On the premise that a smartphone could vastly improve his love life, Joel Simkhai built one of the most popular dating apps in the world.  In 2008 he was living in LA and looking for an easy way to meet other gay men.  He saw the early potential of the GPS-enabled iPhone, and a year later, launched Grindr: an app where users could determine if a potential date - or a quick hookup - was down the block or ten miles away.  With no background in coding or app design, Joel bootstrapped Grindr into a global phenomenon –all the while dealing with technical meltdowns, safety issues, and criticism about toxicity on the app. Grindr was eventually sold, and Joel moved on; but last year launched another queer hookup app “for today” - called Motto.




This episode was produced by Casey Herman, with music by Ramtin Arablouei.

Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Katherine Sypher.




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I remember people always telling me, you know, hey Joel, nobody pays for apps.

I'm essentially a dating business and people have been paying for dating for centuries.

And so I expect people will be willing to pay for it Because we're providing a lot of value.

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Joel Simkhai wanted an easy way to meet other gay men.

So he built Grindr and helped it grow into 1 of the most popular dating apps in the world.

If you don't know it, it was started as a dating app, mainly for gay men, and today it's used by around 12 million people a month.

In 2009, when it launched, there was no Tinder, there was no Bumble.

Yes, there was internet dating, but Grindr was different.

First of all, its founder, Joel Simkhai, was unapologetic.

He called it a hookup app, plain and simple.

But secondly, and most importantly, Grindr was the first dating app to use geolocation.

It meant you could see how close another Grindr user was in real time on the app.

But what's probably most remarkable about the rise of Grindr is that Joel didn't really know what he was doing, at least at first.

He wasn't a programmer or a software engineer.

But he was a gay man who knew how hard it could be to meet other gay men.

That year, Steve Jobs made the iPhone open to third-party apps.

And in the iPhone and the App Store, Joel saw an opportunity.

Grindr would go on to become 1 of the most successful, but also 1 of the most polarizing dating apps ever created.

Sometimes it even put its users in danger, but we'll get there.

Joel Simcai was born in the mid-1970s in Israel, but his family moved to New York when he was 3.

And as long as he could remember, he struggled to fit in at school.

Yeah, so I was mostly friends with girls.

I played tennis and I, you know, my parents, you know, were very good in giving me opportunities and encouraging me to do things, but I was not very good at sports.

I was not, my hand-eye coordination remains to this day not very good.

And so it wasn't something that I excelled at at all.

When did you start to feel like, you know, like maybe,

feel like, you know, like maybe when did you start to feel different from other boys?

I mean, you mentioned the sports thing, but did you get teased as a kid?

You know, luckily, I had a great family and my cousins.

And so that was really who I connected with.

As a child, I didn't quite connect as much with people at school.

I knew I had these feelings, but I didn't quite understand them.

And I vividly remember once I was part of the swim team in high school, and I was teased, and someone called me a faggot.

And for the first time I said to myself, wait a minute.

And So, you know, it took me several years to realize that I was gay.

1 of the things that was very helpful for me was online.

So these were the days of CompuServe and AOL chat rooms.

And so I was able to connect with people online.

So, all right, so you are kind of exploring your own identity.

You go off to college, you went to a Tufts in Boston, and while you were there, Did you start to feel more comfortable coming out or were you still quiet about it?

So I was pretty quiet about it still in college.

I had a girlfriend or had several girlfriends.

But I also was started to kind of date guys.

This was kind of my, you know, I would go on AOL and, you know, meet guys in Boston.

And then I would, over the summer, and I was back home, that allowed me a little bit more freedom where I was Going to bars and going to clubs and leading You know more of a gay life when I was back home in New York

When you finish college, I read that you worked very briefly in investment banking and then and I guess you worked at a dot-com startup like right before the dot-com crash in the early 2000s.

And I know that like after 9-11, you ended up working in media at NBC for a couple years, doing some translation work.

So, okay, so at the time you were living in New York.

And I guess it seems like you didn't quite know like what you wanted to do next.

But I guess you'd figured out that you didn't want to work in a corporate environment.

Like that wasn't going to work for you, right?

And by the way, in terms of your personal life, you know, this is still early internet era, but you know, internet dating is starting to gain traction.

And I mean, how was your sort of social life in New York?

Yeah, New York, right after college, I remember just a great time.

I'd just come out, and now everyone essentially knew I was gay, maybe not at work, not something I advertised at work.

And so I just would go out, I would go to clubs, bars, restaurants, and would still use online.

You know, Craigslist became very popular, personal ads on Craigslist.

