
Show HN: Tinder Revenue Estimate - ebellity
https://manicoti.com/bmodels/1
======
mi100hael
Feedback: consider ditching the .00 on the numbers and spelling out
"million"/"billion." It's a lot easier to quickly read "$36.2 million" than
"$36,200,000.00"

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ssdd
At least numbers looks humongous at first glance with it. :)

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pc86
Go the federal budget route, round down until you get to "in thousands" or "in
millions" for everything. Then it's still easy to compare $12 to $36,000 at a
glance without staring at a table full of 000,000.00 :)

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slig
Congrats on shipping! One suggestion: I'd make the URLs prettier e.g:
/companies/<id>/stripe/bmodels, /companies/<id>/stripe/submodels/1,
/companies/<id>/stripe/submodels/2, etc.

That way I can delete the last part of a URL a return to the
/companies/<id>/stripe/ home page. It's also easier to know what the URLs are
about before opening them.

~~~
ebellity
agreed, thanks for the feedback !

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rb808
IAC has a chart showing total revenue of Match group, which includes tinder.
Page 6

[http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/IACI/4185874240x0x970...](http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/IACI/4185874240x0x970772/E6E5B1DF-8D33-4503-9F60-6F51154D4AC1/Q4_2017_Shareholder_Letter.pdf)

BTW Love the quote "Match Group proved definitively in 2017 that Tinder is not
just a moment, nor just a solid business reflecting an enduring commercial
testament to the power of love. "

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joering2
"Commercial testament to the power of love".

Any idea what author was trying to say??

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lifeformed
He's saying: "The success of Tinder shows that monetizing love is a profitable
model."

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joering2
But its not. Tinder relies on many months of your membership in other to make
a buck. If you find love, you stop being paid member.

I say to the contrary: the financial success of Tinder proves that online
dating doesn't mean quickly finding true love.

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primitivesuave
Really cool idea. It would be awesome if you could crowdsource the data for
any companies through employees - some big companies don't have much
transparency on revenue numbers, but employees in various positions could
piece that information together through this service. Maybe even the rare
private company that offers their revenue information willingly.

Reliable data on revenue of private companies would be very useful to
employees/investors in determining the actual value of the company's equity.

~~~
ebellity
Yeah I'm sure a company like Buffer could be willing to share that information
(like they already do for their revenue on the Baremetrics "open startups"
page)

I agree employees (and past employees) could offer valuable information,
although they're probably legally bound by some confidentiality agreements...

However I think when you're in a market it's easier to estimate how your
competitors are doing, even though you don't have any privileged info.

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sjbase
Nice work and grats on getting to the elusive "done" stage :)

Income tax is a big piece missing from the expense model. I'm guessing it's
easy to add that line item, but it even if so it would be cool to have it
computed automatically since its mostly just a function of {domicile,
entity_type, pretax_rev}.

~~~
ebellity
Thanks, and yes it's elusive :) Sure, will need to add this. Can't avoid
taxes!

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Glench
Cool! I think evidence-backed modeling is a really interesting idea.

As an unsolicited suggestion, I wonder if there's a way to emphasize numbers
that are backed by evidence (links and maybe commentary?). Right now from a
visual and informational standpoint all the numbers look like they're equally
valid when in reality some of them could be based on reports published by
Tinder and some could be just totally made up.

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RandallBrown
If you scroll down it has links and comments about where all the numbers came
from.

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Glench
Yeah, but none of that information is surfaced in the high-level report. If
I'm reading this I'd like to have an idea of each number's validity.

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ebellity
Definitely something I'm thinking about. Maybe even some kind of "confidence
interval" of confidence ratio could be added next to an estimate.

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cal5k
I think this number is a massive underestimate of their annual top-line. Based
on the cost of a subscription I'd bet it's in the $1B+ range.

~~~
BlackjackCF
Agreed. Having worked at a dating app that had a significantly smaller user
base, the revenue numbers are definitely low balled.

