Hinge CEO’s best advice for entrepreneurs: Be both naive and flexible

Be naive and flexible at the same time, says Justin
McLeod, pictured.
Van
Sarki

• Hinge
  founder and CEO Justin McLeod tells new entrepreneurs to be
  both naive and flexible.
• It’s important to stay true to your vision, while also
  taking into account criticisms of your business and changes in
  the market.
• McLeod learned this lesson firsthand: He believed in
  Hinge when no one else did, but he also had to make significant
  changes to the product years later.

When Justin McLeod was first pitching his idea for dating app
Hinge, few people believed he’d
be successful.

Instead, McLeod told Business Insider, they’d say to him, “This
is never going to be a thing. Match.com owns the market. No one’s
ever going to be able to break into it.”

This was more than seven years ago, back before dating apps had
taken off (Tinder launched in 2012). But McLeod, Hinge’s CEO, was
relatively certain that the app — which initially matched users
with people they were connected to through mutual Facebook
friends — would be a hit.

Today, Hinge has raised more than $20 million, according to
Crunchbase,
and is one of the most popular dating apps in the US.

Related:

An entrepreneur who dropped out of Harvard Business School to
launch his startup made a key hiring mistake that stalled the
company’s progress for years

When McLeod advises early stage entrepreneurs, he mentions his
own determination to make Hinge work, even in the face of
resistance. But he also cautions those founders to listen to
their critics and to be willing to change course if necessary.

As an entrepreneur, McLeod said, you must have “this
naiveté and belief that you’re going to make this
succeed no matter what. But, on the other hand, if you hold too
closely to your vision, and you’re not flexible, and you’re not
willing to change it, and you’re not willing to evolve over time,
then you can just hold onto some vision that’s not working.”

McLeod knows firsthand about the importance of flexibility. In
2016, he made the decision to
“reboot” Hinge, most notably removing the swiping feature so
the app could appeal more to users interested in serious
relationships.

This decision, McLeod said, was based partly on the publication
of a
Vanity Fair article about the dating “apocalypse,” and partly
on McLeod’s observation that Hinge had become too similar to
other dating apps on the market.

“If you always listen to every else, then you’ll never do
anything new,” McLeod said. “And if you never listen to anyone
else, then you’ll get to the point where you might do something
crazy, or you’re just banging your head against the wall.”

He added that at Hinge, “Doing things the same way we’ve always
done as the company continues to grow and the market continues to
change is just a recipe for disaster.”