One Year As a Publicly-Traded Company: Celebrating our Accomplishments and Building Our Community Going Forward
One year ago this month, Grindr shares debuted on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). This was an incredible milestone for a company built by gay people for gay people, and I love how often people remind me about the party Grindr and NYSE threw in front of the exchange—one unlike anything the cradle of capitalism had ever seen before.
In the year since being public, we’ve delivered continued growth in our monthly active users to 13.5M and stellar financial results, consistently generating higher than expected revenue. We’ve harnessed that growth to fuel the launches of significant app enhancements—an updated home screen, videos in albums, and new chat features (“lost all my chats” is no longer an excuse for not getting back to someone!) are just a few of the ways we improved the Grindr experience for our users. Concurrently, we started to work on features users have been wanting us to build for years, such as improvements in how they indicate their intent in the app, and Teleport, which allows users to show their profile in a city other than where they are at present. We expect these and other features to launch next year.
We also expanded our impact in making the lives of our community safer and more just, by enabling individuals in the US, Ireland, and Georgia to protect their health by ordering free at-home HIV test kits directly through our app. Since the launch of this initiative in the US, a quarter of a million kits were distributed in the first six months, and a quarter of those went to people who had never tested before. Our vision is to provide this service to all our users around the world.
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This year, a big focus for Grindr’s executive team has been to help build a culture where our employees can continually learn and grow, and unleash their full potential. Our goal is for all our employees to strive to achieve audacious goals through operational excellence. As part of this effort, we’ve been adding some critical talent to our team, with fantastic leadership hires in product, engineering, marketing, finance, and legal.
As we celebrate the progress we’ve achieved so far, we remain committed to our mission of building the global gayborhood in your pocket. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved this year, but I know there is still a lot to do.
Looking ahead, we are focused on rolling out initiatives that make it easier and safer for our users to connect however they’d like. Artificial intelligence for recommendations and better matching and specific programs for our users are just a couple of the things we will be investing in as we continue on our path to become the super-app for our community.
What a year it has been for Grindr. I am looking forward to what lies ahead as we work to make a world where the lives of our global community are free, equal, and just.
