with them. People also use Grindr just literally as, like, friendship management, application, not where it’s like, oh, hey. These are my closest friends, but, like, this is my gym buddy, and I’m kinda start talking to him on Grindr, and then I see him at the gym, and then ask him to spot me. Or these are guys I oftentimes see at the bar, and I’m, like, shy to ask them for their names, and so I talk to them on Grindr, and then I see them at the bar again. So there is a in real life component to what’s happening on Grindr without us forcing it.

It just kind of inevitably, happens because, you know, for gay men anywhere, frankly, even if you live in West Hollywood or Castro, your density is still pretty low, right, because there are only so many of us. And so having a place where a huge chunk of the gay population in any given location is going to be, it’s not a %, there’s still opportunity to add more people to our user base, even in The United States in a significant way. But where most of them are going to be is really valuable and very helpful.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: So you called out 98% are gay men or bi men. Can we kind of dig into the demographics a little bit more? Are they are user generally older, younger, more affluent, less affluent? Yeah. Suburbs, urban, like, you know, how

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: So so we’re actually everywhere, and even in The US, people might have perception that, hey, like, probably more heavy on the coast. It’s actually not. Incredibly, like, there’s a very heavy set of people who are in, the middle of the country, big cities in the country, and also rural areas in the country. And frankly, people in rural areas might be using Grindr more actively because that’s, like, their only outplay. Like, there’s not even a gay bar that you can go to, right, or, some other or a gay gym where you see a lot of people, who who are gay.

So we are all over the country. Grindr is the only product of its kind that hasn’t had this issue of the younger generation going to a new product. Right? So like Facebook then was threatened by Instagram, then they bought Instagram, then it was threatened by Snapchat, and then it was then Snapchat and Facebook were threatened by TikTok. So there’s kind of every three, four years some new product has come out that the younger cohort has gravitated to.

We’ve not had that issue. Younger cohorts come into Grindr, in part because they actually want to be around other people like them who are older. I guess, actually something that they do want. Grindr is an 18 app only, so when we say younger people, we mean like 18 or older. And so we’ve been very successful in getting kind of the younger cohorts in.

Frankly, if there’s big opportunities with the 45 and plus cohort who maybe use Grindr a lot ten years ago, but is using Grindr less today, and getting them back into the app is something we are thinking through and how to kind of do that. They usually still have a grander of competence, but they must not be in the app that much. You know, gay men on average are significantly higher disposable income than their straight counterparts. Gay households, meaning so gay married men, have 2x the income of a straight household. Gay men have twice the likelihood of having a JD, MD, MBA, or a PhD, versus their straight counterparts.

So and they don’t have children by and large, right, so that disposable income is also not only do they earn more money in general, but also that disposable income is much higher, and that’s actually a big reason why gay men tend to travel a lot and like kind of experiential things in life, which cost more money because they have that money to to spend. You know, that’s gonna start to change slowly because when you survey younger gay men, a very large percentage of them actually want to be married. So fifty percent of people gay and by men below 35 say that they eventually want to be in a settled down relationship, which is way higher than what you would have seen fifteen years ago when I was, you know, in kind of my late twenties. And then if you ask them if they wanna have children, 25% of gay men below 35 wanna have kids, which is also a, like, orders of magnitude change. Because when I would say I wanted to have children when I was, I don’t know, 30, I was some of this weirdo dude who, like, you know, was definitely very strange, and and now it’s very different.

And that kinda goes back to, like, you know, Andrew Sullivan was one of the main leaders intellectually of the gay rights movement around gay marriage, and he would always make this argument, if you allow them to get married, they’re gonna become much more, you know, integrated into society in that way, and and I think that’s definitely happening, which has a product implication too because that means we have to build more features for dating and long term relationships because that’s what our younger cohorts actually really want.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: Can we switch gears to macro here? It’s affecting a lot of different industries. How has Grindr been impacted if at all? And does it show up in online dating or is it pretty resilient?

