This week, I speak with George Hadjia, the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Bristlemoon Capital, a long-short hedge fund. George publishes regular insights on his firm's blog, including a recent post on Match Group, the company that operates Tinder and Hinge. The topic of our conversation is the dating app market and its prospects for growth after the tumultuous COVID era.

Among other things, we discuss:

The impact of COVID on the dating app market;
Whether consumer attitudes have soured on dating apps;
The demographic component to the decline of these apps, and how engagement varies by age;
The upper limit on how large any one app can get;
How defensible these scaled dating app businesses are;
The match-making dilemma;
Whether advertising is an opportunity.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on:

Season 5, Episode 12: A deep dive on dating apps (with George Hadjia)