
Eight years ago, just before the dating app Hinge started up, Julia Silva invested some of her spare time to serve as a beta tester. Her job was to help try out its software from a consumer perspective.
That investment paid handsome dividends for Ms. Silva when it came to a man named Brian Whelan, whose profile she noticed during her brief tenure on the site.
“He was a few years older than me and working in finance,” said Ms. Silva, 30, a business development manager in New York at Allergan Aesthetics, a company based in Irvine, Calif., focused on