Edna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: So we can’t say we’re immune because that would be probably going too far, but we have been incredibly resilient. We were certainly nervous when we heard about student loans coming due last September. We didn’t see any impact. We had heard a little bit also about a la carte going down in some of the other dating apps. We didn’t notice that either.

I would say that now maybe we have a hypothesis, which is because it’s such a community, a social networking app and it’s really for the community. And yes, it’s monetized through dating predominantly right now. It’s just so much more than that that we have we have been able to stay resilient. So from a macro perspective, we continue to grow our MAUs pretty nicely, I would say, universally across the entire world. Certainly, domestically, we’re about 25% MAU and internationally, I’d say 75%.

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: Midrush could happen, right, and, like, when COVID happened, obviously, that was challenging. But I think the resiliency level is much higher here.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: You know, you talk about the users, really being able to find a community there, particularly if they’re in certain parts of the country where there may be other gay bars or places to go. Is Grindr kind of viewed as a discretionary expense or is it increasingly kind of a staple that folks need?

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: Well, being on Grindr is a staple that you need. Like it’s kind of a requirement, I think, for most people in some fashion or form. But, and I mean, we have a 95% brand recognition on aided in gay and bi community, right, like the number is just incredible. I think paying for it is not, right, because we do have such a robust feature set for free users that you don’t have to pay for it, and that’s been very consciously done because that really helps us drive new users into the product over time. And then we aim to have kind of additional value added services that people pay for.

But, you know, a lot of the discussion usually is like, well, you know, could you have a much higher penetration quickly? And, yeah, we could. We could, like, make messages be paid like they are in most other products or, really kind of get in the way of people being able to use the product for free, and I don’t think that makes sense for Grindr. I think we all really benefit by having a very robust free product.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: Yes. Maybe taking a step back and just thinking about the dating industry at large. Over the years, there were stigma around online dating. That’s, I think, almost completely diminished, at least in The U. S.

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: And gay men went online way before straight people did. I mean, I moved to D. C. After college in February, and Manhunt was like the kind of dominant product back then, and like, I mean, the same way everyone’s on Grindr now, everyone was on Manhunt back then in large cities.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: So do you when we think about growth opportunities international, like when you start thinking different markets, like certain markets may be a little more conservative in terms of being kind of having progressive views and you’re seeing headlines. I mean, does that impact growth opportunity? How should folks think about international expansion in terms of, I guess, online dating signals?

Edna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: So, that’s a great question because we have been seeing international growth significantly faster even than The United States in the perspective of the free user base, which George already talked about, which is really important, right, because that is actually how we build the network and how we build the ecosystem. So, for instance, there’s a few countries in Asia that have been our highest growing countries with respect to free users. And one thing that we didn’t mention was that actually the time spent for free users and paid users is shockingly close, which gives you a sense of how much engagement you can get from our app domestic sorry, from a free perspective. So, yeah, honestly, the it seems that because of the community aspect that you almost need Grindr more in countries that are more conservative because that is where you can really find your community as opposed to, you know, I can even I can go out in San Francisco to the Castro and then really enjoy myself from a different perspective if I wanted to. I think that’s less available.

We also saw that come through with respect to the price testing that we did internationally. I was, you know, we we do a lot of testing all the time. And we didn’t really see a big difference if we brought prices down. So it turned out that it is actually higher value, it turns out, internationally where the price from a relative basis could be more expensive.

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: Yeah. I tend to think of abroad in, like, kind of four summary categories, like there’s the English speaking world where like the behavior patterns are the closest to The United States, but there’s still opportunity to actually do better. Then there’s you know, European like countries, I mean, not just Europe, but like countries in the kind of that economic sphere where we definitely have opportunity both on MAU and pay penetration that’s higher than where we are, in English speaking world than The US. Then there is kind of the rest of the developing world, right, both in Latin America and Asia, where we have a lot of opportunity on MAU for sure, and Latin America has more penetration than Asia, but nevertheless. And then there’s like a separate bucket of India in in my mind because India is such a big country and such a big opportunity, less on revenue in the near term and more on the user front, because there is a lot of cultural change happening in India and we should be in a position to take advantage of that over time.

