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111: Tinder Takes Dating Worldwide
In this episode of Globally Speaking, we talk to Andy Andersen, who is a leader in international growth at Tinder, the world’s largest online dating platform. Andy explains the mindset needed for global growth and gives us his tips on what makes Tinder successful at moving into new markets. He also shares interesting insights into how online dating is changing cultures worldwide. Tune in to hear all this and more.
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Transcript: Tinder Takes Dating Worldwide
| Speaker | Transcript |
|---|---|
| Jim | Hi, I’m Jim Compton, the Manager of Technology Partnerships at RWS Moravia. Today, I’m thrilled to be talking with Andy Andersen, who works on international growth at the dating platform company Tinder. Today, we’re gonna be talking about how a company like Tinder approaches localization, and more broadly about the phenomena of online dating in the context of globalization. Andy, great to meet you. Maybe you could introduce yourself? |
| Andy | Yeah. Of course. Thanks, first, for having me on the podcast; it’s great to be with you all. Yeah, so, as Jim mentioned, my name is Andy Andersen. I work in international growth. I help companies to go international and to expand in their new markets and to build out their foundations and global platforms. My current role is with Tinder. I’ve been working with Tinder for international growth for about four years now. As an app, we’re in 56 different languages spread out globally to millions of users around the world. And I also oversee our organic user acquisition for the app stores, which encompasses seven stores, I believe now, across about 70 customized localizations. And, you know, for that, the team as is pretty active and pretty busy. Needless to say, keeping up with the trends in this year has been quite interesting—just to say the least. |
| Jim | Can you tell us a little bit about what has made this year interesting? |
| Andy | Yeah, sure. I think the whole reaction of just the pandemic has been crazy for everyone. There was a, kind of, low in some of the markets where the pandemic first hit the hardest. Specifically, I think some of the European countries, maybe like Italy, or areas like that, where there was an initial impact. And then, over time, you kind of saw this trend happening around the world. And then, there was probably this leveling off stage where the markets had kinda reached this, but then there became this online surge, which we’ve seen—not just in our apps. But I think you’ve seen this across the industry with streaming applications and with video chats and with Zoom and all these other things where people, once they were at home and then became somewhat bored, I guess—or maybe just looking for distractions or something—people really turn to online and applications to connect digitally, even though they weren’t meeting up in person, they couldn’t go to the bars, they couldn’t go to the restaurants, they couldn’t go to festivals, all that kind of stuff. People started to really interact and engage online. And we’ve seen that with the explosion of so many different things this year in terms of, you know, the social space has been, I think—maybe forever changed, maybe permanently, maybe it’s temporary. We don’t know if we fully understand that yet, but there’s been a lot of potential industry changes this year. |
| Jim | So, I understand that you basically created the localization program for Tinder, is that right? |
| Andy | Yeah, for the most part. I mean, when I came in, there were some things already in play. There were some languages that had already been localized into, like, a handful of languages and we’d scaled that up just a few months before I got here. What really wasn’t in place when I got here was processes and procedures and structure to help scale, I think, in terms of like, you know, how do you handle multiple assignments a day? How do you keep the team moving? How do you keep turnaround times and efficiencies in terms of workflows? Things like that. A lot of those things weren’t necessarily there. You know, like, I think there’s this phase with a lot of earlier companies. And Tinder wasn’t specifically a startup when I started there, you know—it was starting to get to a more mature company phase—however, it still acted like one in a lot of ways. And I think what you see in earlier companies is there’s always this initial, “OK, I know we need localizations” or “I know we need translations,” and then they do it. And then they’re like, “Oh, actually this needs to be a managed part of our product.” This needs to be something that’s actively, you know, engaged with and stuff—not just a side thing. And then, whenever you get to that point, you really have to start thinking about organization and how this fits into the structure and shared responsibilities across the organization. |
| Jim | So, it sounds like, when you came in, you were looking at sort of maturing the program, making it more part of the product and scalable. Maybe you can tell us a bit about what were some of the things you did to support that idea of maturity and scalability with the localization program. |
