Tinder’s chief executive has revealed the dating app tests new features in in Australia because users there don’t “cross-pollinate” with the rest of the world very much.
Sean Rad said that the simple virtue of Australia being “far away from everywhere” meant it was a safe place to roll out changes to the app without influencing users elsewhere.
“There’s not a lot of science behind it. Australia is very far away from everywhere else, there’s not a lot of cross-pollination,” Rad told Cosmo editor Farrah Storr on stage at Advertising Week Europe in London. “If you are going to leave Australia it’s a big deal.”
Australians are alosuseful for testing new features because they are early adopters, he added.
Some of the features Tinder has tried out in Australia first include the “super-like” for paying users to show the really are into someone, and the so called “Tinder blend” which orders how potential matches appear based on different criteria, such as popularity or distance.
However, Rad said it shelved the feature allowing users to “force” two Facebook friends on the service.
He said: “We launched in the very early days, a product called Matchmaker. You could take two of your friends and could force them to match with each other.”
“It was very popular amongst a smaller group of our audience. But we decided to take out of the app because our internal policy is if the majority of our user base doesn’t get value out of something we’ll remove it.”
For those seeking killer advice for how to find a match on Tinder, in either hemisphere, Rad said his main tip was that headshots that don’t at least hint at someone’s features beyond their looks don’t work well.
Instead, he says budding daters on the service should go for: “shots that display what you look like, but also the environment you live in, your interests”.