We still have a lot of users in India now, but you know, just look at TAM versus where we are, there is a lot more to be had there over time as people become more comfortable. But you know in India being gay was illegal like fifteen years ago. So you know there’s still a lot of cultural change that has happened.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: Let’s talk about TAM a little bit. You know so you’re the top dating app for gay men. Yeah. Everyone knows you, very high awareness. What does it take to keep accessing this TAM, which is massive globally to get more users on?

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: So yes, everyone knows us in The U. S, but in Spain, for example, our our, you know, brand awareness is like 60%. Now that’s probably extremely good for most companies, but when you’re comparing yourself to something that you have 95% of in in one country, where you’re like, okay, there’s still a lot of room to grow, and if people don’t know you, they can’t use you, right? So, I think in we still have a lot of room to drive our brand awareness to be higher, and that’s not it doesn’t mean go run a bunch of TV ads in Spain, right? Like, we are narrowcasting to a segment of the population, 6%, whatever that might be.

And so we use a lot of social media as a way to communicate with people who don’t know about Grindr, but might be, and we need to do that more of, for sure. And that’s true in many other countries where there’s opportunity. But even among US users and potential users, there’s still a pretty significant number who don’t use Grindr on a regular basis. Now they might have an account and use it regularly or they might not have account at all or they used to have an account and don’t have one now. So we still feel like there’s a ton of mal growth possible even here.

And a lot of that I think has to do with broadening the feature set to serve all the different ways in which Grindr is already used. But I think with people who might not be using Grindr in The US, for example, as much, they just don’t like the fact that we don’t have those features. Right? So we don’t have features for dating. We don’t have features for friendships.

It’s very like all the feature set is still used primarily for the hookup experience, even though the using usage of the product has expanded. And so a big effort that we’re undertaking is this product innovation via intent to try to build features that will specifically cater to whatever intentions people might have.

Edna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: And we could even be a little more basic internationally, like this is extremely true certainly in the places where we have a decent amount of TAM. I’d say that internationally, we haven’t done any real localization. So a lot of our language and our imagery isn’t even done yet in some of those key countries that George has been speaking about. So from my perspective, the Mautotam International has a lot of room to grow, but it will take a little bit of work. Although we have incredible global product market fit, in my opinion, I think there are some local efforts that we could do to to really raise that up a little bit along with the brand awareness that that has already been kicked off.

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: And it’s, like, very basic stuff. Like, in India, for example so in The US, a lot of people are discreet, and in Western Europe, people are still discreet, high percentage. But usually, they’ll just, like, leave their profile blank. If you go look at profiles in India, they’ll have, like, a random picture of, like, you know, scenery or something like that. I guess, a different, like, different experience.

People expect different things, and so we probably can solve some of that for them in in different ways where, you know, it’s not all blank, but has a different kind of solution. But a solution that works for The US in that regard where, like, maybe here we create AI avatars for you, if you want a bit discreet to make the the app be better in that sense, I don’t know if that works in India. We might need to do something else, right? So very basic localization, would go a long way. Not to mention the fact that the idea of showing U.

S. Western models in Asia is like beyond silly and needs to be fixed.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: All right. So huge opportunity, U. S. And globally. Great brand awareness.

Let’s switch to monetization and kind of the product roadmap. The team has done a great job executing. At the Analyst Day, you laid out a really clear kind of roadmap for the next several years. There’s some key product launches in 2025 intent based travel, AI personalization. At a high level, what’s kind of the biggest near term monetization opportunities that you’re most excited about?

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: Well, so we tend to think of product separate from monetization a little bit because I think our approach, my approach, but also the whole team’s approach is very much like build product for the user. If the user gets value, then you’ll figure out how to monetize that, which, you know, might not necessarily be what all investors think about, but I think that’s the best way to preserve the quality of the app and not run into issues that some of our peers have run into over time, where it was like only focused on monetization and then you hollow that out and you have problems. There’s a lot of products that we’re working on and a lot of them are things that are going to be in testing this year and maybe in testing even next year, but it will monetize in ’twenty seven. Those are things that are going to be in testing this year and then monetize in ’twenty six. Kind of at a meta level, I think the way we think through is create better experiences based on people’s different intentions and use all the data that we have about people to create better inferences that educate users about each other because ultimately our goal is make it easier for you to find the people you want without having to go through a lot of chatting with people who are not right for you, whether it’s for a date or for a hookup or for mentorship or for going out to a bar with a bunch of people on a Friday night.

