“At Bonobos, I fell in love with the scrappy startup-culture. This role helped him realize a few important things about his burgeoning career in product, before he even realized he’d officially step into that career trajectory. While Hinge was filing for incorporation in 2011, Tim was working as a customer support agent at Bonobos, the retail startup that’s now become the largest apparel brand ever built on the web in the US. In the process, Hinge helped more people connect with others, and ultimately accomplish the good type of churn they like to see–which is finding love on the app. By harnessing empathy and data, Tim and the team helped transform how relationships are formed online. Tim joined the product team right as Hinge’s leadership decided they needed to detoxify dating app culture and retool Hinge so it led to more relationships. “Only one in 500 Hinge swipes led to a phone number exchange, and 81 percent of Hinge users reported that they had never found a long-term relationship through a swiping app,” says Tim MacGougan, Chief Product Officer at Hinge. Ultimately, the Hinge team turned to the data to make their decision. In a 2016 interview, Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod told Vanity Fair that its dating apocalypse article had spurred a rigorous interrogation of the value of swiping to Hinge’s users and its impact on their lives. But unlike the other giants of the day, Hinge was listening. ”īack then, Hinge’s app–just like Tinder and Bumble–allowed profile swiping, a feature inspired by slot machine gaming psychology and widely blamed for trivializing modern romance.

The article pointed a finger at, among others, Hinge for “ swiping romance from the screen. The author prophesized a “dating apocalypse” and decried the multifarious dating apps of the day. In August of 2015, Vanity Fair ran an article castigating hookup culture.

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