Hannah Clayton-Langton: 0:04

Hello world, welcome to the Tech Overflow Podcast. As always, I'm Hannah Caitlin Langton.

Hugh Williams: 0:10

And I'm Hugh Williams.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 0:11

And we are the podcast that teaches technical concepts to smart people. How are you, Hugh?

Hugh Williams: 0:16

I'm well, Hannah. I'm well, Hannah. I'm coming to you live from my uh my little studio on my farm today. So that's uh that's pretty exciting. How are you? How's uh life in Ohio?

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 0:26

Well, I am coming to you from inside of my walk-in wardrobe, which uh was always a dream of mine to have one. And I never thought I'd be using it for podcast recording, but the acoustics are pretty good in here. So today, listeners, we have got a real treat for you, which is our first ever tech overflow interview. We've got a really awesome guest coming up, and he's gonna tell us a little bit more.

Hugh Williams: 0:48

Today we have Jonathan Bedeen, who is one of the co-founders of Tinder. For those of you who don't know, Jonathan, he's a pretty well-known guy, but Jonathan really is the product brains behind Tinder. So he he has the claim to fame of having invented the swipe right, which I guess is just a metaphor these days for saying yes to things. Jonathan today is gonna really talk through the early days of Tinder and gonna really dig into that story, both from sort of a visual design side and product side, right through to some of the tech that was behind it when Jonathan first built the original Tinder interface.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 1:23

Yeah, it's super cool episode. You guys are gonna love it. And there's two things I I love about it. One is that I was a Tinder user back in sort of 2014, the early days. And I think I mentioned this on the episode, but if not, I met my husband on a dating app. So, you know, I'm very personally invested in the course. And uh secondly, and probably more importantly, what I loved about our interview with Jonathan is that the way he speaks about the evolution of developing the technology really resonates with a lot of the themes that we talk about in our previous episodes. So if you've not listened to episodes about sort of coding and product and apps and how it all hangs together, it's super useful foundations for this episode. And it was a really good test case of what content we pulled together so far, which was which was nice.

Hugh Williams: 2:07

Yeah, I I'd say to any of our listeners, if you haven't listened to those episodes, go back and listen to them. They're a great foundation for the conversation that we're gonna have with Jonathan. So should we get him on the show?

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 2:16

Yeah, let's do it.

Hugh Williams: 2:18

Jonathan Badin, welcome to Tech Overflow. It's so, so good to see you, my friend. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's been a long time. Uh obviously, we worked together at Tinder in I want to say 2015, somewhere around there. You're making me feel old.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 2:34

And I can say that I was a user of Tinder in 2015, so we were all part of the story.

Hugh Williams: 2:39

Oh, it's all connected. And did you meet anybody on Tinder, Hannah?

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 2:43

Not to take our podcast in any strange place, but I could regale you with some tales off mic, but the uh sum total of my dating app use was a success story, as I'm now married to someone I met on a dating app. Not on Tinder, but I feel strongly that Tinder changed the face of dating, which I'm sure we'll get into. So I still give Tinder large credit for my happy marriage.

Jonathan Badeen: 3:03

I'll swipe right on that.

Hugh Williams: 3:05

Look, Jonathan, you had many, many claims to fame, I'm sure, but I think the thing that you are best known for is actually inventing the swipe right, which we obviously want to get deeply into in this story and talk about the genesis of that and the technology behind it. But I thought perhaps a really good place to start is right at the beginning. So, how did you actually get into tech in the first place?