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ebellity
Is there a variable in particular you think is too low ? I've taken the number
of subscribers (3M) from Match Group report. But I've taken the assumption
that there's high churn and they don't all pay for 12 months. Let me know what
you think, it can be updated :)

~~~
cal5k
The subscription price varies substantially according to age and region. I
also suspect that they make a lot of money from "whales", i.e. people with the
most expensive subscriptions who also buy their other item packs (superlikes
etc.)

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matte_black
I spent a ton of money on boosts, and have a gold membership, easily $200+. It
was worth it. Truth is for busy men with a bunch of shit to do these
enhancements completely improve the experience to the point that they are
practically mandatory. Any time I’m on a serious Tinder spree I’ll buy up big
packs of boost. Boost gets you laid.

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aphextron
>Any time I’m on a serious Tinder spree I’ll buy up big packs of boost. Boost
gets you laid.

Agreed. I don't know how they did it, but they finally made a dating product
that works for women AND men. Match Group is going to the moon IMO, and I say
that as someone who worked for their #1 competitor.

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philipodonnell
This is an interesting way of decomposing a business model in general, not
just documenting existing companies. I could see something like this chipping
away at the Excel models that we all made in business school. Reusable inputs,
explicit sourcing of assumptions, creatively visualizing how to arrive at the
outputs, easier to run what-if analysis.

Not sure who the market would be as a paid service, but would be being a great
teaching tool.

~~~
ebellity
Yep, you just read into my mind ! Also think it could be great for education,
in the information age it's still not easy to understand how businesses work
exactly for most people.

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oli5679
I did an internship for a mobile games studio. They had really detailed
estimates of competitor revenues because they were able to combine:

1) their own daily revenue from titles

2) publicly listed studios' quarterly revenue figures

3) the daily rankings of 1 and 2 in the two app stores

to extrapolate every rivals' revenue.

I'm pretty sure tinder grosses more than $1 m / day (excluding ads)

[https://www.appannie.com/en/apps/ios/top/](https://www.appannie.com/en/apps/ios/top/)

[https://thinkgaming.com/app-sales-data/](https://thinkgaming.com/app-sales-
data/)

~~~
ebellity
Thanks, someone said pretty much the same thing to me but couldn't share the
data. I'll increase the ARPU number again to reflect that, sounds like they're
extremely profitable...

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redgetan
I like the site's intended purpose, but I agree with others that design needs
improvement. Also, perhaps you can source some data from public data (i.e
annual report, appannie).

~~~
ebellity
thanks for the feedback. It's funny now that you mention AppAnnie I just
remembered an old project I did in 2010 called AppsMetrix trying to estimate
the number of app downloads based on what data was available (number of
ratings, reviews, some apps who communicated about their downloads numbers
etc). Somehow I keep coming back to working on the same kind of stuff!

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fwdpropaganda
Cool stuff.

I've noticed that some times you source numbers from news articles, which you
reference. How do you plan to keep the numbers updated?

EDIT: In fact, how have you done it so far? Manually, I imagine?

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ebellity
Yes I've done that manually. In my head I would love for it to be something
even more collaborative 'Wikipedia-style' and people would help keep the
numbers up to date. Of course that could only work for popular companies if
there is enough interest about their business.

For smaller businesses it could be cool to have templates like "pizzeria
business plan" that people could "fork" and input their own numbers. Perhaps
reuse some variables across the board such as "cost of tomatoes" instead of
everyone doing their thing separately on Excel.

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gupir
You should allow requests to add or alter data, mostly like nomadlist.com do
(example [1]). The owner could discuss and accept or reject the request. I
think it would enrich the plan much quicker. Congrats for the launch!

[1][https://nomadlist.com/canggu-bali-indonesia](https://nomadlist.com/canggu-
bali-indonesia)

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ebellity
Thanks, I agree, maybe like a "pull request" that can be accepted / validated
by the owner

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gupir
Exactly, or even "clone" the plan. Seems cool, git applied to tabulated data.

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telekid
This interface generalizes nicely to estimating any Fermi problem, not just
business models. I love it!

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ebellity
Thanks, agreed it could be extended to other types of models and estimates !

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vm
I really like what you're doing here. Two things that I would like as a user:
-ability to get updates (pref email) when new companies are added or companies
I follow are updated -timeline for the financials. are these annual revenues?
monthly? etc.

Nice work on shipping!

~~~
ebellity
Thanks ! Indeed, that's actually something I should have added before posting
here (to collect a few emails for future updates).

Timeline is also a big area of improvement. It's good to be able to see a
snapshot at a moment in time, but I'll have to develop ways to make it more
clear which it is, and perhaps to extend that and make projections for
months/years to come.

Update : I've now added a top banner to collect emails for people interested
in company news

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webninja
The actual revenue may be in Match Group or IAC’s Quarterly or Annual
financial filings on sec.gov or Morningstar. It’s also possible the revenue
was teased out in one of their earnings call transcripts as well.

