Thanks everyone for coming. Happy to have John North, CFO of Grindr here today. Thanks for joining. Appreciate it. Thanks.

Maybe just to start on the category, Grindr has continued to grow at a really healthy pace. Despite kind of headwinds in the online dating industry across various apps, What do you see as the kind of key structural differences for Grindr and generally the community?

I think fundamentally it's more than a dating app. It's really a social network. I think it's when users turn 18 and they're able to be in Grindr or whenever it is in their journey that they're discovering who they are and figuring out what it means to be in the community. Grindr is where a lot of people, I think, go. The vast majority of our users don't pay. 92%, 93% don't pay. Having a free user experience is very important to us and something that we want the app to be very usable without people having to pay for it. And that's both to encourage early adoption of the app when people are younger and figuring things out in their 20s or whatever and also you know because we do think being the social network where where all these things are able to happen is important to the engagement and what makes grinder the most popular app that's out there and really the only one that you can have a robust experience without paying so i think that's just fundamentally different you know as we think about certainly monetization you know there are there are two ways that we do that you know users can subscribe and and they can buy consumable things. And then if not, they can be served ads. And both are important to our shareholders and to us as stewards of the business. But at the same time, we want to make sure that the user experience is powerful and robust, and I think is very differentiated than what you see with other apps that are trying to figure out how to convert more people to pay. We're a lot more focused on trying to create value so that our payers want to pay more, not so that we need to turn the dials to monetize more users, which has been pretty fundamentally different, I think, than a lot of other apps.

Yeah, that makes sense. In terms of 1Q and just to zoom out a little bit in this year, so 1Q revenue growth was better than internal and our estimates. Could you just talk about some of the bigger operational drivers of that outperformance and what could be kind of durable as we're in 2Q and just through the rest of the year?

I mean, the majority of our revenue comes from subscriptions and consumables in the App Store. It's about 85%. About 15% traditionally and consistent with how we talked about it at our Investor Day a couple years ago comes from the advertising business. In the first quarter, there were two things that were in play in terms of the outperformance. WE INCREASED SUBSCRIPTION PRICING FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2018 AT THE END OF LAST YEAR THAT CAME INTO PLAY IN THE FIRST QUARTER AND FRANKLY THE RESPONSE WAS BETTER THAN WE EXPECTED YOU KNOW WE TYPICALLY EXPECT WHEN PRICING GOES UP TO SEE HIGHER DEGREE OF CHURN LOWER REACTIVATION YOU KNOW FOR PRICE SENSITIVE PEOPLE THAT ACTUALLY WENT BETTER THAN WE THOUGHT SO WE SAW BETTER PERFORMANCE EVEN THAN WE HAD SEEN IN OUR TESTING AS WE THOUGHT ABOUT PRICE INCREASES and what the leakage might be from just churn users went better than expected, led to some good upside relative to our expectations on the subscription and in-app purchases kind of business. The advertising business, we have a pretty large exclusive deal with a pharma company we've talked about that was for the full year and is a big driver of our direct revenue growth this year. Historically, they've spent more money with us in the back half of the year. This year, it's been more flat or consistent from the early part of the year to the end of the year, which is what we weren't expecting. We were thinking it would be more back-end loaded. So that led to a little more upside but didn't change the total picture for us. But that was also a reason that the first quarter was better than we initially thought.

Okay. That's helpful. And then just the shape of the growth as we get through the year. I think you guys have been pretty clear that revenue growth is expected to decelerate in the back half of the year as we lap pricing. And so what do you view as the main kind of growth drivers in the back half and even into next year?