Jonathan Badeen: 3:26

Uh, you know, a long time ago, I don't know, it was middle school, I started kind of getting into computers and all. And then during the dot-com boom, I and a friend uh created a partnership. We were making websites. I didn't even know HTML, though. I was using like Microsoft front page, you know, it was more of just like a hobby, it's just something I just kind of always did, sort of side gig kind of things, and then uh went to school for other things, went to LA to act, which is a little bit out of left field or whatever. And then I ended up working at a uh company and got a job as a web designer uh because of a website I made for somebody else that they liked, and was sort of cognizant of conflict between designer and programmer, you know, designers trying to ask for the world, programmers saying you don't understand how this works and that's really hard and gonna take too long or whatever. So I kind of decided that to try to learn some of the stuff so I could help out, you know, communicate, how I was gonna uh talk to them and all. And it was much easier at that time to do it because before it's so daunting. If you're especially in the web world, it's like, okay, I need to know HTML. Well, that doesn't do much of anything. I need to know CSS. Okay, well, now I've got a static site that does nothing, and no, I need to know uh some sort of back-end sort of thing, and it's you know, C sharp or uh, you know, Ruby on Rails or PHP or whatever, and you know, a billion different things to choose from, and I have no context for what the right thing is to choose, and you know, then of course a database and all is you know, having to learn like five different technologies just to do one simple thing, JavaScript. Sorry, I forgot about that. But when I worked at that company, it was this opportunity where I could just take one part of the stack and learn that, and so that kind of got me into the programming aspect of it, and uh obviously kind of focused more on the front end of things, coming from sort of a design product side, because that was really the part that I got really excited about the sort of the animation, the interactivity, the uh the visuals and all. And then ultimately that ended up leading me to Mac programming, which is practically the same thing as iPhone programming and fast forward, you know, a little bit. I'm writing Tinder.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 5:33

How did you get from there to working at Tinder? Or was it not even called Tinder when you started working there?

Jonathan Badeen: 5:37

Well, was it? Yeah. So uh so originally, you know, I was working at this uh thing called LA Casting Casting Networks. That's where I'd learned to do the Mac programming, and I I taught myself to do that. Uh from there I went to working at a company called Cheg, who had just acquired a company in Pasadena called Cramster. So I was working there and kind of hired there as sort of like an incubator uh of sorts to try to use this API that they were um working on, which they never finished, at least while I was there. I ended up uh being introduced to Sean, my co-founder, to join him at Hatch Labs for something having nothing to do with Tinder. It was we were working gonna build this thing called Cardify, which is like a loyalty rewards program that you'd get points off of your credit card at restaurants and stuff like that. Although when I first did meet Sean, he was they were working on a hackathon project within Hatch Labs, which was a um something he was calling Matchbox, which ultimately would become Tinder. So we made Cardify and we had some issues getting it out there and knew we had some downtime. And that downtime, Sean's like, you know, what do you what do you think about like making this matchbox thing for real? And uh basically built Tinder in like six to eight weeks and and launched it, went back to Cardify right afterwards, rebuilt that and pivoted with that, and then decided, eh, we're not really so interested in that. Let's let's focus on Tinder.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 6:53

Okay, so the the hackathon for non-engineers, like that was an event that was like a quick and dirty for fun concept definition type thing, and and that was where the idea was born, and then it turned out to be. And who who was in the hackathon? Like, do they get credited for Tinder or so like yeah?

Jonathan Badeen: 7:12

Sean Sean was in that there, and then another guy uh named Joe Muniz, uh, who was early on at uh at Tinder, they did it. I don't even know what if they actually built anything, but it was there was the presentation for sure, sort of this concept in general. Not every element was the same. There's like, you know, it's it was more focused on like uh it was going to be used in a bar or a restaurant or something, and not the restaurant next door, but in this restaurant or whatever, uh, as opposed to Tinder, which you know was a little bit a wider radius and using some different technologies, you know, to try to accomplish that. But uh yeah, it was uh it was pretty close to it. So they did that, and I don't know, it was like a weekend or the week or something like that, kind of pitched that. And then a few months later that we actually sat down and decided, let's let's build this thing.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 7:57

I presume online dating on like match.com or plenty of fish was well established at this point. And we were just, I think I got my first iPhone in like 2012, which may have been a little bit late, but that was that was the year that you launched, right? So was it the first use case? I presume it was the first use case of a so-called dating app. And was the original matchbox an app or was it a website or something?

Jonathan Badeen: 8:19

So the original matchbox was to be an app, it wasn't it never really existed because Hatch Lab's focus was actually on creating uh disruptive mobile apps, so native mobile apps and all. And so that that was the focus. And then uh, of course, Tinder, when we were making Tinder, uh, we were gonna call it Matchbox, but because of issues that could arise with match.com and all, started looking for different ways of uh different names and all. And Tinder was one of those kind of went along with the fire theme that we were kind of going with. And so we ended up ultimately landing on Tinder.

