TECH CRUNCH – A former president at musical.ly (now known as TikTok), Alex Hofmann, helped build an app that could compete with social giants like Meta, YouTube or Snapchat. After ByteDance acquired musical.ly for ~$1B in 2018, Hofmann left the company to become an investor, but he soon decided he wanted to make apps again. He founded 9count, the parent company of apps like Everland, Helpline, Juju and the friendship-making app Wink, which has millions of users. Wink connects people without regard to location. "It was interesting that some of the 18+ users asked us, 'Oh, it would be great if I could look for people in my city,'" Hofmann said. "So that was one of the reasons for launching the dating app Spark." On Spark, users can see people around them all at once in a grid, kind of like on Grindr. But unlike Grindr, they can only receive messages from people if they've both "sparked" each other. Spark has already "soft-launched" in hundreds of countries, climbing to #1 in the iOS app store in Ireland and the Netherlands within a day.