| Andy | Yeah, I think there are a number of ways to think about it. You have to first of all take in, like, the current state of things. You have to take into the current state of affairs, if you will, and see where localization is. Are there tools in place? Are there procedures in place? You know, how do people request translation assignments? Or how do people partner with the team for roll outs and the product? You have to take in a lot of those considerations. So, you have to first start with facts and kind of gather that information. And then, I think, the next step is to look for improvements and efficiencies. Like, if something’s taking a lot longer than it should, you know—something’s taking two weeks when it should really be only taking one week—that could be a number of things. It could be the vendors. It could be expectations. It could be a lack of documentation in terms of the way things need to go. So, next is kind of outlining that plan about, you know, making sure that vendors are aligned with the mission. Making sure that the different stakeholders across the company understand what is entailed and working. It’s not just the machine translation—it’s actually more involved than that. And teams actually need to be actively engaged. So, really, kind of outlining and putting the structure in place. Some of that documentation—writing out things, writing out, “This is how things work,” talking to people, all that kind of stuff—all that’s entailed. And then, I think the third component that’s probably overlooked to an extent is what I like to call, or some others in the industry like to call, “evangelization,” in terms of, you know, getting champions and really getting people excited about international growth and languages and localizations and all that kind of stuff because, for better, for worse, not everyone is excited about that. Some people really love that and they’re like, “Oh, that’s super-cool that the product is in, you know, this language” or something like that. Or maybe you have a native speaker in the company and they come to you and say, “Oh, this is really fun. I’ve just used the app in this language and it’s really cool now” or something like that. But there are also— for every person like that, there’s probably a few people at the company who are not super-excited about that, or don’t really care, or maybe just indifferent, if you will. And so, there are a number of things that need to be done to get people excited, you know. You need to have talks across the company and talk to different organizations and get them excited about their part of the process, and not just giving them a list of things that they have to do, but also saying, like, “You really have to sell the why. You have to sell the, you know, why are we doing this? What’s the benefit to you? Why should you help me? Or why should we work together on this?” And you have to sell those things. And that could come from just the talks. That could come from, you know, looking for the—sometimes people call them “cheerleaders”—or the people who really champion the work that international is doing. |
| Jim | So you came into this existing landscape; you saw there was room for improvement. It sounds like part of what your strategy was internal evangelization, right? To get the actual product team to maybe make changes in the name of global growth. I would like to talk about online dating and, specifically, about globalization. How from your view has globalization impacted the practice of dating around the world? |
| Andy | Yes. Dating is a super-interesting space because dating is not dating as we think about it globally. That’s the first thing. I think you have to think about some of these ancient—shall we call them “traditions” or “ways of life”—that still are remnants in many parts of the world. And so, in some parts of the world, dating is somewhat of a foreign concept. You can think about some of the more conservative areas of the world, where there might be religious limitations or just cultural limitations, where there’s a lot of family involvement. You know, sometimes you see that in the Middle East, you would see that in parts of, you know, Southeast Asia, like maybe like India—those areas. And then, those kinds of concepts that make dating a bit of a foreign concept—like meeting up with someone, just for the sake of getting to know them, or potentially turning into a romantic relationship—those are things that are not consistent around the world, which makes it interesting. But, at the same time, globalization has started to impact and make meeting people easier than ever before. There is a book that talks a little bit about modern, well, a lot about modern dating, actually. It’s by a comedian, actually, Aziz Ansari. You may have read it, but it’s called “Modern Romance.” There’s some interesting concepts around this idea of that, you know, back in the previous days of dating, like if you go back pre-smartphone, pre-pre-internet really, maybe—let’s go back 100 years. You really would date people that you knew or that one of your friends might have. Like, it would have been an introduction by, like, maybe first- or second-degree introduction, right? It would have been, like, either immediate family introduction or maybe a friend