"You're the CEO. What's stopping you?" The wake-up call that transformed Hinge into the dating app designed to be deleted

"I just want to start over."

When Hinge CEO Justin McLeod expressed this desire to his chief brand officer over lunch right before Thanksgiving in 2015, the company was experiencing moderate success. The dating app had gained around 500,000 users, raised significant funding, and established a reputation in cities like New York, LA, and Washington, DC.

Everything seemed to be working. But Justin knew something was fundamentally broken about their approach to online dating... and Hinge had to change course completely.

"The big thing that hit me was just where the company had landed there in terms of our values and our mission," Justin told me for this week's This is Working. "There was this article that came out in Vanity Fair called like the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse. And it was about how these apps had just created this hookup culture and ruined dating. And it was hard for me to deny, frankly, a lot of what was in that article. And I just felt like this isn't really the company that I wanted to build."

It was at lunch with his brand officer that he realized he didn't have to. "I was telling her this and I was like, 'I just want to start over.' And she's like, well, what, you know, you're the CEO, what's stopping you?'"

He decided to reboot, rebuilding Hinge — the company and the app — from the ground up. He set out to reimagine what a dating app could be if it actually prioritized helping people find meaningful relationships rather than just making quick connections. Throw away the endless-scroll playbook that made other apps addictive. Forget the gamification elements. Create a new purpose focused on getting people to "put in more effort and more thought" and then build the product to match.

The work eventually transforming Hinge into "the dating app designed to be deleted," an approach so successful that it's now a $550 million-in-revenue business, growing 39% last year alone. In February, relationship site The Knot surveyed nearly 8,000 recently engaged couples and found that Hinge trounced the competition in getting people to the alter. The reboot clearly worked.

During our conversation, I sat down with Justin to understand how he navigated the high-stakes decision to completely overhaul Hinge and stick with his convictions. What emerged was a lesson in recognizing when success is actually failure in disguise – and finding the courage to start over.

Some of his key insights:

To build something meaningful, embrace contradiction

This wasn't just a product pivot for Justin, it was deeply personal. The app wasn't aligned with him "from a values perspective anymore." So he made the dramatic decision to cut the team size, completely rebuild the product, and change how it measured success. It wasn’t easy. Nor was was it clear in the first year that it was even the right decision, as the company struggled with an accelerated burn rate and lower engagement.

"I think that entrepreneurship is really the art of being both hopelessly idealistic and ruthlessly practical at the same time," he told me. "Like if you're going to create something big in the world, you have to both hold onto that big vision and not be satisfied with, okay, I've created an app with 500,000 people on it. I wanted to create something with a lot more. Right? And at the same time, being ruthlessly practical and admitting, you know, when things aren't going the right way and being able to constantly iterate and tweak and look at what's not working right."

Making hard decisions requires both empathy and resolve

The reboot process was incredibly difficult: Justin had to let go of half his team, cutting the company from 30 to 15 people. On the same day he showed longtime employees out the door, he had to turn around and give the remaining team an inspiring presentation about Hinge's future. "I offered every single person the same severance package that I offered the first group if they didn't want to come along on this journey, which one person took and the remaining 14 stayed," he recalled.

Create a new path rather than following the established one

Perhaps his most counterintuitive move was making the radical decision to completely ignore what competitors were doing. "That was one of the most foundational principles that actually we created coming out of the reboot in 2015," he said. "When we did the reboot, I was like, no one's allowed to have any of the other dating apps on your phone. We're only paying attention to our customers, and we're gonna, like, head in a completely different direction."

If you're going to follow your values, you can't do that and also copy someone else's values.

“What I learned is if you're the smaller player copying the bigger player, you're never going to be able to break out like that,” he said. “We had to figure out our own game to play. Because at the time we were very focused on the competition and everyone had all the dating apps downloaded on their phone. And every time someone else would release a feature, we'd like, we'd scramble to release that feature too."

"If you're the smaller player copying the bigger player, you're never going to be able to break out like that... We had to figure out our own game to play."

For Hinge, playing its own game meant focusing ruthlessly on what Justin thought the real job to be done was of people who were dating: to find someone meaningful. And when that occurred, there was no more reason to have Hinge. So that became the message: We’re an app designed to be deleted.

The idea caught on and word-of-mouth spread as daters came to believe that Hinge was there for them, not to drain money from their desire for love.

The results speak for themselves. Hinge has become the top most downloaded dating app in 10 countries, with more than 10 million monthly active users in the US alone. They say they send someone on a date every two seconds. And the company maintains a remarkable 94% employee retention rate.?

And most importantly, it's fulfilling Justin's original vision of creating meaningful connections in a digital world. As The Knot said, "Why have most couples consistently met on Hinge? It could be because the app's mission statement, 'designed to be deleted,' falls right in line with, well, finding your partner for life."

See Part 1 of my interview with Justin here. And stay tuned for Part 2, where we talk Hinge's unique company culture.

On LinkedIn’s video series, This is Working, I sit down with top figures from the world of business and beyond to surface what they've learned about solving difficult problems. See more from Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Savannah Bananas owner Jesse Cole, Google CMO Lorraine Twohill, Taco Bell CEO Sean Tresvant, Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz, former US President Barack Obama, filmmaker Spike Lee, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva, cosmetics legend Bobbi Brown, F1’s Toto Wolff, and many more.