Hugh Williams: 8:53

I'm super interested in sort of the the creation of the of the product. I mean, I'm dying to get into the swipe right itself, but how did you sort of decide or realize that it should be a you know a photo-based, app-based tool? I mean, did that did that sort of come out of some user studies and and and data, or was it just a moment of inspiration? So how did you actually sort of end up where you ended up?

Jonathan Badeen: 9:13

You know, there's a whole bunch of things that kind of go into it. You know, as you kind of pointed out, too, I think was actually a really good point that like the iPhone came out in like 2007, but you didn't get it until 2012, which is coincidentally when Tinder was released. And so it really, even though it's a five-year time period, it's not like everybody got an iPhone on day one. So we're really still early on in that time frame. But you know, we were looking at some of the things that existed out there in the world, your match.com, your okay, as you mentioned, plenty of fish, also eHarmony, and all of those things, they were very desktop-based. They've been around for a while, they had a lot of cruft and extra billion different features in there. And a lot of them, they yeah, they had a mobile app, but they were secondary. It was like they they had one because they had to have an app, you know, they didn't, it wasn't like their main vector or anything like that. In fact, I think I remember talking to Match group at one point or the uh CEO and was like, you know, you can't even actually create an account in your app, it's completely broken. They really weren't giving it much love. And so there's between that where it's half baked to try to cram everything onto it. And you have to kind of realize back in 2012, as you remember, the you know, we were talking about an iPhone 4S, I think was the phone at that time. So on really small screens and all. So part of when you're deciding to make a uh dating app for a mobile platform, a very small screen and all, you're gonna be prioritizing very different things. Instead of having maybe a grid of a whole bunch of photos, uh, that's gonna be pretty small. It's going to start pushing you in that direction of one person at a time. That was sort of something that Sean had kind of envisioned. I know when I saw it, I very much kind of agreed with that sort of thing. It reminded me of the hot or not, which was a thing when I was in college. And I remember how addictive that was going through one at a time and and sort of rating and then just always like, well, I'll just I'll I'll stop after I find one more nine or whatever it is, you know. And so I think that that really lent it to it. But there were a lot of decisions that got made because of the platform. You know, obviously your swipe couldn't exist without gesture technology, which comes from a touch screen. Uh, we originally had sort of the a quick and easy way to log in or to create an account because you don't want to be typing profile for an hour on a small little uh so Facebook login, uh, which was more of a thing then than it is now, but it allowed us to create these profiles real easy. We've crafted the communication part of it more off of texting as opposed to the previous things, which were more email-centric. You know, you've got this small screen, you're gonna put less information about the person right up front. And so the the very first version had a photo, although not quite as large as it ultimately ended up becoming. First name, age, and it had uh number of shared friends and shared interests. And then you'd tap into the profile and you could get all of that plus a little written blurb. But uh, you know, I think it's uh a lot of people think, oh, it's only photos. Never was only photos. However, it does turn out to be actually one of the most important things. And I think okay, Cupid did some interesting tests that really proved that too.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 12:12

And so let's start with the most defining feature of Tinder, which is the swipe right. How was that born? Why wasn't it swipe left? Like what insights can you talk us through?

Jonathan Badeen: 12:22

So there's a couple different stories out there about the uh origins of the swipe, and one is a um makes for a great scene in a movie or something. The other one's the real story. And the real story is that the origins of the swipe actually predate Tinder. I had been working at Check, and somebody uh within my team brought up the idea of like making a flashcards app. I was pretty dismissive of this at first. I was like, there's a billion flashcards apps. What are we gonna do that's gonna be interesting?

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 12:54

Um, this is um flashcards for like studying, right? Because you said exactly.