of a friend or something like that. And, a lot of times, it would be from the same neighborhood, maybe even from the same building, if you were from a big city, like New York or something. You would see this thing—it’s mentioned in the book—is this, like, kind of choice situation where you perceive that you only had a few options and it wasn’t just in selecting a partner or something. It was also in life in general, like jobs, in other things, and you seemed like your options were somewhat limited. With the advancement of the internet and the advancement of, ultimately, smartphones and apps, there’s this new concept where you can meet people in a range of a certain amount of miles or distance or kilometers, or wherever you live in the world. And it could be that you could change your location and meet people. You could have a pen pal. You could have, you know, a video call with someone on the other side of the planet, instantly. And you could have absolutely no previously existing connections with this person whatsoever. And that, I think, has in many ways transformed this idea of “the other” and “the stranger,” in a good way, I think, is that people have started to engage with people that they might not have engaged with before, because they were outside of their social circles. And that can go, that can transcend into demographics, socioeconomics, into ethnicities, you know, religions, you know. I mean, you think about in the context of—I don’t know, a border or something—and you have a distance around a border and you can meet someone on the other side of a border, but you would normally not go to that country or that state or whatever the situation is. And now you can meet those people. And I think that conversation in a lot of ways is starting to open up this dialogue across the world that enables people to speak more openly with one another and to get to know each other and to reduce these kinds of walls—proverbial walls that we have with each other about cultural differences and things like that, which I personally think is a good thing. And I think being able to, like, connect with people like never before—I think it has opened people up to an extent. You’ve seen new trends emerging around the world where certain countries, certain markets, people are starting to be introduced to this idea of dating online and actually choosing a partner for themselves rather than having a parent or a, you know, family member introduce them and say, “This is someone that I think you should meet.” They’re doing that on their own and able to really do that. And it’s not just with apps like Tinder. You’ve also seen apps specifically for communities. Like, you’ve seen, like, Muslim dating apps or Jewish dating apps, or other things like farmers’ dating apps or these kinds of things, which enables people to even date within a community that may or may not have dated before within, you know, itself. And that might not be crossing, like, you know, borders or crossing cultural things. However, it’s still opening the option pool a little bit for people who previously didn’t have those—at least in their mind, maybe they did, or maybe they didn’t—but at least as far as their limitations, they didn’t really feel like they had the option to branch out. So, I think it’s been pretty transformative and it’s been really, really interesting. And it’s really only been—we’re talking about eight years now, eight or 10 years—because Tinder has only been out for about eight years as an app, but then before that, there was Match and there were eHarmony, and there was some of these other sites that have been out, I believe, since about early 2000. |
| Jim | Totally. It sounds like the online dating part has the power to change the culture of some of these places. Do you notice any change in the way that these markets have been using Tinder? |
| Andy | Yeah, I think, I wouldn’t say just for Tinder. I wouldn’t say it’s just specific to Tinder, but I think that you’ve seen, like, I guess we can use the word “aperture”—like for markets, like for regions and cultures that traditionally haven’t dated, as I was mentioning earlier, about, you know, whether it’s a religious reason or it’s a cultural limitation or just some form of tradition. I think you’ve seen more and more aperture in those markets. And you’ve seen it by not just the success of Tinder, but you’ve also seen it in the success of other brands, and maybe even local brands, to an extent. If you look at, like, India or the Middle East, or some parts of Southeast Asia, a lot of these areas weren’t necessarily traditional dating markets as we think about them in the West. And you would look at now how there are a lot of local apps there. You have Muslim dating apps. You have Jewish dating apps. You have a dating apps specifically for India. You have dating apps that have emerged for Southeast Asia. And so, that to me is showing that there is an appetite also for that change because those people are pursuing those businesses. And for the global companies like Tinder or some of the other players out in the world, that would be, you know, considered as a global app in the same space. You’ve seen that they’ve also had positive trajectories in those markets and they’ve also focused, I