How Fount Helped Hinge Bolster Their Tech Stack to Support Massive Growth

Client: Hinge

Hinge is the dating app that introduces you through friends. It was voted the #1 dating app in the New York Times Wedding Section in 2017. Hinge is currently growing at an annual rate of more than 400%.

The Challenge:

Help a B2C startup prepare their back-end systems for massive scaling (over 1M users) and traffic.

The Solution:

Embed as Senior Engineers with Hinge’s Development Team to assist with back-end, API, Devops, & Infrastructure development efforts.

The Crew:

Ryan VanMiddlesworth – Senior Full-Stack Engineer with strong back-end architecture, design, & implementation skills as well as extensive operational infrastructure experience.

The Background

In the crowded marketplace of popular dating apps, one company has made a significant impact helping people looking for real connections. In 2016, Hinge relaunched as a relationship app and took a new approach to online dating by helping people find connections through relationships. With over 50,000 dates and 3,000 new relationships a week, Hinge is now one of the most popular dating apps available.

The Challenge

Around this same time, The Hinge Team had also raised a round of funding and had planned a major re-launch to their community and beyond. There were numerous concurrent initiatives in progress that included the development of newly redesigned mobile apps, a brand redesign, and a marketing team that was launching a massive campaign to promote their new product. With a need to scale quickly and support over 1 million new users post-launch, Hinge connected with Fount to investigate how to handle the upcoming scaling needs.

The Solution

With so many initiatives launching at the same time, Hinge needed additional talent to ensure the back-end development milestones were met on target. Fount’s resident infrastructure & DevOps expert, Ryan VanMiddlesworth embedded with the Hinge Team for over 6 months to assist with various back-end development tasks.

Ryan became a temporary team member of the Hinge Development team participating in regular stand ups, sprint meetings, and assisting with backlog grooming. Ryan tackled a multiple large projects during this time including the development of a load testing framework which would be used to test performance under artificial system stress.

The Result

After 6 months of Fount assisting the Hinge Development team bolster their infrastructure, Hinge was able to successfully re-launch their product, making a splash in the market. Hinge has since been featured in Techcrunch, Washington Post, The Verge, and other major publications and has acquired over 1 million users.

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