Probably three things to talk about. I think the first is if you look at 2025, we had really strong third and fourth quarters. So just off the starting position, the comps were going to be more difficult relative to how the year shaped up last year. On top of that, the pricing increases are going to be basically done at this point. Those were implemented at the end of last year. We have probably a higher churn and reactivation rate than other apps. A lot of people will subscribe and cancel, and then a few weeks later decide they want to subscribe again. As that happens, the legacy pricing goes away. So as a result, the implementation of the pricing increases is faster, and that will be mostly reflected by the time we're through the second quarter or we have the full quarter of that pricing increase. So we don't expect that benefit to continue in the back of the year. And then I think the third thing is the biggest kind of new development in terms of product we're building for the app is what we call Edge, which is our new premium tier. We've done some testing with that. We've been working on that for a number of quarters now. But we made the decision to plan on that implementing in the first quarter of 27, specifically because we wanted to make sure we get it right. It's a very different product than one we've launched before. It's a much higher price. we are designing it for a small subset of users we don't want it to necessarily be as broadly consumed um you know and so i think the product and the marketing fit we want to make sure we take extra time to get right and so we purposely made the decision that that would be you know introduced in 2027 that's going to set up another good growth year for us you know obviously we continue to want to see the revenue growth be kind of consistent with how we've grown in the last couple of years. And that's a key driver for that. But that's not going to come into play until the first part of next year, which is why the back half of this year is a little slower in terms of growth. But that's what we're expecting and why we talk so much about it is hopefully to make sure everybody's eyes wide open as to how it's going to play out. Right.

You mentioned one of the drivers in 1Q was the pricing changes were maybe a little bit better than expected. Can you talk about like what you thought price sensitivity of the members would be and then versus in how it's performing relative to your initial expectations?

Every time we're going to make a modification to the revenue components and drivers of the business, we do some pretty significant testing. You know, do some A-B testing with users. everything from how the pricing is displayed to how many clicks it takes to buy something to the price point itself. And the simplest way to probably explain the math is just what's the anticipated revenue boost, which is the product of the subscribers taking the new price that's higher, subtracting the increased churn that comes as the price goes up, and making sure that that equation results in a positive number so we want to make sure that we generate more revenue than we lose from people choosing not to resubscribe or buy the product and we run a bunch of testing and did that very significantly because this is the first time we've had subscription pricing materially changed since 2018 as you mentioned so we did all that work we had an anticipation

of what was going to happen that was baked into our forecast and then when we put those things in place in the first quarter of this year we saw a couple percent better retention than we expected which led to some of the revenue upside okay pair penetration is another area that you know we've kind of focused on since we've been covering the company I think a lot of people look at the tinder I think at peak was 20% ish penetration of MAU and and grinder you know has done a good job the last couple of years of increasing that pair penetration over the long term how should we think about it what what levers matter most how do you guys think about it like where is it on your on your guys priority to you know kind of maximize the financial uh model it's probably not And, you know, I think as I started our conversation today, I mentioned, you know, that we really want a robust experience for free users, and we want the app to feel very functional if you don't pay.

And that's really, you know, foundational to what Grindr is about. You know, I always channel my inner George, you know, and I think what he would say is we're a lot more interested in getting our paying users to pay slightly more than to get more of our users to pay and i think you know what we see is if you bifurcate our users by age cohorts so you know 20 to 29 30 to 39 etc pair penetration naturally as one would expect gets much higher as you get into the older age bands you know those are people that that frankly have the means to pay and that secondarily probably need more of the pay features to meet people and to make the connections they want to make as they get older. And so for those reasons, we find that the take rates are a lot higher on people as they get more settled and mature and get older, frankly. Those people tend to be much less sensitive to price changes. You know, if you're in your 40s doing well, you know, and looking at our users like they tend to skew, I think, nearly double average household income, you know, much higher percentage of advanced degrees, a lot less proclivity to have children. so they have more disposable income. So what we find is because of that sort of natural benefit of the demographic setups, to push a couple-dollar pricing change through to someone in their mid-40s that's already a paying user is not a very big deal. So I think overall, payer penetration has increased. I think we've gone up from, I think, five or six to seven and then eight. And all the same, MAU has been growing as well. So overall, it would be higher as well, but MAU's also been growing, but it's definitely never a topic for us to think about, gosh, how do we go from 8% payer penetration to 9 or 10? It's much more about how do we get more MAU and DAU to make sure that there's still the network effect, which is what keeps Grindr first in Wallet, because people want to go where other people are. Nobody wants to be the first person dancing at the nightclub. You want to go to the place that's full. Same kind of idea for us. That makes sense.