think, attention in a lot of those markets just because there’s been more and more interest by local areas. And I think that’s one of the things, when people make decisions at a startup phase, or at a business going global, I think you make a lot of considerations like that. And a lot of times you would overlook markets where you think you didn’t have any opportunity or any potential in those markets because of either some form of obstacle—some form of limitation—that would be a barrier to entry to your business in that market. But now, you’re seeing a lot of that is no longer relevant because companies are investing there. Companies are spending time there. So, I think we’re seeing that happen right now. And I think it’s only gonna be more in the next few years—I think it’s just gonna continue as a trend. |
| Jim | Has the Tinder app itself, specifically, changed in the context of this new global opportunity to connect markets that might not otherwise be engaged in global or online dating? Has the app itself evolved as this globalization opportunities started to become more apparent? |
| Andy | Yeah. I think the thing about Tinder that you see is that Tinder—there’s a lot of core functionalities that most people would recognize, you know, from the early days of Tinder. If anyone was an early Tinder user from 2012, 2013; some of that core functionality that people love hasn’t really changed in the app, you know. It’s ease of use, it’s quick start, you know, you can download it and be swiping within, you know, a matter of minutes. And, you know, all that is still pretty native to Tinder. However, you have seen a lot of changes over time. And some of that has been adapting to the current state of things. You know, there’s been video chat and there’s been things like that introduced this year, but then in terms of, like, local dating, I wouldn’t say that the app is like really, extremely customized on a market-by-market level. I think that’s a bit of a feat from an engineering and product perspective, to have that level of customization. I’m not really sure if any app does that, to be honest, but I do think that there are always considerations made about what could be relevant and what could be useful on a market-by-market space, and making decisions kind of more at a macro stage, like saying, you know, “What is a feature that could be relevant in solving problems in a specific area or in a specific country, but could also be relevant at a bigger scale?” Like, you know, in thinking about multi-markets or thinking about other areas. And we’ve also done some fun things that were not necessarily, as you might think, dating related. But it ended up being, like, it was kind of a dabble into the content space—which a lot of people talked about—which was Swipe Night, which was a really interesting product that the team launched a couple of months ago globally. And that was, like, a content stream where people can make decisions inside of the app based off of a scenario situation. And then, at the end of that, they could see what choices other people made and then potentially match with them and have a conversation about their choices or something. |
| Jim | Can we get an example of, like, what would be some feature or, you know, way the product itself works where it’d be working differently in one market versus another? |
| Andy | You know, you solve for specific problems and specific markets. And I say problems—I don’t necessarily mean like the app is broken or something. I just mean that Tinder launched a Tinder Lite variant a few years ago, where, for example, users that didn’t have the latest and greatest smartphones—had low bandwidth, had, you know, lack of memory on their phones—could still use Tinder and download the app, but a light version of it. It is something that is, you know, a customization that was made for people who couldn’t access the app based off of where they were located or based off of, you know, some limiting factors. Other things that I can think of that may be interesting would just be that we do focus on, you know, what are some unique challenges? And this is what, you know, all companies focus on is, like, what is a unique challenge in a market and what is something that we can change in the product that can do that? And when you think about that in terms of the dating space, it could be limitations in terms of communication. It could be limitations in terms of context, in terms of being overwhelmed or making efficiencies inside of the product. Like, for example, how do you make things easier for people? How do you make things more streamlined for people who are just looking to start a chat instantly rather than having to swipe a bunch of times and then hope for a match? They can send messages more rapidly to people or things like that. So, I think you solve for those as they come up and I think we’ve done a number of things in that regard and you’d see that reflected in the product, you know, the features that have been launched somewhat this year, I think in a lot of ways. |
| Jim | Cool. So, I know that there’s a “go global” feature actually in Tinder. Can you tell us what that is all about? |
