Grindr Inc. (GRND) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I'm Nick Jones, Internet Analyst here at Citizens. Really excited to have Grindr here today. We have CEO, George Arison; CFO, Vanna Krantz.

We'll get into it. I think most folks probably know what Grindr is and has heard of Grindr. But for those who may be 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?

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, 16 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 primarily, over 98% are people who use Grindr are in those two categories. Bi has grown over time because, I think in the younger generations, more people are willing to say that they're bi versus not from previous times. And we are very international. So we're in 190 countries, obviously, in the U.S. 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 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 is a public good kind of 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 hookup still, others are actually networking for totally other reasons or people could actually be multi-intentional at the same time, right? You might be looking for a long-term partner, but you're still not averse to hookup. But 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 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.

So there's a lot of dating apps out there today. What really stands out, I guess? What are the really competitors and what makes Grindr unique from -- I think people, when they think dating apps, think swiping.

Yes. 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 is our higher tier, see unlimited number of people. Our XTRA subscribers, which are middle tier, see 500 people. And then nonpaying subscribers see 100 people around them. But if you move around, the number of people change -- I mean the people you see, it changes so you actually can see more people, but 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 you. So Grindr users send a ton chats every day. We produced 130 billion chats last year on 14.5 million active monthly users, right? So 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.

Let's talk about the grid interface. At the product level, how does that help create a unique user experience? Why is that such a key feature?

Yes. 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 the bigger products. Now they're on top of smaller products like Grindr that kind of mimic Grindr's The Grid. But of the big companies, we're the only one that has that. And that is partly why people are there for many different reasons, right? So you might not have a relationship situation with somebody because it's just not a match, but there might be something else that you want to talk about with them. People also use Grindr just literally as friendship management application, not where it's like, oh, hey, these are my closest friends, but this is my gym buddy, and I kind of started 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 tried 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 real-life component to what's happening on Grindr without us forcing it. It just kind of inevitably happens because 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 100%, 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.

So you called out 98% are gay men or bi men. Can you kind of dig into the demographics a little bit more? Are they -- are users generally older, younger, more affluent, less affluent, suburbs, urban?

So we're actually everywhere. And even in the U.S., people might have perception like, hey, probably more heavy on the Coast, it's actually not. Incredibly, 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 outlet, there's not even a gay bar that you can go to, right, or some other gay gym where you see a lot of people 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 there was Snapchat. Then it was -- then Snapchat and Facebook were threatened by TikTok. So there's kind of, every 3, 4 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 or older. I guess it's actually something that they do want. Grindr is an 18-plus 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 10 years ago, but is using Grindr less today, and getting them back into the app is something we are thinking through and how we kind of do that. They usually still have a Grindr account, but they may not be in the app that much. Gay men, on average, are significantly higher disposable income than their straight counterparts. Gay households, meaning gay married men have 2x the income of a straight household. Gay men have twice the likelihood of having a JD, MBA or PhD versus their straight counterparts. And they don't have children by and large, right? So their disposable incomes 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 experiential things in life, which costs more money because they have that money to spend. That's going to start to change slowly because when you survey younger gay men, a very large percentage of them actually want to be married. So 50% of people, gay and bi 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 15 years ago when I was in kind of my late 20s. And then if you ask them if they want to have children, 25% of gay men and below 35 want to have kids, which is also like orders of magnitude change because when I would say I want to have children when I was, I don't know, 30, I was some -- this weirdo dude that was like definitely very strange. And now it's very different. And that kind of goes back to like 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 going to become much more integrated into society in that way, 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.

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?

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 cartes going down and 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 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%. They both continue to grow very nicely.

I mean, force majeure could happen, right? And when COVID happened, obviously, that was challenging. But I think the resiliency level is much higher here.

You talk about the users really being able to find a community there, particularly if there are certain parts of the country where there are maybe aren't 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?

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. And I mean, we have a 95% brand recognition unaided in the gay and bi community, right, the numbers is 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 a lot of the discussion usually is like, well, could you have a much higher payer penetration quickly. And yes, we could. We could make messages be paid like they are in most other products, or really kind of get in the way of people able to use the product for free. And I don't think that makes sense for Grindr. I think we will all really benefit by having a very robust free product.

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.