Maybe just pivoting over to competition, obviously Match invested in Sniffy's, $100 million for a significant minority investment. Could you give us an update on how that may change the competitive environment broadly and specifically for Sniffy's? Like, how would you respond to someone who believes that Sniffies could actually take share from Grindr over some period of time?

Well, I think, first of all, we're happy that the Sniffies team was able to create a monetization event. And I think it's good that, you know, we have another data point that there's a lot of value in, you know, this demographic within a sophisticated company like Match, you know, making such an investment obviously speaks to their view on the desirability of being in the space and, you know, potentially competing against us. i think you know many years ago match tried to actually buy grinder and i think the board couldn't get comfortable with it so we also think that's great that the board was able to validate you know potentially even a more risque form of you know the casual dating hookup scene that's kind of quarter grinders functionality and really what sniffies is all about about. The reality is Sniffy's really came about with the decision from Craigslist to get rid of their kind of cruising and hookup components of the Craigslist website because of the concerns around sex trafficking. When that decision happened and those classifieds went away, then that was when Sniffy's really kind of launched and became a thing. We think it's a much narrower use case than what we're trying to build. It's very anonymous. It's very focused on immediate proximity hookups. And, you know, that's certainly a core part of what users come to Grindr for. But there are many other use cases and large parts of what we're trying to build around the adjacencies of what we call the gayborhood. But what are the expansions that having a trusted, you know, access point into the community can allow us to offer, whether it's lifestyle VIP experiences or health care or travel or other things that are on the roadmap for us. We talked about varying degrees of specificity. I think it's fundamentally different, and we have a more robust product offering to go after. And I think we're very focused on continuing to compete, and we'll see what happens and wish them the best.

You mentioned the edge tier a little while ago, and you also mentioned, talking about the cohorts, and some of the older cohorts have a higher propensity to pay and willing to pay more, and then this edge tier is going to come out next year. I'm just curious what gives you the confidence that there could be a nice uptake of the tier, and then how are you guys thinking about pricing that tier?

Well, we've done some pretty significant testing in Australia and New Zealand. I think we saw better than expected performance in terms of the value to the people that subscribe, meaning did they resubscribe, did they give us favorable feedback. You know, the thing about Grindr that I probably didn't appreciate until I got into the app and started using it, it's very overwhelming. So when you log into the app, you get a grid of people that are within a distance to you. It's all proximity based, obviously. But what ends up happening is if I have the app open for an hour, I might get 35 or 40 different messages from different people. And so you can imagine pretty quickly how if you're in the app and you're talking to people, you could end up with many, many conversations and many misconnections and threads that didn't go anywhere or whatever ends up happening, what Edge is really designed to do is to make the usage of the app more efficient. So there's the ability for us to summarize and suggest conversations that you should look at, revisit, or people are close again, if there was a misconnection, whatever it was, recommended profiles. So we give you, hey, we think you might like these people based on who you talk with in the past and what we know about you. And then importantly, insights about people that you're interested in. So this person tends to message at this time of day. You might wait until later to write them so that you're at the top of the inbox when they tend to be in the apps, things like that. So we think for people who have more time or more money than time is probably the easiest way to say it. There's a lot of value in those kind of things. We still think there is tremendous value in the network effect of having interactions in the app. And so we certainly don't want the time spent on the app to decline overall. But for a subset of users that are probably older, probably busier, dealing with the demands of an intense career or something, there's a lot of value in the things that we can do to make it basically more efficient for them to find what they're looking for. But I think we're thinking of this in terms of tens or hundreds of thousands of people globally, not millions. We don't think that this is helpful if it's broadly distributed. And so what we're trying to balance is, you know, what's the price that people who are in this category are willing to pay such that we only need to put it out to the fewest number of people possible to achieve the revenue we want? And obviously, the higher the subscription, the lower the number of users we need to get for the math. And that's the balance that we're trying to strike. So a lot of what we're doing in the back half of this year is figuring out how to market and position it. to do some price testing at different price points. And we've tested into the several hundred dollars a month. There's certainly things online you can see where people have posted about it if you're curious of the specifics. I'm not gonna speak to them today, but they're discoverable if one's curious. But we'll figure out what that right balance is and go from there.