| Andy | Yeah. I think the premise with that is, essentially, that you can match with people in other places rather than just where you are. So, the “go global”—or the Global Mode, I think is actually what it’s called—but Global Mode can be used by anyone. But when you turn it on, it basically means that you can match with anyone around the world. So, it kind of opens up the net of conversation. And so, for some people, that would be really relevant and for other people, they might not like that. So, if you’re in a city where you already have plenty of people to match with, and plenty of people to potentially meet up with in person—like a New York and L.A. in the United States or, you know, globally, and another major city like London or something where you’ve got plenty of people to meet up with—you might not really care about that because you’re not looking to chat with people, just, you know, a message back and forth with people, like that. However, if you’re in a smaller area where there might not be as many people to chat with, maybe you find interesting conversations with people in other areas, because there’s not enough people locally or something like that, which is kind of an interesting thing. So, it’s not so much that you’re going global as a user, as it is that it’s just kind of opening up the pool of people to chat with, which is kinda interesting. But again, I don’t know, it’s probably person-specific whether that’s interesting to them or not, like, you know, I can say I find conversations interesting with people just in general, in terms of, you know, if you think about just having a coffee with someone or whatever, I think that can be very interesting in terms of a platonic chat with someone about just whatever topics of interest you have. There’s some people who aren’t interested in that. Some people are just exclusively trying to date and looking for a partner and they’re all-business, and so they wanna meet someone locally. They wanna meet someone in their neighborhood or in their city, and that’s that. So, I think it’s one of those features that’s really person-specific. |
| Jim | So I understand that you maybe have done some interesting things or have some ideas with regard to app store optimization, findability or search engine optimization? |
| Andy | App store optimization and SEO or search engine optimization—they both fit into what most of the industry would say is, like, user acquisition. So, it’s like, you know, acquiring new users. There’s a couple of categories of that. You have new users and then you have usually, like, returning users—you know, people who are visiting again. SEO has been a topic that I’ve actually been involved with probably since, I don’t know, 2000, early-2010-ish, maybe, is probably as far back as—maybe even longer than that, really, because I remember when I was little just making, you know, websites and stuff like that from WordPress or from these other things where you would make a page. And that probably even goes back to like—I’m dating myself a little bit here—but, like, the Myspace days and all that, when you would just do a little HTML code and add these keywords or add that, and that was kind of part of it. So, I think I got involved in SEO for a while now, and it wasn’t necessarily doing it professionally for that time period. But when I started at Tinder and started to work on ASO, it was kind of a natural transition into that because there’s a lot of overlap, and it’s kind of really fun to customize that across the world because there’s a lot of nuances in the stores. So, in terms of ASO, just to break it down a little bit, you have two main stores—you have the Google Play Store and you have the App Store—and there are a number of other stores around the world that have emerged in there in the recent years. Most apps are not in those stores and there are a lot of times, like, regionalized or single market or things like that, but the primary two stores that people focus on are the Play Store and the App Store by Apple. In those, they’re very different. On a surface level, they seem similar, but the way that they actually work is quite different. There are a number of factors that contribute to traffic and conversion for both of those stores. And a lot of them come down to visual and localized components to it. And, if you think about the type of app, it really gets down to the granularity of relevance for screenshots and for terminology that you’re using and things like that. So, if you think about traffic, it’s trying to figure out which words, you know, people use locally. What’s the slang? What’s the word for this, the word for that? Because it’s not necessarily just translation. It’s really using localization to find what’s most relevant. And then on the conversion side, we would also often equate that to the visual components of the stores. And if you think about social apps—I mean, you can look at any of our store listings, they’re all public on the Google browsers—but you would see that our screenshots, and things like that, they do change, depending on, you know, market needs and things like that. And so, you can see how that really relates to the cultural components. And you can see how localization really comes into play there, because that becomes a lot deeper than just texts. It’s then at that point also