Hinge CEO Justin McLeod bribed children with KitKats to draw early users

But in 2011, the fledgling entrepreneur in his twenties was so eager to get people to enroll in his app that he even bribed them with chocolate.

Back then, online dating mostly took place on desktop computers and required real effort. The idea of ​​swiping in your cell phone to search out the love of your life (or a one-night stand) seemed alien.

So it was a challenge to persuade fellow students (who had loads of opportunities to fulfill people in school, dorms, and at parties) to enroll in Hinge, McLeod says Assets.

“I remember the days when I used to run around the university library in Washington, DC, at this college, Georgetown, bribing kids with KitKats to try my app,” he laughs. “We had dozens of users a day – maybe more.”

Financing Hinge also required quite a lot of patience. McLeod remembers having to do quite a lot of “begging and borrowing” to get the app off the bottom.

“I was out there networking and talking to as many people as I could and taking money from anyone who would give it to me. That’s just what you need sometimes,” he says. “I was literally collecting checks for $5,000 and $10,000 to start Hinge.”

The big breakthrough for the Hinge CEO got here with a job offer from McKinsey

These days, it’s hard enough to get an internship while studying – let alone discover a full-time job straight after graduating. But that wasn’t the case for McLeod: He hadn’t even accomplished his second yr of business school when McKinsey offered him a spot on its coveted graduate program.

A profession as a consultant would have put McLeod on the trail to a six-figure salary. Glassdoor estimates that the common consultant makes between $173,000 and $233,000 per yr. McLeod’s sign-on bonus alone was $12,000.

It turned out that this was the large breakthrough he needed to finally get Hinge off the bottom.

“I was able to delay my offer for about a couple of years,” he recalls, adding that he “borrowed” the cash to develop his app.

“When Hinge started to take off and they saw that I was the founder, they said, ‘You’re not coming here to be an analyst, are you?’ And of course, I had to pay the money back at that point.”

Why did McLeod select the highly dangerous path of self-employment when he could have had a cushty profession at McKinsey?

“I turned down his offer and started working on Hinge because I was just so excited about the idea. Once I started thinking about it, it was hard to stop. I really knew this was my calling.”

Of course, it paid off: By 2015, Hinge had raised $26.35 million and was valued at an estimated $75.5 million before Match Group bought the corporate from McLeod for an undisclosed amount.

The founder treated himself and his family to an almost 13 million dollar apartment in New York. In the meantime, Hinge – which he still leads as CEO – 396 million US dollars in sales last yr.

Advice for entrepreneurial Generation Z graduates

Like McLeod, today’s young people don’t dream of getting a full-time job or climbing the profession ladder after college. Research consistently shows that he desires to be his own boss.

And they’re already turning these dreams into reality: According to LinkedIn, the job title “founder” is currently the second fastest growing amongst Generation Z graduates.

His advice for young entrepreneurs? “You have to be hopelessly idealistic and at the same time relentlessly practical – that’s the only way you can create something big and successful.”

“Some people who are too much in the hopeless idealist camp dream but never do anything, and people who are too much in the ruthlessly practical camp do things but nothing that big or groundbreaking,” McLeod explains.

Instead, he says, successful founders like him consistently attempt to reconcile the 2: They dream big, but “pay attention to the very practical realities of everyday life in order to put them into practice.”

Meanwhile, he advises members of Generation Z who don’t yet know what they wish to do after school to not give it some thought too long, but to easily give it a try, whether by starting their very own business or by entering the workforce.

“I think people who are too self-absorbed, wondering what they want to do for a living, what they should do, miss the opportunity to develop their passion and interest in something in the world out there,” he says.

“I would never have figured out what I wanted if I had just sat around and thought about it. I had to work in healthcare for a summer and realized that wasn’t the right thing. Before I came to Hinge, I worked on a few other startup ideas and had to figure out a lot of what I didn’t like or what wasn’t a good fit for me. But each time I got a little smarter and got a little closer to my goal.”