Sean Rad
speaker
161 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Sean Rad’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And it was an expiring 24 hour moment and people could reply to it and your matches could be like, oh, you know, great. And we all love the product so much that we were like, you know what? Maybe this could be for friends. Maybe we let Tinder be more than just romantic connections. Maybe you can add your friends and you can share moments with your friends.
So we started, we sort of tried to shift from a dating product to a social network. And we very quickly learned we have no business doing that. Our brand, our mission, our thesis is very much about creating new connections, introducing you to someone new. We weren't in the business of connecting you with your friends. And our users didn't want that.
At some point, we also said, hey, let's create an app to help you make friends. And we very quickly learned that no one wants to open an app to make friends. Like, that's a very desperate, weird experience. And then we said, well, could we apply Tinder's mechanism to business connections? And then we quickly learned, well, no one wants to swipe and match and make new business connections.
Yeah, it was a reminder. I think the more we scaled, the lesson was always focus. Focus on your mission. Focus on what you're good at. Stop trying to be something you're not. Every company needs to continuously fucking relearn. It's like even when Steve Jobs left Apple and he came back, what did he do? He killed a bunch of products because he said, we have no business doing these other products.
This isn't in the DNA and the soul of the company. So I think when you get bigger and you have more money and you have more resources, you fall in this trap of, oh, we could do more things. But you have to stop and ask yourself, just because we can, do we have any business doing those things? Does that map to our core competencies?
Is that why the thousands of employees we have actually joined this company? And if you're going to change that vision, there better be a very good reason. And it's got to be bottoms up. It's got to be start with because your users are asking for that. None of our users ask for a friend-making app or a business-making app.
It was highly effective. Our perspective on paid features was the only reason we would charge you is if charging you for that feature made the ecosystem better. Meaning if we gave that capability to free to everyone, it would actually dilute the quality of the ecosystem. The first feature we launched that really started making a lot of money was the super link.
So we wanted to have this signal that you're not just someone I swiped right on, you're extra special. It's sort of like in the real world, I can walk up to someone and say, hey, what's up? Or I can walk up to someone and maybe this might not be a good idea and say, you know what? Like, I feel this strong connection. I really like you. Like there was sort of like the next level of romance.
That was what the super like was. But if we actually gave it to free, it would have no value. So we gave one free to everyone. And then we charged if you wanted to super like again. What the one free did is it took away the desperation. So someone didn't know, did I use my one free on you or did I actually spend money to get your attention, which could make me look desperate.
So it gave me the sort of excuse like the out, but then I can spend money to buy more super likes and super like more often. But again, charging for that not only allowed us to build better products, it created more revenue, allowed us to fulfill our mission, it built the business, but it also made the product better because it created a new feature where it made sense for us to charge.
Look, I don't subscribe to anything that's elitist. I think in many ways, a lot of these dating apps are elitist. Living in a world where one person or one group is better than another. Bumble is elitist. Why, you know, women go first. Women have all the control. Why? Actually, I'm not even sure that's good for women. It was always a weird concept. I'm like, what?
It was a good marketing gimmick, but I don't think it actually ever made sense. And then, you know, the league's perspective is, you know, you have to be, you know, some educated, highly educated. Or Raya's perspective is you have to be cool and rich. Like, you know, fuck that. Tinder was always, you're yourself. We're going to find and match you with people who love you for you. And everyone...
deserves love and everyone deserves a match. We wanted to solve core human issues. We didn't want to give a leg up to one group or another group. Are you proud of the Tinder product today? I haven't been there in a long time, so would I look at the product and say I'm proud of the existing iteration of the product?
I think I would look at the product now and say, fuck, all the missed opportunity, because when the core team, when I left and then others left, there was a lot of unfinished business. We had a roadmap that I would say was like, 10 years long, we knew once we achieve this, it's going to open the opportunity to this. It's going to open the opportunity to this.
So I think I would look at the product right now and I would say, it looks the same as when I left. That makes me sad because when I was there, when the team was there, actually we had a rule that every year we had to redesign the entire product. That was a rule. We would redesign the entire experience every year because we didn't want people to get bored and stagnant.
And we didn't want to become complacent as a team. So we would have to have one major redesign every year, which then forced us to reimagine all the features. And I think it was a bit. brilliant to exercise because it kept taking it to the next level. The energy, the passion, maybe isn't as strong as it was in the early days, but that's also, again, natural course of business as you scale.
That is a very sad idea. The journey is part of the reward. Me actually talking to someone, getting to know them helps me learn about myself, helps me learn about them. It's not about a transaction. Romance is a journey. It's not just an ends to a means. I think abstracting away the journey is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. And you learn a lot of that journey.
And look, it's like addiction is when something is too easy, when you get a free dopamine hit without doing a lot of work and you actually feel worse about yourself. When you have to work for something, the reward is even greater.
Number one, you said it, money does not buy you happiness. I think up to a certain point, you want freedom. Money brings you freedom. Freedom does enable happiness. But after a certain point, it doesn't make you happier. If you're not careful, it could actually complicate your life a lot more. You can accumulate more shit. It could change your relationships.
For me, and it took me a while to see this, but I live a life that is much less than I can afford to live because I don't want chains. I don't want stuff. I don't value those things. I don't care about a yacht. My friends are my childhood friends. Building, creating products, solving problems is what makes me happy.
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