a matter of people, a matter of what they look like, does it feel local to me? Does it seem relatable? Is it a relatable product to me? And I think that’s something a lot of companies should and could be doing in terms of their presence, at least in the stores, is that they really need to be relatable to people. You know, if you’re a person in XYZ country, when you see the app, if you don’t know the brand, whatever brand it is, you wanna be able to say, “That looks like something that myself, my friends, my family would use, and let me download that because it looks relevant,” versus something that looks like a foreign product. And so, I think those are, like, the interesting things and nuances about the ASO space—the App Store Optimization space. And I think on the SEO side, it’s interesting because SEO and ASO, they have a lot of overlap in some ways. SEO is a lot more broad. It’s really just, like, the WWW—the World Wide Web world—it’s just, like, literally everywhere. I mean, you can publish content. That’s kind of the concept of global from day one, that you probably heard in the industry before, is that when you publish, when you press the “publish” button on the internet, on a website or a blog or whatever, that content is really global from day one. I mean, you can see it from Antarctica, you can see it from South Korea, from anywhere in the world, like, within minutes, within seconds, really. And it can be shared, it can be posted, it can be whatever. And so, SEO is really interesting because it’s another space that can be powerful for companies, and it can be an impactful metric to helping to grow things. But, you know, it really depends on the company and the focus, and I think all products are different. Each company, in each product, each focus—they’re all slightly different. I think the apps space, you know, overlaps a lot with what I’m talking about. I think other spaces are somewhat different, but it completely depends on the product and the focus of the company. But I do really enjoy those spaces a lot, and I really nerd out on ASO stuff sometimes. Talking about people, I can get into a rather whole conversation about just, like, keyword optimization or this or that or whatever. And it sounds super-nerdy and cheesy, but it’s kinda fun. |
| Jim | No, it sounds awesome. I love it. Again, it’s not just in one market, right? It adds a different dimension of interest and complexity to try and do that and have it be equally findable or desirable, I guess, like everywhere in the world. So, no, I’m with you. If you were to put everything in place in a way that would best serve companies like Tinder with their globalization objectives, what would you ask for? |
| Andy | Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting question. So, I think one of the things that I really think that the industry lacks right now—and I’ve talked to a lot of people about that, or I’ve tried to, at least, every time I get a chance to—is there’s not a lot of standardization across the industry in terms of whether it’s localization-specific roles or whether it’s tooling or whatever. Each company tends to do their things their own way. And then, additionally, as a kind of related component to that, is that localization—because most people don’t understand localization—a lot of people just think it’s a side task that’s not really fitting into any other structure organization. I think one of the challenges is that traditionally at companies, when they decide that they need languages or the new translations or something, they just get—whether it’s a marketing manager or whether it’s someone, you know, on whatever team XYZ team, and they start doing things that way—it kind of just puts localization in an ambiguous situation, where there’s not a lot of, like, clarity on what they do. And they can be a really great resources for the company, you know, if they’re allocated the right kind of budgets or the right kind of mentality. Like, if they’re given the authority to really execute on international growth initiatives. What we see in the tech space is that a lot of companies—and I’m speaking purely from the Silicon Valley kind of mindset right now—they develop with like an “America first” kind of thing. And I don’t mean to make that as a political thing. I mean, more like just that it’s, you know, the mindset is “United States is a big market. Let’s focus on English audience worldwide everyone speaks English,” that kind of thing, versus the localization kind of mindset where the only thing that we people in international growth can think about, from sunup until sundown, is international things and cultures, and how people are looking at our product internationally. |
| Jim | If you were to be advising a startup right now on how to be incorporating this idea of, like, global-by-design into the product, what would be some of the advice that you would give them? |
