Inside Tinder’s ‘Cultural Reset’ As It Battles for Gen Z Relevance

Inside Match Group, there’s a common refrain: Tinder is your first dating app, and Hinge is your last.

As the watering hole for young daters, Tinder’s success is largely reliant on Gen Z. The young generation’s dating patterns have also become increasingly inscrutable: they drink and hook up less frequently, and might even be tiring of dating apps entirely. As Tinder teetered toward becoming out of touch, the platform’s revenue plateaued in 2024 with 1% growth year over year and a 7% decline in paying users.

Then came Spencer Rascoff, the bright-eyed Zillow cofounder who planned to reinvent Match Group as CEO. Within months of Rascoff taking the reins, Match Group laid off 13% of the company in May. Tinder CEO Faye Iosotaluno stepped down, and Rascoff chose to lead the property himself.

“Tinder needs a lot of work, and it is therefore my primary focus,” Rascoff said on Match Group’s second-quarter earnings call.

Rascoff has shaken up Tinder. Company leaders told Business Insider why they think the company is headed for a turnaround as product timelines narrow and the app’s messaging gets updated.

Their golden goose: Gen Z.

“We are absolutely, with Spencer’s arrival, going through a bit of a cultural reset,” said Hillary Paine, Tinder’s VP of product. “It’s reinvigorated the energy at the company.”

Faced with competition from buzzy upstarts and evolving dating habits, the stakes are high for Tinder as it battles to stay relevant with young daters.

Tinder is flatter, faster, and leaning into small teams

Tinder’s new Double Date feature — yes, for double-dating — was scheduled to roll out slowly toward the end of 2025. Then Rascoff became CEO, saw the product was performing well, and pushed up the timeline by six months, said Cleo Long, Tinder’s senior director for global product marketing.

Tinder is moving faster than ever, three of its leaders said. The company used to have a twice-monthly schedule for shipping code, Long said. Now, it’s weekly.

Speed is one of the seven product principles Rascoff laid out in a memo sent to Tinder employees in May. Rascoff wrote that Tinder would employ a “‘ship ship ship’ mentality” and said it was important that data analysis would “inform but not delay” the timeline.

Another is to “prioritize results.” For a long time, dating apps like Tinder focused on expanding their paid tiers. Rascoff, though, wrote that revenue was an output of audience growth; thus, product should be focused on improving “user outcomes.” (Rascoff declined multiple requests for comment.)

Paine worked with Rascoff in her previous job at Zillow. Tinder’s new “smaller, more structured pods” are reminiscent of what they had at Zillow, she said. The goal was to have teams “act like mini startups within a larger organization.”

Rather than working with a pooled team of 60 engineers, Paine said, a product lead is now working with about 10 — as well as a designer, an analyst, and a researcher.

“They’re all physically sitting next to each other in the office,” she said. “There are whiteboards, they’ve got their devices out, and they’re riffing quickly on things.”

While going “startup mode” can speed things up at a large company, it isn’t always what existing employees are looking for. Some business leaders can use it as an excuse to institute long hours; others to micromanage.

Asked about these challenges, Paine said that there is “higher accountability,” but that “the people who are here today are here for that energy.”

Rascoff has made Tinder significantly more focused on the long-term, the leaders said.

Stephanie Danzi, Tinder’s SVP of global marketing, used to plan her team’s budget quarterly, or sometimes even month-to-month. The process is now more fluid, she said, something that was important with the early launch of the Double Date feature.

“I’ve never been able to transfer my Q4 dollars to Q2 with a launch,” Danzi said. “He was like, ‘This is ridiculous.'”

Tinder has also trimmed its head count. Match Group declined to disclose what percentage of Tinder’s staff was laid off in the companywide 13% cut, though it said that roughly 1 in 5 managers’ roles were eliminated. (Another one of Rascoff’s principles: “Smaller In Size, Stronger In Commitment.”)

