Build engagement and retention first; push monetization only years later

David BarnardSo I won't steal your thunder. Why don't you just tell me about what you shared in the tweet and why you think those things, and I'm sure I'll have a million follow-up questions.

Jeff MorrisYeah. So I guess a bit of background before I go into the tweet is I ran revenue at Tinder for four and a half years through our hyper growth years. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about monetization, subscriptions, and revenue, obviously. And what worked at Tinder and when we really started to turn on monetization didn't happen until years four or five into the product. And so we had built up just a great product that had extreme product market fit. We had scaled the product to 30 to 40 million monthly actives, but we didn't have a huge focus on monetization. I think the playbook, at least until call it AI native applications started to come to market was to really spend time on getting the product right, starting with just the core engagement loops and then making sure that you had great retention to kind of earn the right to build a subscription business or monetize through in app purchases or advertising.

Jeff MorrisI think there's a lot of external reasons why founders now are pushing monetization earlier. Market is so competitive. And so I think the metrics that you need to raise capital change, and so the revenue slopes are much more extreme, but you're seeing teams now focus on monetization really on day one, even within the first session. There's a part of it which is also like, hey, these businesses are really expensive to operate and the model costs …