There was another website called connection, which was more dating-based for gay people.

And I met 1 of my first boyfriends on that.

But I kind of had a healthy mix of online and meeting people offline and, you know, being quite social.

Did you always in your mind think that you would start a business?

I mean your dad had a business He sold diamonds and so, you know, maybe it's in your DNA But did you see yourself as like somebody who could hang up a shingle and start something?

Yeah I mean, I always thought that I would want to do something of my own.

I remember my dad would always say to me, people out there have become very, very successful in selling shirt buttons.

So he'd point to the buttons on my shirt.

And say that there's millionaires who made their wealth by selling buttons.

And it might not be glamorous, but it's a great business for a bunch of people.

And so that ethos was always very much part of my upbringing.

You know, we were not the lawyer or doctor kind of family.

But I had started selling magazine subscriptions online.

And so I started, you know, a website that sold subscriptions.

And- Just let me, let me, so how did you even find out?

Was this like a multi-level marketing thing?

I remember I went to go buy a subscription to something.

And I went online on eBay and I saw that it was like really cheap.

Cheaper than you would get it if you went and bought the magazine directly.

And so I said, huh, How do these people sell these magazines so cheap?

And then I found out that you could buy these subscriptions through these clearing houses.

The mechanics of the business is these magazines are eager for subscribers because that's how they get their advertising base.

And so they often would sell it, uh, the subscription at a discount just to get the subscriber.

And so I set up a website, contacted some clearing houses and started selling magazines.

And you would sell subscriptions to which magazines?

And so the business grew, I mean, it was, um, you know, I don't remember how big it grew to, but this was my main business for a number of years.

Um, and you know, it grew to a point where I actually couldn't handle it anymore.

There were, you know, there's a marketing component to it.

So we had people helping with the marketing and then people, some people helping with the customer service and the operation.

So it wasn't a very complex business, but you know, I was able to work from home and run my own business.

So you're doing this magazine subscription website.

But I guess I, from what I understand it, the business kind of plateaued around 2008

and you decided to close it down and and make a major move to to Los Angeles.

What what were you gonna do when you got there?

But I remember at this point, I had for a number of years been kind of trying to think about how can I meet guys in a more efficient manner and how can I use technology?

And I remember the founders of Foursquare, before they started Foursquare, they started a company called Dodgeball, I think, and it allowed you to connect with people using SMS.

And so I remember I reached out to them and I said hey can I use your platform and I thought this would be a great way to meet guys

this is something that you've been thinking about like why you were doing the magazine subscription business you were thinking I have a hard time meeting other guys Because presumably like you know you might meet somebody or see somebody and you wouldn't know if they were gay They might be gay you wouldn't necessarily know you wouldn't know if you could approach them or talk to right I mean, they're probably things like that too

Absolutely, I mean that that's I think every queer person walks into a room and wonders who else is just like them in the room?

And so this nagging problem was always there and And then right, you know a few months after I'd moved to LA Steve Jobs announces the second generation iPhone and

Remind me what what would made the second generation of iPhones special?

1 was the App Store, and so now developers could develop third-party apps.

Secondly, they could distribute those apps in the app store.

And third was that they would add GPS to the iPhone.

In some ways I felt like Jobs had built this phone for me because it was exactly, you know, what I needed.

Almost immediately you think this is a platform that I can build something some kind of dating or meet up app on.

It wasn't almost immediately it was immediately you know the second he said this I said I need to build an app that lets me meet guys on it.

The big problem is I had no no skills to make this happen.

This is you did not study computer science.

And you know I don't have any design skills.

I don't know how to build you know I don't know I don't know technology.

And back then there was no ecosystem for iPhone developers.

Not clued into the tech community, I wasn't clued into development and anything like that.

So what I did was I went to, you know, the first generation iPhone had a jailbroken app store where third parties would develop software for the iPhone and this was sanctioned by Apple.

And just to clarify, These were apps that people developed for the first generation of iPhones But I guess the phones had to be as you say jailbroken it to be like Internally hacked in order to run these applications.

Okay, and you knew that there was a website where you could like download these apps.

Yes, so there was an app store, the jailbroken app store I think it's called, or it was called Cydia.

And they had a number of different apps that you could download.

Well, the ones I remember were some mapping apps.

This was again before any Apple Maps or Google Maps.

And so I reached out to each of those developers.

