The Spark
When Sean Rad started his first company Orgoo, he met Justin Mateen, with whom he later co-founded Tinder. Post his stint with Aldy and while working on the app Cardify at Hatch Labs (a mobile app incubator, based out of New York), Rad was tinkering with the idea of building a flirting app based on the concept of 'hot-or-not'.
The Launch
In a Hackathon conducted by Hatch Labs, Sean Rad, in collaboration with Joe Munoz built Matchbox, which was along the lines of a flirting app. Matchbox won the Hackathon, and the team shifted their attention towards its future development. After 3 weeks and an investment of $50,000 (part of which was from IAC), a polished version of Matchbox was ready for the launch. Matchbox was re-branded as Tinder, and the app was launched in 2012.
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