~~~
ebellity
From what I've read they just gave a few hints such as the number of
subscribers for Tinder Plus or the overall increase in revenue for Match
Group, but not a lot more than that.

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mcintyre1994
This is a cool idea! I'm not sure why but all the submodel pages say "There is
an error in your formula." next to the current formula even though they seem
to be the correct calculations.

~~~
ebellity
I've fixed that, thanks!

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PaulHoule
I love the idea here, but I don't find the report very easy to read.

~~~
ebellity
yeah I'm not completely happy about how it looks either, will probably have to
work with someone better on design/UX for that. if you have ideas on how to
improve or feedback on the parts that were not clear don't hesitate

~~~
PaulHoule
in my mind that looks something like a spreadsheet but more structured, say
like the old

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK_Solver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK_Solver)

There is a large precedent of people writing financial reports and projects so
I would look at accounting literature or talk to an accountant (possibly in a
non-professional relationship) or business analyst about it before talking to
a UX person.

I think I'd like to see an overview calculation at the top (which I think I
see) and then see it broken down hierarchically below. I think that might be
what you are trying to do, but it doesn't come across clearly.

Another issue is that this is described as a revenue report but I see stuff in
there about salaries, desk costs, etc. which is not revenue but expenses. A
real financial report would probably consider both and should be completely
clear about what is what.

~~~
ebellity
Thanks you're right I've updated to "Revenue & Expenses Estimate" on the page
title.

Indeed there are a lot of norms about how these reports are presented in the
financial world, but for the common people it's often complex to understand.
I'd like to make a design that could help a 20yo waitress understand business
better, more than for accountants !

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bourgoin
Have you built capability for nested sub-models? It doesn't look like it's
structured that way, but I can imagine that being a desired feature as a model
grows in complexity.

~~~
ebellity
At the moment there's only one level of submodel, but yes this can definitely
be an interesting addition. Wanted to keep things simple at first. Maybe this
could be an advanced feature.

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bluetwo
I find it interesting that the site-generated revenue almost covers what they
pay in advertising to others. I wonder if that's an intentional strategy.

~~~
ebellity
frankly that's a weak part of the model, I have no idea how much they spend on
marketing

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bluetwo
Ah. Thanks for the clarification.

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pg_bot
Employees + Salaries seems a bit higher than what I would expect. Does tinder
employ 500 people? Last I heard it was around 200.

~~~
ebellity
You can see the source for that 500 estimate below in the model (or if you
click on the variable name). 200 was in October 2016 and they planned to
double in the next 12-18 months.

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lifeformed
Suggestion: be able to specify ranges for variable estimates, and give ranges
for the answers to calculations.

~~~
ebellity
Good one to think about, thanks

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stillsut
So RapGenius for Financial Statements?

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ebellity
Spot on, a big inspiration for me ! I really like RapGenius and even looked at
some of their UI while I was developing this.

Either this or "GitHub for business plans" (but many features missing for
that, to collaborate, fork, go back to a moment in time...)

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bflesch
I like it very much, but you should add some caching as the submodels are
loading very slowly.

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ebellity
thanks will do, and just temporarily upgraded to a better dyno on Heroku... I
was on their small Hobby things, mostly good for side projects and it crashed!

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matte_black
Any chance of Tinder IPO someday? TNDR

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swyx
MTCH :)

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matte_black
MTCH gives exposure to Tinder???

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celestialcheese
MTCH owns tinder. MTCH's parent company is IAC

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matte_black
Yea I just looked it up. Picked up some shares in MTCH, should have looked
into this earlier.

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nerdponx
This is really interesting. Thank you!

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ebellity
Thanks :)

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hemantv
Where are you getting these models?

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ebellity
I made it, you can make one too !

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senatorobama
Now do Bumble.

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aw3c2
This should be a Show HN, as it is showcasing your (interesting) service, no?

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ebellity
Well to be honest you might be right. I didn't think it would get so many
upvotes, just wanted to throw an example out there to see the reaction and
make sure the site doesn't crash. It's good content though, I did some genuine
research on Tinder for that example, I'm not just pointing to the homepage :)

~~~
sctb
We've added “Show HN” to the title. Please let us know if you'd rather not!

~~~
ebellity
it's fine, can't back down now anyway :)

