Justin McLeod was just a young Harvard Business School student when he came up with the idea for a dating app that’s designed to be deleted. Today, Hinge is the second most downloaded dating app in the English-speaking market, trailing slightly behind Tinder. In 2023, more than 14 million people signed up to find their perfect match on Hinge. In 2011, the fresh-faced 20-something entrepreneur was so desperate for people to sign up for his app that he even bribed them with chocolate. At the time, the idea of swiping to find the love of your life on a cellphone seemed alien, so convincing fellow students to sign up to Hinge was challenging. That’s when McLeod decided to scour the college library at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, bribing students with KitKats to try his app. In the beginning, he was thrilled if he got a dozen students to sign up. Then all he had to worry about was funding the app. He hadn’t even finished his second year of business school when he was offered a 6-figure salary and a $12,000 sign-up bonus by McKinsey & Company, a multinational strategy and management consulting firm. Convinced that his app would be a success, McLeod kept putting the offer off for almost 2 years. Finally, he had enough money to get Hinge off the ground. Once his app became successful, executives at McKinsey sent him a message: “You’re probably not coming to be an analyst here, are you?” McLeod said he followed his passion and it ended up paying off. Today, Hinge has a net worth of $400 million and McLeod and his family live in a $13 million apartment in New York........and it all started with a bag of KitKats.
