Tinder’s new CEO: ‘We probably have dropped the ball’ on women’s experiences on the dating app
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Amanda Bardwell will become the first woman CEO of Woolworth's in September, Citigroup rewards CEO Jane Fraser with a pay bump, and Tinder's new CEO takes over the business during a tough time for dating apps. Have a tremendous Thursday.
- On the apps. Dating can be a marathon, but the woman leading the world's biggest dating app is racing out of the gate: "We need speed and we need urgency right now," says Tinder's new CEO Faye Iosotaluno.
Tinder parent Match Group last month named Iosotaluno as the app's chief executive after leaving the role vacant for a year and a half. Tinder—responsible for more than half of Match Group's $3.4 billion in annual revenue—had cycled through several leaders, most recently Renate Nyborg, who was its first female CEO; she left in mid-2022.
Iosotaluno, now Tinder's second female CEO, is inheriting the business as it faces some pressing challenges. Tinder's paid users dropped 5% year-over-year in 2023, a trend that's hit the online dating industry as a whole as consumer spending tightens and users grow weary of dating apps. Tinder, now 11 years old, is also working to stay relevant. Its "swipe" feature was innovative when it hit the scene for millennials, but today's daters (particularly Gen Zers) want something different.
What's more, a lawsuit seeking class action status (and filed on Valentine's Day) accuses Match brands Tinder, Hinge, and the League of turning users into "addicts" who pay for the false promise of endless matches. The suit claims Match violated consumer protection, false advertising and defective design laws. (Match says the suit is "ridiculous and has zero merit.") The parent company's stock has fallen 17% in the past year.
Match Group chose an insider to steer Tinder through the tumult. Iosotaluno joined Match in 2017 as Tinder's SVP of new business initiatives. Then, she pivoted to the broader portfolio—which includes OkCupid and Hinge—as Match's chief strategy officer. Most recently, she was Tinder's COO.
In an interview at Match's New York offices earlier this month (before the lawsuit was filed), Iosotaluno acknowledged she has a lot to do. Driving paying users is one of Tinder's top priorities for 2024. (Last year's to-do list included AI integration and an overhaul to Tinder's marketing to appeal to Gen Z.) "We want to drive high-quality payers, and we want to drive revenue," she says. "We don't want to maximize payers for the sake of maximizing payers." To that end, Tinder has introduced some new options like a $500-a-month "ultra premium" subscription tier.
"We want to make sure we're putting the right product in front of the right people at the right time," Iosotaluno says. On the paid front, that could mean monetizing different features in different places; in Japan, an anonymous browsing mode is one of the most popular features but is not monetized, the CEO says. Or it could mean a different version of Tinder for a 19-year-old who's excited to swipe compared to a newly-single 28-year-old woman who's cautiously getting back on the apps after a breakup, the CEO says.
"We probably have dropped the ball" on women's experiences on the app, Iosotaluno admits. "I envision a product that really thinks about, what are your best interests at heart?"
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
The Broadsheet is Fortune's newsletter for and about the world's most powerful women. Today's edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