Like, whatever it is that you’re using it for, we can match you a lot better, and given how much chat content we have, there’s a lot of inference that we can make. So a lot of the work we’re doing at a foundation level is like applying AI to some of these things, learning things that we can derive about users from that, and then through that building out products that make sense for users. Like for example, we just launched 2,000 test users, what we call summaries, which look at your chat conversation with people that you had a lengthier chat conversation with and then create you a summary of that experience. Like, that’s a pretty awesome thing for Grindr users, but the level of accuracy of that is also very, very high. Twenty four months ago, that was not possible to do.

Like, GenAI couldn’t do that. Now it can, and it took one engineer, no PM, four weeks to launch it.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: Wow.

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: Right? So, like, the level the speed of technology development is increasing dramatically, and we are taking advantage of that, which is great. So the two things I’m most excited about for this year is the discovery tab, which is I think of the discover tab on Instagram, right, that we’re gonna show you a much broader range of people, break down geographic barriers, and kind of then experiment within that different ways of sorting these things for you without touching the grid of location based because I don’t wanna touch the thing that’s so effective for us, but create a new space where we can run tests. And then the second thing I’m psyched about is the a list. You know, Grindr’s founder wanted Grindr to be like his black book for people that he kind of developed relationships with, and he never got there with the product that he built, but now we actually finally can.

So we’re gonna take these summaries, and we’re gonna use them to then prioritize certain people for you based on what we know about them, what we know about you, and what matters, and a little bit by geography. So if you had all these people you talked to in New York and you’re living in San Francisco, hey. If we know that you’re going to New York or you’re landing in New York, then let’s bring those people to the foreword and remind you about them, and you can then reengage them without having to go and look for new people to talk to because you already had these conversations. So those are two things I’m personally most excited about for this year.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: Well, we got about a minute and a half left here. What do you think investors should walk away from this conversation as it relates to Grindr? What’s interesting to me is online dating apps have always kind of said they have like a little bit of social media angle. And Grindr seems to actually have that where people are using it to

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: So I’ll take my forty seconds and then I can take the other forty seconds, and I won’t talk about financials. I think the big thing we didn’t talk about is there is the core product and, like, making investments into that to make that a lot better and getting people to increase number of pairs that we have in the product. But there’s also this fact that we’re working on what we call neighborhood extension opportunities, which are like adding on totally new businesses on Grindr and using Grindr and our engagement users as a way to distribute these products. And so we have health and wellness as one area that we’re really focusing on, that’s probably like at least a couple products that we’re working on in that bucket. There is travel and luxury experiences, and there are things that we’re working on there.

And these are all meant to be like new businesses that reach anywhere from $25,000,000 plus in revenue each over a certain period of time that can be growth engines for Grindr over the very long term. And so that’s another kind of piece that’s really critical.

Edna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: And the one thought on the financial side, I would say, is we’re between 78% of payer penetration. That’s well below any dating peer. And what you’ve seen since we’ve been in these seats in the last two years is that we have been driving our conversion up from free to paid. And the way we’ve done that is frankly just through all the product roadmap enhancements that George and the team have been working on in terms of adding a lot of value so people are compelled to pay. So I think you should see more and more of that in the next couple of years.

You know that we gave out our midterm guide. We’re still very committed to that and frankly have quite a few different avenues on how to reach those numbers as George has just alluded to. So we’re pretty psyched for the future.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: Great. Well, we’ll be excited to see the results tomorrow.

Edna Krantz, CFO, Grindr: Tomorrow.

Nick Jones, Internet Analyst, Citizens: George, Vanda, thank you so much.

George Harrison, CEO, Grindr: Next year, we’ll do earnings before the conference.

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