| Andy | Yeah. I think the thing that they really need to focus on is expecting to be successful in languages that are outside of their native language of the app. They need to think about this from the beginning, because what ends up happening with a lot of companies is that they focus on one or two markets which, in the startup world, a lot of investors and stuff would say maximize your, you know, focus on the one market, get your traction, and then build out from there. And that is a trajectory that most people follow, but what ends up happening with a lot of companies is that they focus so much on one market in one language. Over time, whenever they do become successful, they actually have to spend a significant amount of their roadmap and energy and resources trying to make the product internationalized so that they can localize the product, which slows them down. It pushes them back on their deadlines and it makes them not be able to go global as fast as they possibly could if they hadn’t done that from the beginning. And so, you see that in the case when there’s a lot of, like, head-to-head competitions in the tech space. I’ll use the example—and I’m not sure if this is the best example—but an example that I can think of is, like, an Uber and Lyft dynamic. And so, if you saw from the beginning, Uber was international from almost day one, as much as I can remember. I think they went localized pretty quickly; maybe not exactly day one, but like in the early days of Uber, they started having new languages. They started going into new countries. That did hurt them in some ways, because there was a lot of regulation issues that came back to become challenges for them. However, Lyft, on the other hand, stayed in one market in the US, mostly. I don’t even know if they’ve expanded yet, but I think it was last year when they started offering Spanish in the app. And that was the first language that they started to offer outside of English and it took them much longer. And now, if you go around the world, and you stop in any market that had or has Uber currently, it’s become synonymous with ride sharing. Uber is that name—it’s the Kleenex of ride sharing. And so, if you think about it that way, and then Lyft, and you try to explain Lyft, you have to be like, “Oh, it’s Lyft. It’s like Uber, you know.” And it’s, like, you think about this and it’s a competitive thing. So, one of the things with that, too, is that we have this really simplified and generalized look at the world. And what a lot of people think is that the United States is an English market, or the UK is an English market or France is a French-speaking market. But thanks to, I guess, a combination of migrations, globalization and just the multicultural nature of 2020, that is completely not true. If you really look at the data, if you look at the, I mean, you can just drive around any major city in the world, pretty much, and you can quickly see that a lot of other languages exist. I mean, I think this is accurate. I did hear this—it’s kind of a thing I’ve heard of online, but I don’t know how accurate it is—but I think there’s about 800 languages spoken within New York City, just as a city. And I think—and I lived in New York—and I can say that one of the things I loved about it was you get on the train from wherever you lived. You go from point A to point B. It could be a 30-minute ride, but you would see the neighborhoods change as you were on the train because of the people that would get on and off, and your ears would just be buzzing with, “Oh, that’s Russian. That’s Chinese. Oh, that’s Farsi. That’s this.” And you would just, like, you would be hearing all this on the train and then you start to think about it and realize, like, you know, even if you own an app and you’re only based in the United States, at a minimum, you should be offering Spanish, almost from the beginning, if you wanna really expand, depending on the type of product that you have. |
| Jim | Yeah. I totally agree. And I think the competitive risk that you’re talking about, where if a company sort of takes the approach of, you know, “We’ll go ahead and dominate locally first and then, you know, go global later.” The risk you bring out is you will maybe lose the opportunity to be known, like, as that brand internationally. But the other risk is—I mean, there are other companies who have taken that approach, and just some local competitor comes in and replicates their entire business model. And then they can’t get into that market because it’s already owned by, like, you know, whatever the local version of the ride-sharing company would be. Andy, thanks so much for joining us today! This was a fascinating conversation! |
Guests
Andy Andersen is a leader in international growth at Tinder. He’s passionate about localization and has spent most of the last decade helping companies reach more people and expand into new markets. Andy is responsible for setting up the localization program at Tinder that has helped the online dating platform become the biggest in the world. He has a degree in International Studies (Global Diplomacy) from Louisiana State University and is a huge advocate and supporter of endangered language preservation.
Hosts
Jim Compton is a localization industry maven with over 25 years of multi-faceted experience and a reputation as an innovator and passionate problem-solver. He’s developed and implemented solutions to address the growing global content needs of an evolving market. He is currently the RWS Manager of the Technology Partnerships Program.
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