Grindr has always excelled at helping its users find folks looking to spend some quality time together, but the hookup app is looking to speed up the “looking?” process even more with its latest feature.
Today, Grindr announced that Right Now, its social media-like live feed feature, is rolling out to all of the platform’s users following a pilot test in select markets. Unlike Grindr’s traditional grid that shows you an array of other users’ profiles based on how far away they are, Right Now functions a bit more like X / Twitter and displays a stream of recent posts that can include both text and photos.
Right Now posts disappear from the live feed after an hour, and while they don’t have to be used for hookup purposes, posters can hit a toggle specifying whether they’re looking to host (read: have someone over for fun.) At launch, Grindr says users in certain locations “will receive a number of free hour-long Right Now sessions per week (refreshed every Friday)” meaning that the feed will only be accessible in hour-long windows. Down the line, the company also plans to make more sessions available to purchase.
Grindr
In a press release about the new feature, Grindr’s chief product officer, AJ Balance, explained that Right Now was designed to help people “find exactly what they want, when they want it – without the guesswork.”
“We built this intention-based feature based on feedback from our community so they can connect with like-minded people without wasting time on mismatched expectations,” Balance said. “The response to our initial March launch was so strong we accelerated the global rollout ahead of schedule because it’s clear people want this… well, right now.”
Grindr is not the first app of its kind to introduce functionality clearly inspired by social media platforms. Sniffies, a more cruising-focused Grindr competitor that doesn’t require signing up for an account and allows users to post sexually explicit photos on their public profiles, has had a feature similar to Right Now for some time. But Right Now’s widespread launch is the latest phase of Grindr’s larger plan to roll out a series of new features — many of which are powered by generative artificial intelligence — meant to boost revenue and make users see the app as “the Global Gayborhood in Your Pocket™.”
Previously, Grindr introduced A-List, a tool that uses Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 model and Amazon Web Services’ Bedrock to summarize chats with the intention of helping users rekindle “meaningful past connections” and pursue “high-potential matches.” Bloomberg reports the same platform is now underpinning Grindr’s Wingman, a generative AI assistant that can draft chat responses for users who can’t think of things to say for themselves, provide sex tips, and give suggestions about places that might make for good dates. Some of Grindr’s AI features are free to try, but for continued access to them, the company requires users to sign up for its monthly subscription plans.
All of the features are part of Grindr’s effort to bring in more money and staunch the financial bleeding that came following its initial public offering in 2022. As Platformer reported last year, Grindr’s stock price plummeted by 70 percent following its SPAC, and the company has been scrambling to establish new revenue streams amid employee unionization efforts and internal concerns that Grindr “was losing its progressive culture.”
At the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference this week, Grindr’s CEO George Arison spoke about how AI has changed his own productivity, and his desire for the company to start thinking about how the technology can be more deeply integrated into its services.
“For all the new things that we build, I want them to be built as if we are an AI-native startup,” Arison said. “If you’re going to do marketing for this, great; start thinking with AI first and then go to people because that’s how I think companies are going to be built moving forward and that’s what we should be doing as a business as well.”
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