How I became the most liked man on Tinder (for a day)

"Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity, To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, Would you capture it or just let it slip?" - Eminem, Lose Yourself

My goal in life hasn’t always been to make myself the most liked man on Tinder, but when the opportunity presented itself, I couldn’t resist.

This article explains how I (probably) became the most liked man on Tinder for April fools, 2024 and got 1,289 likes during the day, and how I used the campaign to promote my extension to a wider audience.

Background

I'm the creator and owner of the Chrome extension LighterFuel for Tinder, which allows users to help identify fake accounts by showing the date the account was created and allows for one click reverse image searching on matches to see if their profile images have been used anywhere else online.

As the extension relies upon Tinder sending this extra data like when the account was created, they can stop it from working at any point, with no way to get it working again. This meant this could be my only shot I get of running this prank.

I’ve also been trying to get better at marketing recently, as I had difficulty promoting some of my other browser extensions so I knew it was an area that I had to work on.

Snap2Calendar was one of the extensions that I struggled to promote, in spite of it being free and having a huge target audience, with real world utility.

LighterFuel luckily didn’t need promoting to get where it is currently, as it grew by itself thanks to the visibility on the Chrome web store which grew it to 10k daily users over a few years, but some extra promotion for it couldn't hurt.

The April Fools Plan

So, for April fools I wanted to do something different and run a campaign that has never been done before. I was partially inspired by the dating app Singularity where there there was only one profile of one guy on the entire platform to swipe on, and aside from it being quite entertaining, it got media attention!

This led me to want to do something similar to Singularity, but on Tinder instead. I thought only showing one profile for the day would be a bit intrusive so I instead thought it would be funny to show a profile, and only allow likes for it.

The message that appears when you run out of likes on Tinder.

Tinder already had a mechanism to stop users from liking profiles, as unpaid users have a limited amount of likes they can submit per 12 hours, but you could always still reject profiles. Whenever you “ran out of likes”, a modal shows up telling you to wait, or pay for premium, so that made me want to create my own modal, but with a more cheeky message.

This was the alert that appeared when users tried to dislike the profile.

I never actually wanted to use my own profile on Tinder as I had my Colin the Caterpillar account which I used for testing and development, however that got shadow-banned for not being a real person and the profile couldn't be used.

I also tried reaching out to some YouTube influencers to see if they wanted to be the face of the campaign, but I didn't manage to find anyone who was interested in time.

This left me with no other option than to use my own profile, so I decided to make the most of it, as I could lean into more of an egotistical character for the prank and it would make it slightly more believable to my users that I was doing this all to get likes for myself, as the creator of LighterFuel.

The Execution of the Prank

I didn't have enough time to take any new photos as I left it a little late to start the campaign, so I used some random tinder compatible photos I had of myself, and I had a bio that said "LighterFuel Creator, Soon to be, the most liked man on Tinder." however I had to get rid of the LighterFuel part as I didn't want to have to explain it to customer support if I got banned.

The week before, I managed to push the update through the Chrome web store which got delayed due it being erroneously flagged as a "mature" extension which I successfully appealed, but only days before April. This meant a smaller proportion of my active daily users got the update, but it managed to get to 16k people in total before the 1st.

This rejection was sent to me on the 25th of April and was later overturned as it was inaccurate.

Starting from the 31st of March, people started to see the profile as it was set to show whenever the local time was the 1st of April. My palms were indeed quite sweaty for this one, as I had no idea whether or not it would all work out, or how people would react. I also had the worry of my profile getting banned from people reporting it and it not showing up because of that.

The picture of the first like coming in, from the realtime dashboard in Google Analytics

When I woke up on the 1st of April, I immediately checked my Google Analytics to see if it was all going well, which I could see the realtime stats showed the likes coming in thankfully. Next, I checked my Tinder account, and I saw I was soft-banned, meaning I had to re-verify by sending them selfies of me doing different poses. These bans happened 3 times over the course of the campaign and I'm not sure about the impact it had on the number of people who saw my profile on the day.

On the 2nd of April at around mid-day, it was all over and I saw I had a huge amount of likes from the campain: 1,289 in total but not as many as I'd hoped. I was aiming for at least 3.5k likes but the update not rolling out to everyone alongside more people than I expected using the escape hatch I put in, incase any users really didn't want to like my profile, put the numbers down.

In total, the popup saying "This person is too hot to dislike" came up 5145 times, and there were a total of 72 people who were pranked that uninstalled the extension.

However, I was still very happy with the results as it could have easily just not worked due to a variety of influences out of my control.

The Media Aspect

I had also published two press releases, for before and after the actual prank, outlining my goals and eventually how it actually went with some stats so I could just link anyone there for more information about the prank. I'd also written them in first person with a playful tone, to present the campaign as just a more of just a silly guy messing around and having fun as opposed to a corporation desperately trying to gain attention.

"Now I couldn't fault you for thinking that I'm going to get my likes through my dashing looks, or perhaps my charming personality, but I'm sure to your surprise, it's neither! I've put my software engineering skills to use and given my chrome extension for Tinder a little update. (\s)" - The introduction to the first press release

Now it was time to get some media coverage!

I started this April fools media campaign with the goal of one official news article about the prank.

I sent out emails to as many tabloid outlets as I could, that I thought would be interested in covering the story. In the end only The Sun got back to me, but with my goal of 1 article, that worked for me.

Here's the article!

I had a 15 minute call to confirm some details then waited a few days, then it went up which I'm incredibly happy about. 🥂🎉🎉🎉

The Conclusion

First of all, risk-taking has its rewards. The decision to use a familiar platform in a unique and unconventional way led to attention and recognition that would have not been possible without running the campaign. This prank stood out.

Rather than attempting to sell a product or concept, the success of this April Fools' prank stood upon the comedic and unexpected transformation of my Tinder profile. This not only engaged users on a personal level but also increased the awareness and popularity of my extension.

I'm incredibly proud of what I acomplished here and how this all ended up, not everything went perfectly but enough went to plan to call this a huge success in my books.