Motto gay app
The Story
Tech entrepreneur Joel Simkhai created a monster.
As the founder of Grindr, the category-defining gay hookup app, Simkhai developed undoubtedly the most impactful brand in the history of the LGBTQ+ community.
Grindr is core to the experience of queer people across over 100 countries who utilize the app for an average of 2 hours per day. In the process, Grindr has grown into a highly-profitable machine with a stranglehold on the gay app market and a recent listing as a public organization on the NYSE.
Despite this rosy picture of a thriving business, Grindr is making people miserable. In a study of 200,000 users, Grindr left users feeling more unhappy than any other app in the App Store with 77% feeling regret after logging off. Citing the app’s toxic culture of bullying, high levels of addictiveness, and the sheer amount of time users feel is wasted on the platform, the most iconic brand in the space is also the most hated.
After selling Grindr, Simkhai came to our agency seeking a do-over by launching a competitor to take on the company he once created. The result is an app called Motto that is rapidly growing across the US.
The Approach
Motto is an premium hookup ap
Over a decade after founding Grindr, Joel Simkhai wants a do-over
When Joel Simkhai left Grindr five years ago, he had a lot of time to think.
Simkhai, a gay guy and tech entrepreneur, helped launch the groundbreaking queer hookup and dating app in 2009. Grindr, which piloted geolocation software to show users’ distance from one another, fundamentally changed queer culture.
By retrofitting queer social and romantic interactions to the digital age, Grindr broughtmillions of people together in ways that gay bars — the longtime focal points of LGBTQ social scenes — simply couldn’t. But under Simkhai’s watch, it also laid bare, and some say worsened, the physical and racial discrimination that has long plagued the gay community.
Now, more than a decade later, he wants a do-over.
Simkhai launched a queer dating and hookup app this month called Motto, which he says has innovative features to help prevent the “toxicity” and “discrimination” that have cast shadows over other gay dating apps, including the one he spearheaded, amid a barrage of controversies for the better part of the last decade.
By requiring its users to contain face pictures instead of “headless torsos” and limiting
Joel Simkhai, the innovator that brought us Grindr, is debuting a brand-new dating website app called Motto.
Its no secret that Grindr completely revolutionized gay male society. On its inception in 2009, the geosocial intelligent phone app was intended to link similar minded gay males for friendship. However, we gays are nothing if not enterprising and quickly recognized the potential to use the app as a hang up tool. No longer were trips to the clubs and bars necessary for a little hanky panky. Grindr and the slew of imitators that would follow it enabled us to see who was nearby via the app and strike up a conversation to judge interest and compatibility. It took all the guesswork and fear of rejection out of the equation. We were now capable to scroll to our heart’s content until we found the perfect suit to scratch that certain itch.
Whether or not this was the best thing for the gay people is up for debate with many decrying the loss of queer prevent space as a product of no one getting off their phones to interact in person. Also, the internet is rife with scammers, bots and of course catfishing. Grindr, being a piece of software has not been able to determine authentic human users from
Grindr’s Founder Hates Your Headless Torso Pic
Joel Simkhai revolutionized gay digital dating. Now he’s trying to do it again by cutting against the tradition created by his success.
Simkhai founded Grindr in 2009, two years after the first iPhone was unveiled. Details magazine memorably introduced the app with the headline, “Is That a Gay Bar in Your Pocket?” Grindr, which shows its queer users who’s closest to them and how recently they’ve been online, became synonymous with gay hookup culture and casual sex, though more than a few users met long-term partners there as well. By 2018, Simkhai had sold it to Beijing Kunlun Tech for a total of $245 million. The app was sold again in 2020 for $608.5 million. The same year, Grindr was reported to hold 13 million users.
Now Simkhai has launched a unused gay dating app, Motto. The app’s features hew closer to Hinge than Tinder, showing users five to ten profiles per day rather than a geographic glut. Its tagline in the app store, “No more headless torsos,” refers to a frequent joke about Grindr: Users will often use profile pictures of only their bodies, face not included, giving conversations about sex an eerie lack of corpo
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