Hinge CEO says he bribed college students with KitKats to boost $400 million-a-year business

Justin McLeod was a young Harvard Business School student when he came up with the idea for a dating app designed to be deleted—or Hinge, as we know it now. It’s now the second most downloaded dating app in English-speaking markets, behind Tinder. In 2023, more than 14 million people signed up to find their perfect match on Hinge, according to the company.

However, in 2011, this young entrepreneur in his twenties was so keen for people to sign up for his app that he bribed them with chocolate.

Back then, online dating was mostly done on desktop computers and required real effort. The idea of ​​swiping to find the love of your life (or a one-night stand) on mobile seemed alien.

Convincing her college friends (who had no shortage of opportunities to meet new people in classes, dorms and at parties) to sign up for Hinge was a challenge, McLeod says. Fortune.

“I remember running around the college library in Washington, D.C., Georgetown, bribing kids with KitKats to come try my app,” he laughs. “We had dozens of users a day—maybe, if that.”

Funding Hinge also took a lot of determination. McLeod recalled having to “beg and borrow a lot” to get the app off the ground.

“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. Sometimes that’s just how it is,” he says. “I was literally collecting — I was collecting — $5,000 checks and $10,000 checks to come and start Hinge.”

The breakthrough moment for Hinge’s CEO was a job offer from McKinsey

These days, it’s hard to land an internship while you’re in college—let alone find a full-time job right after graduation. But that wasn’t the case for McLeod: He hadn’t even finished his second year of business school when McKinsey offered him a spot in a coveted graduate program.

A consulting career would have allowed McLeod to earn a six-figure salary, with Glassdoor estimating that the average consultant makes between $173,000 and $233,000 per year. McLeod’s sign-on bonus alone was $12,000.

It turned out to be the breakthrough he needed — he finally got his life moving.

“I could have put off my offer for a few years,” he recalls, adding that he “borrowed” money to create his app.

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

Why did McLeod choose the risky path of entrepreneurship when he could have had a comfortable career at McKinsey?

“I turned down the offer and started working on Hinge, really because I was so passionate about the idea. Once I started thinking about it, it was hard to stop. I really knew that this was what I was meant to be working on.”

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

The founder soon bought himself and his family a New York City apartment for nearly $13 million. Meanwhile, Hinge—which he still runs as CEO—revenued $396 million last year.

Advice for Entrepreneurial Generation Z Graduates

Like McLeod, young people today don’t dream of working a 9-to-5 job after college or climbing the corporate ladder. Studies consistently show that they want to be their own boss.

And they’re already turning those dreams into reality: According to LinkedIn, the second fastest-growing job title among Gen Z graduates is now “founder.”

His advice to young entrepreneurs? “You have to be hopelessly idealistic and ruthlessly practical at the same time — that’s how you create something great and successful.”

“Some people who fall into the hopelessly idealistic camp dream but never turn their dreams into reality, and people who fall into the ruthlessly practical camp do things, but none of it is that big or game-changing,” McLeod explains.

Instead, he says, successful founders like himself constantly strive to strike a balance between the two: essentially dreaming big, but “paying attention to the very practical, day-to-day realities to make those dreams a reality.”

Meanwhile, he advises Gen Zers who don’t know what they want to do after school to stop thinking about it too much and just try their hand at work, whether that means starting their own business or joining the rat race.

“I think people who get too caught up in what’s my career going to be? What am I going to do? They miss the opportunity to cultivate that passion, that interest in something that’s out there in the world,” she says.

“I would never have discovered what I wanted if I just sat there and meditated. I had to work a summer in healthcare and realized that wasn’t it. I was working on a few other startup ideas before Hinge came to me, and it was a lot of figuring out what I didn’t like or what didn’t resonate with me. But each time I got a little smarter and a little closer.”

This story was originally published on Fortune.com