And gay men went online way before straight people did. I mean I moved to D.C. after college in 2000 and Manhunt was the kind of dominant product back then. And I mean, the same way everyone is on Grindr now, everyone was on Manhunt back then in large cities.

So do you -- when we think about growth opportunities in international, when you start thinking in different markets, certain markets may be a little more conservative in terms of 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 stigma?

That's a great question because we have been seeing international grow significantly faster even in 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 yes, honestly, it seems that because of the community aspect that you almost see Grindr more in countries that are more conservative because that is where you can really find your community as opposed to -- I can, even I can go out in San Francisco to the Castro, and I 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 -- 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.

I tend to think of a broad and kind of four summary categories. There's the English-speaking world where their behavior patterns are the closest to the United States, but there's still opportunity to actually do better. Then there's European-like countries. I mean it's not just Europe, but countries in kind of that economic sphere, where we definitely have opportunity, both on MAU and payer penetration that's higher than where we are in English-speaking world than the U.S. Then there is kind of the rest of the developing world, both in Latin America and Asia, where we have a lot of opportunity on MAU for sure. And Latin America has more payer penetration in Asia, but nevertheless. And then there's like a separate bucket of India 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's 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 if we 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 in India, being gay was illegal 15 years ago. So there's still a lot of cultural change that has happened.

Let's talk about TAM a little bit. So you're the top dating app for gay men. Everyone knows you, very high awareness. What does it take to keep accessing this TAM, which is massive globally, to get users on?

So yes, everyone knows us in the U.S., but in Spain, for example, our 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 one country, I mean 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 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, 5%, 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 the U.S., 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 an 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 MAU 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 U.S., 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 that 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 are undertaking is this product innovation. We are intent to try to build features that will specifically cater to whatever intentions people might have.

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 amount of TAM international has a lot 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 really raise that up a little bit, along with the brand awareness that has already been kicked off.

And there's very basic stuff, like in India, for example. So in the U.S., a lot of people are discrete. And in Western Europe, people are still discrete, high percentage. But usually, they'll just leave their profile blank. If you go look at profiles in India, they'll have a random picture of scenery or something like that. I guess a different -- different experience, people expect different things. And so we probably can solve some of that for them in different ways where it's not all blank, but has a different kind of solution. By the solution that works for the U.S. in that regard, we're like maybe here, we create AI avatars for you. If you want to be discrete to make 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.

All right. So huge opportunity, U.S. and globally. Great brand awareness. Let's switch to monetization and kind of the product road map. The team has done a great job executing. At the Analyst Day, you laid out a really clear kind of road map for the next several years. There's some key product launches in '25, 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?

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 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 our 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 they will monetize in '27. Others are things that are going to be in testing this year and then monetize in '26. 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. 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 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. For example, we just launched to 2,000 test users, what we call summaries, which you look at your chat conversation with people that you had a lengthier chat conversation with and then create your summary of that experience. I think that's a pretty awesome thing for Grindr users, but the level of accuracy of that is also very, very high. 24 months ago, that was not possible to do, Gen AI couldn't do that. Now it can. And it took one engineer, no PM, 4 weeks to launch, right? So 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 think of the Discover tab on Instagram, right? So we're going to show you a much broader range of people, breakdown geographic barriers and kind of then experiment within that, different ways of sorting these things for you without touching the grid of location base because I don't want to 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 excited about is the A-List. 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 going to take these summaries and we're going to 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 talk 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 [ fore ], remind you about them and you can then reengage them without having to go and look for new people to talk to cause you already have these conversations. So those are two things I'm personally most excited about for this.

Well, we got about 1.5 minutes 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 a little bit of a social media angle. And Grindr seems to actually have that, where people are using it, too.

So I'll take my 40 seconds and then I can take the other 40 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 making investments into that to make that a lot better and getting people to increase the number of pairs that we have in the product. But there's also this fact that we're working on, what we call, gayborhood expansion opportunities, which are like adding on totally new businesses on Grindr and using Grindr and our engagement with users as a way to distribute these products. And so we have health and wellness as one area that we will be focusing on. There's probably like at least a couple of 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 new businesses that reach anywhere from $25-plus million 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.

And then one thought on the financial side, I would say, is we're between 7% and 8% 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 2 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 road map 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.

Great. Well, we'll be excited to see the results tomorrow. And George, Vanna, thank you so much.

Next year, we'll do earnings before the conference.