Jonathan Badeen: 12:59

Yes. So like you're talking like college students and stuff like that, you know, learning, uh, you know, studying for the exams and things like that. Um, and so I started playing with some of them, and I did actually start to notice some things I really hated about them. So for instance, I, you know, one, I kind of a I was a procrastinator, I was always gonna be studying last second. I would be probably if I was, you know, walking with one hand with my coffee in it, and if I had a if the iPhone existed back then, I'd have the other hand carrying my iPhone, the class studying last second for my test. And most of these apps or all of them would be very button-centric. And if you ever watch somebody when they're walking and texting, for instance, they slow to a crawl as they're texting, right? And that's because when you're walking, you know, one, you're distracted, but two, it's harder to hit things. You are moving, so it's harder to hit little uh targets on the screen. So I realized I was like, these buttons, one, they're visually in the way. I want to study a focus on the content, but two, they're hard to hit when I'm walking the class. Uh, not that I was walking the class. So it kind of pushed me towards this like, this should be gestural. And there were a few that did have one basic gesture to it. You swipe in one direction to kind of like flip the card over to see the other side. But in order to say, like, yes, I got it right, or no, I got it wrong, that required pushing some button. The swipe on the flipping was always horrible anyway. They they did a horrible job implementing it. But I woke up one morning with this epiphany, just like literally woke up and just got really excited about how I thought you would make the perfect flashcards out. And that was you would swipe in one direction for flipping the card over and you'd make an actually good swipe, but then you'd swipe in the other directions for saying I got the card right or I got the card wrong. And I kind of came up with this with the idea of like how I would use real flashcards, like in real life, not going to class, but like if I was sitting there, I'd start out with a stack of cards. And I would take that card and I'd put it into one pile if I got it right. And that's the the cards I don't need to study anymore. Uh, you know, oh, I got this one wrong. I'm gonna put it over here into this other pile. It's the one that I need to study more. And so now you got three piles of cards until you whittle it down to two. And so I envisioned those two stacks of cards, the right and the wrong ones, right off the screen of the iPhone, because your screen's small, right? And basically that's where the gesture comes from is dragging that card to the wrong or right stack that's just off screen. So ultimately, when we ended up making Tinder, we had already landed on this sort of one at a time sort of card. We're also in this very skew morphic period.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 15:41

So we had sorry, skew morphic.

Jonathan Badeen: 15:44

No worries. So skew morphic is like the original, uh, you know, if you looked at the old iPhone, iPad, and all of that sort of stuff, and the calendar app looked like a physical calendar. The notes app looked like, you know, had the little tears in the sheet. It looked like a physical notepad. That's skew morphism. It's using something from the real world, and and it's it's useful for making somebody, you know, comfortable in a digital setting, try to help them feel more familiar with it. And it's it kind of went away after like iOS 6, it uh it was got pushed out. But so everything felt like real objects back then. So we did have this sort of stack of cards. Uh, then we thought, well, let's use my swipe from the flashcards app and throw that in there. And the very first version, we didn't actually implement it. Uh, I thought it was going to take me a week to implement, and Sean was like, eh, we don't need it. But we had the big heart and X button and all, so it wasn't necessary. But it one one day, uh a couple weeks after we released the very first version of the app, I thought, well, let me see one night, you know. And I ended up being able to do it within a few hours. And I don't know, maybe a week later, I don't know. I was like, oh, by the way, you guys can swipe in here, but never really thought this was like the defining feature of Tinder. It was just sort of like a keyboard shortcut, like, hey, if you don't learn, figure it out, great. Um, but it was planned originally, like the very first version, when you hit the heart, you know, the light stamp would come on it, the card would fly off to the right. And if you hit the X, it would fly off to the left, basically with the intention of being able to actually drag those off or swipe those off uh later.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 17:14

And why was right the yes? Are you right-handed? Like why was right the good file and left the bad?

Jonathan Badeen: 17:20

It was simple as in our design, the heart was on the right and the X was on the left, and making it match that. Uh, however, I think it worked out nicely because in many versions of Tinder, you would actually get to your match list. It was kind of positioned off to the right of the screen. So it kind of worked out nicely because it's like, yes, I want to put this into my match list.

