GrindrBerry.com

The Man Behind the Daily Grindr
By PJ Maytag

Joel Simkhai is curious. Not curious in the sense of eccentric, but I mean curious in the sense of questioning. He was born that way—always wondering about the person next to him. Who are they? Where are they from? What are they into? Perhaps it’s the root of his desire to turn gaydar into reality…eliminating the age old question among gay men when they look at another man; ‘Is he or isn’t he?’
And not possessing that honed sexuality sixth sense some gay men seem gifted with, Joel was inspired to create Grindr. Now gay men everywhere can answer that question with a tap on a touchscreen, just as long as it’s an Apple mobile device. Aww, all you Blackberry users who have been suffering from serious cases of app envy will be thrilled to hear Grindr is beta testing their Blackberry version now (check it out at GrindrBerry.com) and an Android app is next on the developing block so you too can join the hook up action in the very near future.
Joel, a 33-year-old ex-New Yorker who now calls LA home, is founder and CEO of one of the fastest growing apps (and free no less!) for the iPhone, iPad WiFi and iPod Touch among the gay demographic. We’re talking some serious numbers here. There are over 800,000 men in 162 countries with Grindr profiles using this location based mobile technology to find fellow gay men to meet and chat with in their immediate area thanks to GPS tech. It puts a whole new gay spin on ATT’s old ad slogan, “Reach out and touch someone” now doesn’t it?
I had the opportunity the other day to have a phone conversation (I know, how old skool) with the genius behind the Grindr and ask Joel about his inspiration, the Grindr tribe and the mobile future for his company and our community for that matter.

PULP: What inspired you to create Grindr?
Joel Simkhai: Even before I identified as gay, I wondered about the people around me. ‘Oh he’s good looking or she’s good looking or that person looks interesting. But how do I meet them? My whole adult life I’ve asked myself how do I better meet and interact with the people around me?  And I meant that for both the people I see in the coffee house around me and the people I don’t see—like the people on the 7th floor above the coffee house.
Part of the inspiration is the fact that as gay men and gay women, we’re part of the minority so we have two things going on. One is we don’t know who is actually gay or lesbian around us really. And the second issue is, that everybody has, even if you know the person, they may be in the same boat as you are—they may not know how to approach someone to engage in conversation.
The question that I have always been perplexed about is ‘How do I meet the people who are right next to me?’ You know I grew up on AOL chat rooms and CompuServe chat rooms before that and I would talk to people across the country, who were miles away. And I guess as dating sites evolved and other sites evolved, we get closer and closer but still the minimum was a mile. So for me I was curious ‘who is 500 feet away from me?’ You know a mile is 5,000 feet away, that’s quite far especially in the city of New York. I want to know who’s in my block? Who’s in my apartment building? I knew I saw guys in my building who I thought were gay but I had no way to approach them.
I think that’s what Grindr is all about. It simply uses location based services, GPS and some of the other technologies—the cell towers and the WiFi database, to show you who’s around you. That to me is the most interesting thing; who is around and let me find a free and convenient way to chat with them.

Do you think the future for all social networking, not just Grindr, is going to be mobile for other identities?
I KNOW that women, straight and gay, sit in a room and look at someone, another girl, another guy, and they are curious. They sit at a bar and think, ‘Who in here do I have a personality link with?’ That’s what we are always looking for as people—who have common interests. Who else speaks another language? Who else that likes wakeboarding or whatever. Or someone who is from the same state I’m from, or the same hometown, high school. There’s all these people around us who have some kind of commonality with us that we don’t even know about.
So absolutely! I think the future and from my perspective the present of social networking is mobile and is also location based. It’s an element of curiosity—a fire located close to you say down the block is of much more interest to you than a fire 10 miles away. It’s the notion of proximity—we place a lot more value on things that are close to us. What’s around me is one of the most basic questions we ask ourselves.

I’m curious, besides your average Joe Blows with profiles, are you finding escorts utilizing Grindr—and if so is that allowed or encouraged on your app?
No, we don’t allow any kind of commercial promotion or advertising on Grindr. We actually take a pretty hard line on it. From my perspective you’re on Grindr, you are looking to socialize. You are looking to meet people for no ulterior motive. If it’s anything but personal socialization, it’s not allowed. …If we see it we’ll remove it. I mean we try. [Joel laughs out loud] Unfortunately we have hundreds of thousands of profiles and it’s hard to go through all of them!
And then someone may have a basic profile then once in the chat say ‘Hey, I charge 200 bucks an hour,’ so it’ll never be a 100 percent free from that type of use, but we try to make an effort to discourage that kind of use. We always encourage users to report other users who aren’t abiding by our terms of service.

What about cyber stalkers? Is there a way to block unwanted guys from finding your location?
Yes, there’s a couple things we do here for location privacy. One being you can block someone. If you’re talking to someone and for whatever reason you no longer wish to speak with him anymore, you don’t want him to see you, you block them. They can neither see nor communicate with you when you block them. And they won’t be notified that you’ve blocked them—you just no longer exist for them.
One of my goals for the future is to create a real life block where I can block people and they disappear forever. That’s going to take a lot more work! [Jokes Joel]
And it’s not a matter of someone creating a new profile and attempting to contact the person again—we actually block the device. Plus you can’t create multiple profiles on the same phone.
The other option is we also have a [privacy] setting in our profile. One of the things when you view a profile you see <I>exactly<I> how fart away they are from you—it’ll say 200 feet, 2,000 feet, 2,000 miles. We try to be as exact as possible on your location.
So there’s an option to hide that information so that other users can’t see how far away you are from them. It’s an additional option for users who want a little more privacy.

Personally I love the Grindr logo—but I’ve heard from some guys they don’t get why it has a skull/mask element. Care to enlighten us on your choice for the emblem?
When we came up with the idea the question was, now what do we call it? How do we define and build it? A couple of things were this: we wanted to do something that’s different, something that makes a bold statement—but not necessarily gay, or anything with sexuality. We wanted it to stand on its own. I looked at primitive art and tribal art. I looked at Polynesian art. I looked at African art, and art from literally around the world. One of the things I saw, time and time again on these tipis on these maps is this face—is the mask. To me it struck a chord.
What we are trying to do here is get back to the basics of our primal need our primal purpose, which is to communicate and socialize. It’s bringing the self to the tribal need to socialize.
And in a sense we are a global gay tribe here, so this mask comes from tribal art. Our goal was to create a global tribe utilizing this technology. We certainly didn’t expect it to be in a 162 countries in only a little over a year since its launch! We were hoping to create a Grindr tribe—and that’s the backstory to the mask logo.

What’s next for you and your company?
We’re just about to finish up on the Blackberry version of Grindr, we are in the final stages of testing it out. It should be available to the general public later this month, in a matter of weeks. They can go to GrindrBerry.com for more information on that.
Our goal is for EVERY gay man to be on Grindr and help guys connect better with each other. We certainly want to add more ways to filter and search to let us be a little choosier because at the end of the day we are all very specific. In the gay community there are so many sub-communities. We are not just gay.