Stay the Course

This blog has proven to be quite the challenge for me. First off, finding the time to listen to one of these podcasts served to be a huge barrier to entry, because I’ve been super busy with meetings, and catching up on other assignments, that I wasn’t able to find an hour to listen to a blog. When I finally did find time, I struggled with the amount of options there was to choose from. Choosing an episode took me far longer than I anticipated. I didn’t want to choose anything at the top, because I assumed a number of my peers would also pick episodes near the top of the list. As I started scrolling, I became invested in finding an episode that was interesting to me, and I hadn’t found one yet. After searching for a while, I finally decided on the episode about Hinge and Justin McLeod. 

Hinge seemed like a great choice to me because it was an app I had experience with, and it was created based on Justin’s dating experience, of which I’ve got embarrassingly little. Justin walked through Hinge’s entire history, and how every step of the story was inspired by his own dating experience - and how the app was originally designed to help him find a relationship, and now it’s one of the most effective apps on the market. Hinge started as a basic web app which utilized the Facebook network so that friends could denote whether or not they had a crush on their friends. It functioned on a double buy in, so if both parties weren’t interested, neither party received a notification the other had liked them. The idea was incredibly simple, but it didn’t get much use beyond that initial burst of traffic. The app expanded to showcase friends of friends, which was tended to be how people met in real life — this just did it digitally. The version of Hinge on the market today functions very differently, it pulls randomly from people in your area, but instead of simply swiping left and right, it gives users the opportunity to leave a comment on people’s profiles. This fundamentally changes the dating app experience, because it forces users to be intentional with their selections, and to find something specific to like about another user. 

Ultimately learning about Justin’s process developing Hinge into the online dating experience he wanted taught me a lot about how completely redoing your work is ok, especially if it’s not something you are proud of or happy with. This is something that I’ve been dealing with throughout this past year. I’m in the process for rebuilding my portfolio for the third time in 15 months because of how much I’ve learned in the last year. Justin’s journey with Hinge was based on a desire to build a dating app for people looking for relationships, and to weed out the people just looking for hookups by making an app that’s fast in comparison to premium dating services, but just inconvenient enough to weed out anyone looking for a hookup. In Justin’s own words, “It’s just too much work… there are other apps that you have to click two buttons and you are in.” Similarly to Justin’s quest for intentionality, I’ve been working to become more intentional in my work throughout the past three months. While Justin’s strategy for intentionality was to require individuals to exert effort into something they wanted results from, I’ve found results by limiting myself creatively. Challenges like the 48 hour film, limiting roll time, restricting camera movement and focal length have all forced me to be more intentional, and have resulted in near-immediate improvements. Ultimately my biggest takeaway was to keep doing what I’m doing. The changes I’ve made are worth sticking to, and I’ll continue to see results if I stay the course.