Hugh Williams: 17:42

It must have been one heck of a night of coding to go home and create that. And obviously, you got it working and the rest history. But I'm super interested in the subtleties of swiping right and swiping left. And knowing you, Jonathan, I know you cared a lot about those details. But maybe you can just sort of take us one level down into sort of a later version of Tinder that you built and tell us just a little bit about the subtleties of swiping left and swiping right and the animation from a from a design perspective.

Jonathan Badeen: 18:07

Sure. So, first off, I you know, kind of going back to the flashcards thing, within iOS, there's this thing called the swipe gesture recognizer. That thing is evil, it's horrible. That's what was wrong with those other flashcards apps because it recognizes it, it triggers a swipe after you finish the swipe. So that means you go across the screen, it says, Oh, there's a swipe, and now something animates based on that. You know, I was like, well, that's horrible. So, in order to do a proper swipe, basically allows you to just track your finger on the screen. So it that way I can animate based upon or just move things around based upon the movement of your finger. But I wanted it to feel real, I wanted it to feel physical and react to you as you know, similar to a real card. So to do that, you know, I kind of thought about like, well, cards don't move perfectly when you drag them on a on a surface. You know, it's you depending on where you put your finger on a card and drag it, it's going to angle itself because the drag on it, right? So I kind of split the card into quadrants based upon where you're starting your thing, your touch on the card, it will angle different depending on which quadrant that you started swiping from. So then the card will kind of drag in one direction or the other. So there was that part and trying to get that uh to feel right, get that rotation to feel natural. And then on top of that, there was the release. Uh, you want to make it feel natural when you release that swipe. There are a couple different factors I'd look at. It's like one, did it match a certain velocity, or did they stop swiping completely? So if the gesture ended with a certain velocity, then it would go off the screen. If not, it would bounce back towards the center. Then I'd use that velocity and I think I'd create essentially like a fictional distance off the screen and then calculate, use that velocity to uh create an animation with a time uh based upon all of that to get it off the screen so it felt natural. Because you wouldn't think about these things normally, but like you know, if you're dragging really fast and you let go and there's a standard animation that says, oh, this thing flies off in one second, all of a sudden the card goes faster, slower than what you were dragging. To make it feel natural, you actually need to take into consideration all of these things.

Hugh Williams: 20:26

And did you do all that up front before you you released it and and and put it into public consciousness? Yeah.

Jonathan Badeen: 20:33

I'm sure it was finessed a little bit, you know, here or there and at certain points, but yeah. And did you write all of this code yourself? I did. I did.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 20:42

And you mentioned a phrase earlier on gesture technology, which is kind of self-evident, but could you just talk the listeners through that in a bit more detail?

Jonathan Badeen: 20:50

Sure. I mean, you look at previous the iPhone, I suppose there were sort of gestures when you're dragging a mouse or whatever and all that sort of thing. But you know, it's uh for the most part, things were sort of point and click. And then Apple, you know, comes out with the iPhone and it's got this touch capacitive screen. So you're actually it's recognizing your your your finger input and it can actually recognize multiple fingers and all. And that just really opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Uh and I think really exciting possibilities because it makes you feel far more connected to these objects on the screen because you're you're able to actually touch, manipulate them, um, and and it feels um very lifelike. And so that that was just something that that was really new. It's you know, it's it's almost minority report-esque, you know, instead of having this extra device like a keyboard or mouse between you and the technology, you're touching the technology.

Hugh Williams: 21:47

And has the swipe right changed much over time, Jonathan? I mean, is the version that that folks are using today? I mean, it's so ubiquitous, particularly in dating apps. Is that is that effectively what you build, or is have some things changed over time?

