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Same product, different brand vision - the case of dating apps 💘📱
Fall in love with the problem and not with the solution
"Fall in love with the problem and not with the solution"
— Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze
I work with early-stage startups. So, every now and then, I discuss the topic of a new brand’s mission and vision.
Though largely overlooked, I think these concepts are critical because they relate to the core of being an entrepreneur and of understanding an industry problem. Therefore, I decided to write about my own interpretation of them 💡.
To illustrate those concepts, I LOVE using the dating apps industry because their products, technologies and network effects are so similar, and yet their missions and visions are also completely different.
I will use Tinder (considered by many the mother ship of all dating apps) and Hinge as examples.
Source: DALL-E - “One man using Tinder on his phone and one woman using Hinge on her phone, Roy Lichtenstein aesthetics”.
Quick start: the difference between Mission x Vision x Strategy
Mission is what the company or brand wants to achieve. Vision is what the world looks like, once this mission is accomplished.
In my opinion, vision is a concept that is largely underrated and at the same time is the most important one, because it relates SO MUCH to the pain that the entrepreneur falls in love with and wants to solve.
Vision not only forces the entrepreneur to think about the pain, but also of its size. In simpler terms, they need to assess whether the problem is significant enough to create a meaningful impact on the world.
Strategy is how you will get to that. It includes what product & features need to be built, your go-to-market and monetization strategy (among many other things). Even though I will not get into much detail of that in this post, what I mean to say is: strategy is the last part. Before you think of your business model, you need to have clarity of the pain, mission & vision.
Tinder - “Single, Not Sorry”
Tinder is one of the first dating apps ever created. It practically invented the “swipe left and right” feature that inspired other apps to do so, either in dating (ex: Hinge, Bumble) or in other industries (ex: Jobr for job search, Feedly for news).
Tinder’s mission: "Single, Not Sorry" or to make single life more fun, from the your twenties to early thirties. It is meant to be used continuously, so that you will use it whenever you are single.
Tinder's vision: “To create a world where everyone has the freedom to be themselves and connect with others in meaningful ways”.
Tinder’s mission and vision make it clear that the brand was entirely conceived on the concept of making it easy for people to meet. Its strategy, therefore, needed to follow this through.
Tinder’s strategy: Its product was designed to be a very lightweight app with a small number of features, making it easy for anyone to carry it on their phones. The most basic feature is the swiping, and it does not have a lot of filters, so that you can purposely meet people you would not meet otherwise.
Source: Milkshade.
Hinge - Designed to be deleted
Hinge's mission: “To help people find love in the digital age by creating meaningful connections that lead to long-term relationships”. By helping users find their significant other, it is actually designed to be deleted.
Hinge was practically created as a response to Tinder, so that users can find a relationship and then delete the app, making it a temporary use case.
Hinge’s vision: “To build a world where everyone can find someone who truly gets them, and where dating is enjoyable, not stressful”.
Hinge’s strategy: To make people find relationships, the app focused on authentic and intentional interactions between its users. Hinge was not designed around swiping and matching, but to make users spend more time on others’ profiles and find “the one”.
How did they do that? Though A LOT more features on their product (making it a heavier app), which include:
Prompts that spark more interesting starting conversations
More filters so that users can select game-changer qualities such as religion, smoking or drinking preferences
Other features that can boost connections and allow people to know that they are interested without needing the reciprocal match beforehand.