Maybe moving on to AI. AI, you've been at the company since October, so you have a pretty good amount of time to at least see how, in this kind of AI moment, how you guys are deploying it, and just curious kind of how you see AI as helping, like are you deploying it in the edge tier, is that something that's that's helping you if you can just you know expand on ai and um as a potential driver for the for the company yeah i mean from a consumer facing perspective yes edge is

predominantly focused on ai um you know and we've engineered the back end of the platform specifically to be enabled to integrate with ai so that we can implement some of the features which I talked about a moment ago. We think more broadly there are probably AI use cases that need to exist for all of our users. That's still a journey we're trying to figure out, but very focused on how to make sure that the app feels modern and is continuing to evolve in the way that the marketplace is evolving as this tool is changing so rapidly. And I think we all can agree we've not seen anything that's been so transformative so quickly in our lifetimes least i haven't um and i'm old enough to remember a bunch of these things so uh it's been pretty impressive i think the other way to think about it is just what it means for our business and our employees internally and we're seeing a pretty significant increase obviously in the the the apparent things like you know engineering uh you know our our engineers are able to produce and ship you know two to three x more than they used to um but importantly you know 95 of our employees are using ai today um and it's you know becoming pervasive in disciplines that are you know farther afield like finance or legal or hr in a pretty powerful way now what that means for us longer term you know i think is still a question. But very clearly, I think as a leadership team, we're certainly evaluating what that means for productivity and importantly for org design. I think I read something, I think the other day, I was talking about that there are builders, sellers, and measurers in a business. And what AI is really enabling is fewer measurers, because you can do more of that work with the tool and that's where a lot of the jobs are changing but you're still going to need people that can build and still need people that can sell you know so I think we're trying to figure out how to measure more efficiently how to build more efficiently and then potentially if can we sell more efficiently as well I think the answer to all that is probably yes to what degree I don't know but it's only going to be upside in AI may play a role and in this at least in turn if the productivity gains are there and you get good ROI, it certainly will, probably for this next question, is just kind of long-term

margin thoughts as AI could help potentially hopefully on the top line and also on the expense side.

And you guys have said like maximizing margins is not the goal at the expense of growth, and so maybe how could you frame your view on long-term margin profile for Grindr? uh probably a couple ways to answer that question um the first is i think what you said is right we are more focused on revenue growth than margin contribution and fortunate enough to be a rule of 60 rule of 70 company um you know which is which is pretty unique um but you know i think we like the fact that a lot of that is coming from our ability to continue to grow the revenue. I think you've talked about other dating apps and our quote-unquote peers. I think we're slightly different for the reasons we articulated already. But very clearly, those businesses, when the growth has decelerated, has really affected the multiple. That's very obvious. And so I think what we've been very focused on from the beginning is, number one, maintaining a great free user experience so we continue to be the social network and the destination people go to, so we're first in wallet. And then number two, you know, really trying to think about how we get users to potentially pay more as opposed to getting more users to pay, right? So those are the things that we're trying to think about. But we also know there is a limit to where those things can go. And so a big part of what we've been focused on are what are the adjacencies, what are the businesses that would be a natural addition into our community? And given our role and reputation as being a trusted part of that community, we have a right to win in. So things like health care and those topics we've discussed are where we want to grow. So we're investing for that as well. that requires people and that requires investment and infrastructure that often has very little revenue associated with it but that's what's going to set up the growth beyond the core app and allow us to continue to have a healthy balance between usability and monetization um you know i think that's that's what we're trying to make sure we set up so that as we think about 28 29 30 you know the out years and the terminal value of the business from a dcf perspective that there's still you know growth levers that are out there that we can go think about um and you know certainly if ai brings efficiency and we can augment margin and go higher happy to do that but i think ultimately you know i would take a lower margin to set up more growth and we're making investment to do that i think if you cut it the other way maybe to to juxtapose it the the the opposite if we weren't interested in growing revenue what would the margin profile the business look like I think it'd have a five on it and maybe a six. But, you know, that's not how we're optimizing the business or what we're thinking about. I don't think people should underwrite that. You know, but I think it's good and it's an indicative way to think about what we are investing for so that the growth can continue beyond, you know, kind of the core tenets of where we make our money today.