Jonathan Badeen: 22:01

I'd say there's uh one big thing that is different now. There was one thing that we did experiment with, but it never made the never saw the light of day. At one point, Apple came out with this pseudophysics framework, and we thought, oh, let's use this thing. This thing is going to make the swipe even more lifelike and more uh, you know, feel more realistic. And so we implemented it, and the damn thing felt horrible. It was so realistic, though, that you could like put your finger on the corner of the card and flip the card around in a circle, you know, on the screen and make circles with it and all. But like it just felt really cumbersome. It felt like you were having to do a lot of work to swipe and realize that our sort of pseudo-physics um that we had come up with, which may not completely match the real world, but they felt way better and just uh just much more fluid. So that was one thing that almost changed, but didn't change. But the other big change, and and Hugh, you were you were there at that time, was uh we ended up adding a swipe up for super like, which I did not like and I do not like to this day, but uh that obviously changed a lot and did require a lot of uh adjustments in the code to try to figure out which direction they're trying to swipe in. Because before it's pretty easy, it's either it's left or it's right. You can't be a little left and a little right, it's one or the other. Later on, you're is it a little up or is it a little right? Uh is it I it it could be both, you know, which a little bit ambiguous as to where where that swipe is going. And then besides that, there were other elements that weren't necessarily swipe specific that changed over time, but more of just the the stack, what technology we would be using to present those cards. But I would say that the swipe sort of physics and in general that kind of code is has stayed fairly uh uh similar throughout time.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 23:52

And the other apps that utilize the swipe, right, of which there are many, even like beyond dating apps at this point. Is that all built around the same technical principles, or was there like an IP thing there that you guys owned?

Jonathan Badeen: 24:04

Sure. So we did we did um patent the swipe. There's been a couple different lawsuits and stuff over it. People have come up with their own things. You can go on GitHub and find all sorts of different implementations for it, some better than others. I've seen a lot of them that they don't factor in like the quadrants uh touch. It's just it's a standard. They'll do it uh rotation in order to give it the similar sort of feeling, but I call it uh swiping on rails because it doesn't matter how you swipe it, it's always going to be in the exact same place, the same animation. And that's okay, but you know, I take pride in what we made.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 24:40

Did you learn anything unexpected when you got user testing on the original swipe right out there? Was there anything that like took you by surprise?

Jonathan Badeen: 24:48

Well, you know, the first thing I suppose was people started using it a little bit, but they didn't necessarily know what it was. Now there were some indicators in there, you know, as you swipe, that's mimicking what happens with the buttons, but as you swipe also uh the like or stamp or the nope stamp are coming up to try to indicate. But some people just thought they were like skipping a person, they didn't realize they were actually taking an action. So that ultimately led us, I don't know, a month or two later or something, to uh we didn't want to educate people beforehand because we didn't think it was important. It's like we don't want to slow them, we want them to get into the app, start using it, start saying yes or no to people. Um, that's the fun part. So we didn't want to have like some tutorial when you started up the app, like here's how to use Tinder. So what we opted, instead of having to teach people to use the swipe, because again, we didn't even think it was like a defining feature, was after you swiped, we'd say, Hey, you just swiped right. Swipe right means this. Did you mean to do that? And you'd say yes or no. And if you said yes, great. And if you said no, the card would come back and allow you to do do it again. Um, so the education would only happen if you tried to swipe.

Hugh Williams: 25:58

That's super smart. I love that.

Jonathan Badeen: 26:00

But then I think also to answer your question, I I I think there's an interesting story. Like I said, not supposed to be the defining feature of Tinder, but there was um a few months in a college student emailed us, and he said that he and his friends, when they're walking down the street, would say swipe right or swipe left as code, uh, because you know, people didn't know what it meant back then, as to uh an attractive lady passing by or something like that, which I guess the downside is they were doing a little bit of object objectifying, but he even suggested using that in our marketing. And it was at that moment that it made me realize I was like, oh my God, we we really tapped into something or swiped into something, I guess. And and so that was it was not long after that that we actually started to market the swipe and use that as one of the defining features of Tinder.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 26:50

Tinder is one of the few things that like you'll say, like Tinder for fill in the blank as like a different use case for the defining feature, but that defining feature is the swipe, like so. It's kind of crazy that there was a Tinder without the swipe, and it was just uh an interesting idea that you coded in one night because now I mean I think you said it up front in the episode, right? Like swipe right to that means I like it. And I think people don't have to be dating app users or have ever used Tinder to know what that means. So it's um it just goes to show it's not necessarily the things that you think will land the best that do.