And I said, hey, I'd like to develop an app myself and I was wondering, you know, would like to hire you to Build this app for

I think I said it was an apt for you know dating I think I probably had said it's a dating app But I was a little bit cagey about what it was because I didn't want them to steal my idea

And And how long did it take before you got a response?

don't remember how long, but I didn't get many responses.

So a gentleman out of Denmark, Morton, got back to me and I think we had gone on the phone, and I kind of pitched him my idea, and he was all very excited, and he...

Well, at first I was kind of, I didn't mention the gay part right away, but eventually, when I told him I want to build an app where I can meet people using location.

By the way, I'm gay and I think this would work really well for the gay community.

So I'd like this to at least initially focus on helping me find other gay people.

And he was, you know, very excited by it, and he thought that that made a lot of sense, and He thought it would be a great market to launch with it.

All right, so let's just for some perspective here.

Well, 2008, you get in touch with this Danish guy, Morten, who knows how to build an app.

First of all, how are you going to pay him?

And so that was the other part I said to him and by the way I don't have a lot of money and he said okay well we'll figure it out.

Did you design what you wanted to look like or did you like what kind of direction did you give this coder in Denmark?

So the other thing I did at this point was ask a lot of my friends for help I said, you know, I need a name I needed, you know, I need the logo.

I needed to design this app I mean, there's a lot that needed to happen.

And I reached out to my friend Scott Llewellyn, and he was a graphic designer.

And we were friends, he had a full-time job.

I asked him to help me, and he was excited by the opportunity.

And I remember 1 day looking at my photo album on my phone.

And I said, hey, wouldn't it be great if these were the guys around me?

And so that was really the inspiration for the user interface of Grinder, and it still remains today.

The first person would be me, and then the next profile to the right would be the closest person nearby.

And then the next person to their right would be a little bit further away.

And that's how we would display all these profiles of the people nearby.

And like did you think of this as a fun project or did you think of this as a potential like significant business opportunity?

I thought of this as something that I needed in my life and that put me at the center.

And I remember many times talking to people online and they would say, yeah, I'm going to, you know, you hit off and say, okay, great.

And they'd say, oh yeah, I'll be in town in a few weeks.

And with the power of GPS, I wanted to meet the guys who were nearby.

All right, so you're working on this idea and the name, you come up with this name, Grinder.

So we came up with the name, you know, kind of brainstorming various names.

And we didn't want it to be something that was all about being gay or queer but we wanted to be something distinctive we wanted it to be something that was unique And Grindr was 1 that we liked.

We also looked at Mixer and Blender, and we really liked this idea of mixing people together.

We chose Grindr because, 1, I liked that it was edgier, and I also liked kind of the, it wasn't quite sex, but it was sexual.

And I thought it was unique and you know and masculine also.

So was this all you were doing was like your entire focus Or were there other things you were doing?

Were you like doing a day job, for example?

To me, this was a race, a race to launch first.

Because I thought to myself, you know, if I have this idea, I'm sure there's lots of other people who have this idea.

I don't remember quite because, you know, the iPhone was announced in June.

I don't quite know when the App Store and, you know, the distribution started, but it was starting already and people were starting to get these new iPhones.

And so I realized it was just a matter of time before, you know, someone else would do this.

And so, but the challenge was, you know, Morton, Scott were both had full time jobs.

And that made things to, you know, go very slowly.

And how, I mean, even things like, even though Morton was working for very little money, but even things like filing for a trademark and looking for a lawyer to help you do that, and that still costs money, not that much, but it still costs money.

Scott Gottlieb Yeah, I had a little bit of money.

I think we only spent a few thousand dollars.

And you and we say we, it's me and you and Scott.

And do you remember feeling stressed out at that time at the pace of things?

Yeah, I was very frustrated with the pace, you know, because Morten was working part-time and I, you know, or actually, you know, he had a full-time job and understandably not his first priority.

And I wasn't really paying him that much, so I wasn't in the position to be very demanding.

But fortunately, there were no other apps.

I remember I would check often to see, I would type in gay into the App Store to see what would come up.

And I remember at the time also before we launched I reached out to some of our competitors Because I said to myself how am I gonna get this and how am I gonna distribute this?

How am I gonna get people to know about this?

Yeah, I don't have the money to do a marketing campaign I just don't know how to do that.

And so my idea was, you know, why don't you go work with the incumbents?

LAZARTE Like white label it for match.com or 1 of these other...

They were the dominant player in the United States a multi-million dollar business hmm, you know, that's the website that game I would use and I remember I went to them and They called me actually the day we launched and said We're not interested in doing a partnerships, but we'll we're interested in buying you

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Grindr: Joel Simkhai