How Hinge CEO Justin McLeod overcame addiction, heartbreak and professional failure

Justin McLeod had a lot of problems. Knowing his market for a dating app wasn’t one of them. His target customer was himself.

“I originally started [Hinge] for me,” McLeod, 37, told CNBC Make It.

In 2011, McLeod was studying at Harvard Business School. But he was drinking, taking drugs, and unable to deal with a romantic heartbreak. He was unhappy and lonely.

“I was heartbroken, and then I had this idea,” he said.

Users, however, were not able to find lasting relationships on Hinge. McLeod says he was confident it would be successful eventually, but also realised that he had to step back and rebuild the app. His team shifted their focus from usual metrics like growth and the time visitors spent on the app to facilitating actual dates.

“We started over from scratch. We let go of half the company and we tried to build a new app,” McLeod said.

Business went up. Hinge soon had an estimated valuation of $75.5 million, according to PitchBook. It raised $17.5 million in a series A seed round led by Shasta Ventures.

In 2019, Match Group, which owns some of the biggest dating apps in the world, such as Tinder, fully acquired Hinge for an undisclosed sum.

While professionally things were steady, McLeod still had to work on his drinking. After falling off the wagon many times, he found the discipline to stick to his schedule and gradually slay the demons of temptation.

“I was not good at staying sober in the beginning,” he told CNBC Make It. “I went to a lot of 12-step programs and meetings and all that stuff, and I was always kind of in and out.”

The key to developing discipline for McLeod was “doing things that you don’t feel like doing” during the day. The phrase “continuous improvement” became like a mantra for him.

“For me as a leader, I would say that [overcoming addiction] shaped such a huge piece of my personality, going through the recovery process and becoming a believer in continuous improvement. I think that continuous improvement is really built into Hinge ⁠– not just into the product but very much into the culture.”

McLeod said that his experiences showed that “success is born out of just a tremendous amount of failure”.

As for his own love life, it had a sweet ending. He is married to the same college girlfriend whose loss caused him so much agony.