Jonathan Badeen: 27:22

Exactly. You gotta roll with it.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 27:25

Hughes taught me about product as being like the intersection between the technology, the user, and the business, as sort of like Venn diagrams. And we talked a lot about the user and we've talked a lot about the technology, but what was the commercial use case that you were building to? Was it like at some point this will be a paid-for subscription app, or were you you mentioned the super like? Like, were you already thinking about paid for features, or were you just trying to get something off the ground and popular and not too worried about the commercials of it?

Jonathan Badeen: 27:52

Both. Uh, we weren't too worried about that aspect. We were um, it was one of those things like we come up with things like, oh, maybe we could charge for this in the future, you know, or have ads or whatever, you know, things like that. But we were focused wholly on growing the thing. Uh, we wanted to grow that user base, you know. We'd looked at them as, you know, the Facebooks and the Googles as the model of, you know, get the users first, then figure out how to make some money off of it. Um, so we certainly did. In fact, even in that uh presentation, there's mention of like being able to give somebody a rose. And I think the super like for it was actually the evolution of that rose idea.

Hugh Williams: 28:32

Just coming back to the the super like, Jonathan, I remember that very, very well. I was uh I was there at Tinder at the time, and I remember you stopping that release. I remember us, you know, we're gonna go for it, and then you said it's just not quite right. You know, we need to we need to spend some more time on this before this goes out the door. And ultimately it did go out the door. I think I know you didn't love it, I probably didn't either. Um but tell tell us that story of sort of stopping the release. So I want to know what's in your sort of your design and product mind when you know that something's not ready and that it needs more work.

Jonathan Badeen: 29:00

I don't remember the specifics of different things, but I I know that there were a few elements. Obviously, the swipe itself, I think was so important to us at that time. We needed to get that right. We needed to get the velocities right. We needed to try to make it as accurate as to the intentions of the user as possible. And especially if you were going to sell something too, I think we really wanted to make it feel like you're getting something. With the super like, we also we we added a whole bunch of flourish to it, you know, with extra special animations when you pressed the super like button and it would move up. I think it kind of compressed and kind of flew up like a superhero kind of would. We kind of gamified it with putting like the star, like when Mario hits the block and the coin flies up, kind of like that, and it would twist around, and I think it would show you how many you had left. So I think there was just those those elements that we were really, I think, just really trying to nail. But I think uh, if I remember correctly, I think it was really focused on that swipe.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 29:53

Okay, so before we go, is there anything you can share with the listeners that, particularly for the non engineering listener? That was technically like more difficult or surprising or complicated versus what we as end users would have expected.

Jonathan Badeen: 30:08

Oh, absolutely. There's a billion. But I think kind of going along with the theme of the swipe and all, there is a lot going on uh behind the scenes to try to make the experience seamless. We wanted you to uh not have to worry about your internet connection and all and things like that. So we would we would download a certain number, you know, we played a lot with those numbers, whether it was we're gonna download three or download 20 different cards at one time. And some of that has different consequences of like, okay, well, you're trying to get the freshest people, people who are using things or most pertinent to you. So you want to do smaller batches instead of larger batches. So we fiddle with those numbers. But then on top of that, it's like, okay, well, now you're swiping on people and your internet goes down. Well, we don't want it to just stop working. So what we'd be doing is we'd essentially be caching that on the client and storing all of those things. So you swipe right on this person, you swipe left on that person. Once we get an internet connection back up, we'll send all of that stuff up to the server. But then other interesting things happened at certain points. So, like uh, especially early on, we had all of these issues with just our servers just overloaded. We needed things to be much more efficient, and they weren't. And you we'd have multiple servers, but they weren't necessarily fully synced. So you'd be asking a server, you know, give me some new cards, and then you'd get these new cards or to swipe, and then you're done with them, and you ask another server, you don't know which one, it's just kind of automatically routing into ones, and it might give you the same cards because it doesn't know that you already had them. And we don't want to show you duplicates, and it got really bad to the point that if we didn't do anything, you're just swiping on the same people over and over and over and over again. So I had to build a whole bunch of protection into the client where I started to create an extra cache of everything, every person that you saw. And so that if a card came down from the server of somebody that you already saw, we would not show it to you. And then we would, you know, keep asking for more cards until we had enough to do everything, and we filter those out and then come up with some rules because we didn't want your you know, your local database to just balloon with every person that you ever saw on Tinder. So it was sort of like if you hadn't seen a duplicate within 24 hours or something like that, we would toss out everything just in feel because we'd feel like okay, the servers are probably in sync at this point. So there's all sorts of little things that we do to try to make it so that it feels like it's always working, even when it's not. That's such a great story.

