Grindr App Relaunch “Making Hook-Ups Easier Than Ever”
Shortly after becoming the first dating app to provide free STI testing kits to users, Vice President of Brand at the Grindr app, Tristan Piñeiro, has shared its plans to become a destination for the LGBTQ community and a place where hook-ups are easier than ever.
“We believe sex is part of the human experience,” says Tristan in an interview with City A.M.
Coming off the back of a testing few years that has seen data breaches and a falling share price, Grindr is also hoping to capitalise upon changes in how people use the dating app, encouraging more of its use for meeting new friends, finding safe places to go abroad, and meeting people for longer term connections as well as hook-ups.
“We are still a casual dating app but there’s so many other use cases that we’re starting to pay attention to, and productising to really take advantage of the fact we are the premiere global location for the community to contact each other,” Tristan says, before stressing that casual sex meets will remain central to the app.
“That is always going to be at the heart of what we are,” he says, “That’s not going away, if anything we are going to lean into it, because we are about casual dating and hookups and there’s nothing wrong with that. We believe sex is part of the human experience. Down the line it’s something we’re going to be productising more, the immediacy of it all and the right nowness of it, through our communications and imagery and material.”
While Grindr aim to maintain the simplicity of the app, Tristan believes that there is potential to capitalise on its versatility. “There is room for so much more and we know people are using it for so much more. We can see in the app, and we have all kinds of focus groups and research. What we want to do is sharpen it. By building around real behaviours, we’re just making it better than it already is. Not everyone will use all the functionality and that’s fine.”
Grindr inspired a legion of dating apps when it became the first location-based dating service in 2009. Now available in 190 countries, it has become a go-to way for people to meet others in the LGBTQ community when travelling. Taking this into account, the app has launched a new Roam feature allowing users to set their profile location ahead of travelling, allowing them to plan meet-ups with people in that destination. Tristan suggested plans may also be afoot to introduce further expansions to the roaming approach including an in-app holiday booking platform for users.