Danzi said that Tinder experienced a “flattening” under Rascoff. Her team was already fairly lean, so the changes were small compared to the product team, she said.

“We did have some reduction in force, but it was not as dramatic as the reorg that you would’ve seen on the tech side of things,” Danzi said.

How Tinder is chasing Gen Z

Tinder’s corporate shake-up isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about Gen Z. Paine said that Gen Z was Tinder’s “center of gravity.” Danzi called 18 to 24-year-olds the app’s “sweet spot.”

Long explained the company’s product mission: “If we’re seeing this working for Gen Z, let’s give them more of what they’re asking for.”

Tinder has about 50 million monthly users, 60% of whom the company says are between 18 and 30. That would place roughly 30 million monthly Tinder users in the Gen Z age cohort. (Tinder declined to share how many Gen Z users it had.)

Some of Gen Z have cooled on Tinder — or at least its hookup app reputation. It’s implicit in Danzi’s remit, which she said was “reconsideration with Gen Z women.” On his first-quarter investor call, Rascoff said that Tinder’s “infinite card stack” model worked better 10 years ago when there was “more of a hookup culture.”

According to analytics company Appfigures, Tinder was the No. 1 dating app between 2020 and 2024, but downloads declined 38% over the period. (So far in 2025, the Tea app has displaced Tinder’s No. 1 status.) In 2020, Tinder had an estimated 11,363,000 downloads, per Appfigures; in 2024, it was 7,037,000.

Tinder has rolled out a slew of new features aimed toward Gen Z, including College Mode, face verification in an attempt to increase safety and cut down on bots, and — you guessed it — Double Date. Long said that 85% of double daters were between 18 and 29.

Paine said that Tinder’s AI push is about “giving Gen Z more confidence” — and not about “replacing dating.” The company has AI assistants that help users pick photos and an AI game to test their flirting skills.

Of all the dating app leaders, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd — a Tinder cofounder who settled a lawsuit against the company in 2014 — has likely been the boldest in her AI predictions. In May, Herd imagined a future in which users have AI “dating concierges” that date each other first.

Paine sounded skeptical of the idea. “That, to me, feels like a bit of a dystopian future,” she said of Herd’s prediction. “That’s not how we’re thinking about it at Tinder.”

Then there’s the question of dating app burnout. Many young people want to be on their phones less and are tired of swiping. Whether the fatigue is hitting Tinder’s bottom line remains debatable — but sentiment among many has certainly turned against dating apps.

“There is a nostalgia happening for a pre-dating app time when people think it was easy,” Danzi said, pointing out that “Sex and the City” is having a resurgence. Those easy rom-com moments “never really existed,” she said.

Danzi also said that there was “tech influence” on the downturn in sentiment.

“Everybody’s conditioned: When I open an app, I can press a button and get what I want,” Danzi said, pointing to examples like Amazon and Uber. “Dating apps do not work like that.”

When asked about dating app fatigue and how Tinder planned to combat it, Paine said that the company was focused on “fewer likes and better matches.”

There’s another one of Rascoff’s product principles. It also sounds a lot like Hinge with its “turn limits.” That app has shown stronger growth — its revenue, while smaller than Tinder’s, grew 39% year-over-year in 2024 and its paying users grew 13%. Hinge also has a large cohort of Gen Z users.

Paine said that Rascoff had been working on breeding collaboration between the apps, including between Tinder and Hinge. Rascoff refers to the two apps as “siblings,” she said, “and you don’t want your siblings to fight.”

It’s not clear whether the turnaround effort will prove successful. In the second quarter, Rascoff’s first full quarter as CEO, Tinder’s revenue was down 4% year over year to $461.2 million — though that was up a little over 3% from the previous quarter’s $447.4 million. Paid users continued to decline, dipping 7% year over year.

Rascoff sounded bullish in his remarks.

“For the first time in a long time, Tinder’s pace of product innovation is strong,” he said.