Hugh Williams: 32:44

I got one more, Jonathan, maybe, and then we'll wrap up, set you free. You created one of the great startups of our time. I mean, I think everybody wishes they'd created Tinder. There's probably people right now pitching to a VC saying I've got Tinder for whatever. Um, and I know you advise startups. I'd love just a final word from you about, you know, what advice would you give to somebody who wants to be an inventor or wants to create their own startup?

Jonathan Badeen: 33:08

You know, I mean, I think it's really just to go for it and to meet people, to learn and expand your knowledge and and play with things. I to me, I I could never tell you the secret to things, but I feel like there's a certain element of luck, but luck, I think, is based upon it's kind of where opportunity and preparation coincide, where they they meet. So it's you know, it's about learning the things and when an opportunity arises that you're uh equipped to take advantage of it. But you got to get yourself out there and say yes to things, you got to meet people, you got to try things because you know, the more times you try, more things you expose yourself to, that's where you're going to have that opportunity to apply your learnings.

Hugh Williams: 33:54

So it's partly inspiration, a lot of perspiration.

Jonathan Badeen: 33:58

Absolutely. You know, I find it um funny. A lot of times I'll have uh people pitch things and they're very worried about somebody stealing their idea. And I, you know, you should always, you know, be cautious or whatever. But at the same time, most of the good ideas that have blown up in the world are things that everybody thought they were crazy. Nobody was going to steal it because they thought they were crazy to do it. And so it's really about the implementation. A lot of people might have even had your idea. It's about getting it right. And that takes a lot of work, uh, takes insight that is, you know, may come naturally or it may come from just putting in the work to learn the insights of how to get things done and uh make a product that's actually going to work for people.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 34:39

Thank you so much, Jonathan. That's been very insightful. I've definitely learned a lot, especially around what skew morphia or skew morphic means, uh, which felt very relevant actually when we were talking about the user experience. So I'm glad I asked that question. Been great to chat, and I'm sure the users will learn a thing or two. And I need to go and have a look for that supposed pitch deck, which you say is somewhere out there on the internet.

Hugh Williams: 35:00

Thanks, Jonathan. Great to see you. Nice to see you.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 35:03

So that was really awesome. He's such a cool guy.

Hugh Williams: 35:06

Yeah, wasn't that amazing? I I love talking to Jonathan. I could talk to the guy for hours. I hope all of our listeners enjoyed it as much as we did.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 35:13

Jonathan, if you're listening, thank you again. Um and unfortunately, I didn't manage to bring up the Tinder jet, but listeners comment on the episode if you want a photo of Hugh next to the Tinder jet.

Hugh Williams: 35:25

The only thing I'll tell you, Hannah, is it's sort of a, I guess it's a real jet, but I think it didn't have engines. It was kind of like a it was kind of like a prop for one of the best parties I've ever been to. Um something else.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 35:37

Hang on a minute. So basically, what you're telling me is when you hire only software engineers, not hardware engineers, you get a jet that doesn't fly.

Hugh Williams: 35:44

That's pretty much it. That's pretty much it. But you do get good parties.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 35:47

Oh dear. I think that's probably the first time someone's ever recommended inviting a bunch of software engineers to a party, but we won't get into that because um we need to wrap the episode. So, listeners, if you like what you heard, you can like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you find your podcast. You can find us at techoverflowpodcast.com.

Hugh Williams: 36:05

We're also available on LinkedIn where we're posting tons of really interesting content and also on X and Instagram.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 36:12

So we'll see you next time for another episode. Uh, see you then. Bye you. Bye Helen