Maybe pivoting back to more top line oriented, you mentioned the advertising business, about 15% of total revenue and you have the one large pharmaceutical company. Is that a one-year deal or is that, okay.

Yeah, it's a one-year deal. So we did an exclusive with them last year for this year. I think we're certainly trying to be strategic around how to position our marketing effort with that vertical in 2027. And I think part of the reason we've called this one out is we want to be careful that people don't expect, and frankly, we don't expect that that just repeats every year. It was obviously a wonderful win, but I think we want to make sure we're careful, because we have to repeat it. We don't have 10 years of history where we know it's going to happen or not.

Those are the things we're trying to balance. on the international side could you talk about localization efforts and are there you know kind of markets that you would call out that are that could you know be drivers of mau growth or payer penetration yes i i think there's a few different ways to think about it One is, international is gigantic.

So we tend to talk about, like, there's the U.S., and then there's sort of a very American-focused way to think of the world, which is like there's the U.S., and then there's the rest of the world. Pretty different rest of the world. I think we're in 160 countries or something, 170. I don't remember the exact number, but it's a lot. Some of those countries are very important monetization places for us. obvious ones would be you know western europe the uk australia new zealand right i mean those are obvious but um you know i think almost 10 of our users are in brazil uh which is obviously a big country but you know brazil is a massive market um you know and so i think ai is helpful in the sense that we can localize more things so you know figuring out how to translate chats figuring out how to make sure you've got the slang right for what things are called in different languages you in terms of the community and how they talk about things, makes things more authentic, makes things more real. Even images, if you're in an Asian country, showing a bunch of Caucasians probably doesn't work. So those are some of the things we're doing. I think it's still pretty early days. We have a lot of work to do. There are even issues with payment. I mean, a lot of people in Brazil and Mexico can't buy stuff through the App Store because their card networks aren't compatible. So there are many different nuanced efforts there. There's a lot of opportunity, given that it's only about 20-ish percent of our users are in the U.S., in terms of our monthly active users, which means 80% are obviously somewhere else. And we certainly don't think about 80% of our users 80% of the time. We probably think about 80% of our users 20% of the time, and that's the opportunity set that we're after, but there's lots of nuance there.

You obviously reference the strong margin profile and strong free cash flow generation as a result of that. You have a pretty sizable buyback authorization. How should we think about capital allocation?

What's your view for capital allocation over the next couple of years? uh i think there's the typical answer which is you know what most cfos are going to tell you we're going to focus on internal investment first and then inorganic stuff after that and then you know allocation to shareholders through buybacks or dividends if if that's what remains i think that's true for us generally as well i mean we certainly we want to invest in the business um you know inorganic growth could be interesting and we look at things often. So those are there. To your point, the free cash conversion is very, very high. There's no assets. There's not a bunch of inventory here. We don't have tons of physical infrastructure that you'd find in other businesses. We have less than 200 employees. So given the margin profile and the revenue growth, the cash flow is going to be great. I think in terms of how we've thought about the share repurchases I'd probably call it two different ways last year we had a pretty significant dilution event when the warrants associated with us going public were exercised which was good I think to get the warrants out of the way and clean up the cap table but we also then intentionally went out and aggressively bought back stock to offset that dilution and ended up basically the same leverage we were at before which is a function of the free cash flow conversion i think this year you know the board wanted to make sure we had a significant authorization if we saw a dislocation in the share price we bought back eight and a half million shares so far this year i think at basically 12 bucks so i think the execution on that was good makes me happy as a finance person i think the share price sitting at 13 makes me unhappy as a finance person But, you know, c'est la vie. You know, I think going forward, you'll see us be more measured. You know, I don't think you'll see us expend the whole authorization this year. But I think, you know, it's also a function of where the price is. And the only thing I know about share repurchases is the lower the price is, the more conviction I have is where you should be deploying capital. So I'm delighted when I don't get to use it because the share price isn't low. But at the same time, if the share price continues to languish, it's a tool in the belt that we'll take advantage of and we're happy to do so.

That makes sense. I think we're a little bit over, so thanks so much for joining.

Appreciate it. Thank you.