George Arison: Totally. So, historically Grindr is market [ph] very little maybe in the early days it is a little bit more than was almost no marketing when we came in. And in some extent we were successful in spite of our market than because of it. We were not telling our story very, very well. Grindr does awesome things for the community for its users. And historically even in recent history kind of telling that story and that narrative around the brand was not a focus. And product marketing as well when you go into our app like we can do it and where we will be doing a much better job in telling there behind what the features are, how you use them, what benefits you get from them, et cetera. So there’s a ton of opportunity on the marketing side.
Last year we brought on board a new leader for our marketing and communication effort, who is a person in present with a number of the community, has been an app usage that historically, has an incredibly good sense of the user and also has worked both in the United States and in Europe. So bringing an international perspective to things as long and we think it’s going to be valuable. And so when Swiss leadership, I think we’re significantly up-leveling our marketing capabilities. A lot of that has already started to bear fruit. We’ve spoken a shareholder about the process that we ran in the first few months, which had incredible response from users and became a saying in the community in a really positive way. And when you think about the total amount of money that that cost versus the engagement level that you have from users, the ROI was extremely high.
And so another thing we’re thinking about that’s going to start in the next few weeks in celebration of our 15th year anniversary. We are going to be launching a bus tour across the United States. It is a Grindr Bus, that’s going to go to 10 different cities across the country and have these like really major marketing moment for Grindr during the month of June. Obviously, June is pie month and so there are big pie events all around the country. And if you can imagine Grindr is a very heavily used product during those events. And so again, that is going to be a reasonable investment but the ROI you’re going to get from that. We believe from the engagement with the user is going to be really, really significant. We had a little taste of that in Rio, when we, therefore, to get a speech and then how to do this in pie chart about the 15th year anniversary and we also had a kind of version of the bus there.
The lines to get into it, we’re completely unimaginable. Like maybe 20 people would be in line when others like 10s or maybe even hundreds of people in line waiting to get in. They had to call out security to manage the crowd. And so those are the kinds of things we are doing in brand to help tell our story really well and really control the brand there, right? Because for better it was find does attract a lot of attention and a lot more than other products. And that attention can be good, it’s channeled in a positive way on the things that we do really well. But it can be damaging when people try to make things that are not a big deal into a much different deal and so we want to be owning the brand narrative and helping us understand and all stakeholders understand, what brand it does and how does it serve the community.
Unidentified Analyst: Perfect. Thanks.
Operator: And we’ll move next to Rohit Kulkarni with ROTH MKM. Your line is open.
Rohit Kulkarni: Hey. Thank you. Nice color and well said everything. A couple of questions, quick ones for you, George, I guess how are you thinking about AI and like AI-driven use cases? You mentioned chats and you have rebuilt the infrastructure. Maybe talk about kind of what use cases you think you could unlock even more and perhaps accompanying investments that you may have to do to make those use cases a reality? And yes, then I have a couple of follow-ups on the model please.
George Arison: Sure. Good to talk to you. It’s a great question. And so bear with me as I answer it, because I have a lot of thoughts on this. So when we think about both the user perspective in terms of what we’re doing for the user and also how we run the company and how we actually build product that is related to that as well, right? Because the changes that are happening things generally in how code is written for example are incredible. I had a demo, for example, of a product this week in which NAI synthetic computer is basically operating at the same level and you would expect a junior or senior year intern, software engineer to operate. And that’s pretty incredible, right, in terms of how much effectiveness it’s going to add to an engineer’s productivity now.
We’re not fully there yet but we had networks. So the way we tend to think of it is in the following way. Right now we believe software in general, software development and products themselves are in the same stage kind of in early days of cell phones, we were in cell phones versus landline. And you could go after and kind of do a lot more investment into mainline, right, because that’s what was present then as the main way of communication. You could say, hey, no actually I’m going to go invest in software, in cell phones and build a cell phone driven environment. First, for example, because it might not be a good connectivity on online life, and so that’s the kind of decision we need to make as well as we think about building products. So when we think about dating, for example, what we — the way we are putting to say, what is the AI first base dating product like, rather than what is popular today in dating.
And do we try to replicate and mimic in our application, because again we don’t have dating features. I think it forms a much better approach, because that’s what everybody else is going to go. And so since we have an opportunity to build from scratch, whether those for that future rather than what might be working today and that’s how we tend to think about it. So where I think applications for AI are significant in our products, it’s mainly threefold. One has to do with communications, chatting, companionship or support for the user, whether it’s coaching or mental health in either direction, that kind of whole bucket of communications general component, I think is pretty significant and then there’s a lot we can do there and we are working on that.
