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Show HN: Tinder Revenue Estimate
- aw3c2 9y agoThis should be a Show HN, as it is showcasing your (interesting) service, no?
- ebellity 9y agoWell 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 :)
- nerdponx 9y agoThis is really interesting. Thank you!
- ebellity 9y agoThanks :)
- primitivesuave 9y agoReally 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 9y agoYeah 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.
- cal5k 9y agoI 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 9y agoAgreed. Having worked at a dating app that had a significantly smaller user base, the revenue numbers are definitely low balled.
- ebellity 9y agoIs 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 9y agoThe 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.)
- ebellity 9y agoTrue, there might be people spending a lot more than the average cost of a basic subscription. I don't know the product well enough to evaluate if having Tinder Gold is enough or if some users also buy one-off app purchases in addition to that.
- haskellandchill 9y agoYea I spend $100 or more on Boosts a month in my market, NYC.
- ebellity 9y ago
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoCool 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?
- ebellity 9y agoYes 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.
- bflesch 9y agoI like it very much, but you should add some caching as the submodels are loading very slowly.
- ebellity 9y agothanks 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!
- slig 9y agoCongrats 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 9y agoagreed, thanks for the feedback !
- pg_bot 9y agoEmployees + Salaries seems a bit higher than what I would expect. Does tinder employ 500 people? Last I heard it was around 200.
- ebellity 9y agoYou 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.
- bluetwo 9y agoI 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.
- matte_black 9y agoAny chance of Tinder IPO someday? TNDR
- swyx 9y agoMTCH :)
- matte_black 9y agoMTCH gives exposure to Tinder???
- celestialcheese 9y agoMTCH owns tinder. MTCH's parent company is IAC
- matte_black 9y agoYea I just looked it up. Picked up some shares in MTCH, should have looked into this earlier.
- mi100hael 9y agoFeedback: 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"
- ebellity 9y agoRight, thanks
- thisisit 9y agoAgreed. For sometime I was scratching my head trying to understand the exact figures. The standard format is "in thousands".
- ssdd 9y agoAt least numbers looks humongous at first glance with it. :)
- pc86 9y agoGo 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 :)
- jamez1 9y agoIt's about information entropy, you want to maximize the information each character has. using 1000 digits to show what you could in 500 and a header saying "(in thousands)" maximizes the entropy
- atticusberg 9y agoOr better yet, $36.2M
- subdane 9y agoHere's one I always wonder about: $36.2M; $36.2m; $36.2mm; ?
- PaulHoule 9y agoI love the idea here, but I don't find the report very easy to read.
- ebellity 9y agoyeah 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 9y agoin 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 9y agoThanks 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 !
- rb808 9y agoIAC has a chart showing total revenue of Match group, which includes tinder. Page 6 http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/IACI/4185874240x0x970772/E6E5B1DF-8D33-4503-9F60-6F51154D4AC1/Q4_2017_Shareholder_Letter.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/IACI/4185874240x0x970... 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. "
- kaycebasques 9y agoTIL that IAC owns Tinder, Vimeo, Dictionary.com, Investopedia, Ask, and a bunch of other stuff. Their stock has tripled in 2 years, also.
- guskel 9y ago"love" ...right.
- emodendroket 9y agoI don't really get it but it seems like people are getting married who met on Tinder at this point.
- thewizardofaus 9y agoWhat a time to be alive
- carlivar 9y agoYou mean what a time to be single?
- chillacy 9y agoI have friends who got married after meeting on tinder. I don't think they spent very long on the platform though, they never paid for it either.
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- sjbase 9y agoNice 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 9y agoThanks, and yes it's elusive :) Sure, will need to add this. Can't avoid taxes!
- telekid 9y agoThis interface generalizes nicely to estimating any Fermi problem, not just business models. I love it!
- ebellity 9y agoThanks, agreed it could be extended to other types of models and estimates !
- philipodonnell 9y agoThis 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 9y agoYep, 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.
- bourgoin 9y agoHave 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 9y agoAt 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.
- redgetan 9y agoI 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 9y agothanks 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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- stillsut 9y agoSo RapGenius for Financial Statements?
- ebellity 9y agoSpot 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...)
- Glench 9y agoCool! 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.
- RandallBrown 9y agoIf you scroll down it has links and comments about where all the numbers came from.
- Glench 9y agoYeah, 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.
- ebellity 9y agoDefinitely something I'm thinking about. Maybe even some kind of "confidence interval" of confidence ratio could be added next to an estimate.
- vm 9y agoI 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 9y agoThanks ! 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
- webninja 9y agoThe 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 9y agoFrom 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.
- lifeformed 9y agoSuggestion: be able to specify ranges for variable estimates, and give ranges for the answers to calculations.
- ebellity 9y agoGood one to think about, thanks
- gupir 9y agoYou 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
- mcintyre1994 9y agoThis 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 9y agoI've fixed that, thanks!
- senatorobama 9y agoNow do Bumble.
- hemantv 9y agoWhere are you getting these models?
- ebellity 9y agoI made it, you can make one too !
- oli5679 9y agoI 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 9y agoThanks, 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...