Key Takeaways
- Bumble’s founder and CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd, told The New York Times that Bumble’s current downtrend is related to its female-first approach.
- Gen Z is pivoting to IRL dates because they feel rejected and judged on dating apps, Wolfe Herd said.
- Wolfe Herd plans to revitalize Bumble by combining human dating coaches with AI efficiency strategies.
Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO of Bumble, recently sat down with The New York Times for a candid interview about her return as chief executive in the increasingly uncertain dating app landscape.
Anyone in the dating app industry knows how difficult it can be to sustain growth, especially on today’s fickle internet. “I’m not entirely sure people realize just how hard it is to get critical mass on an app twice,” Wolfe Herd said of her successes, first as co-founder of Tinder and then as founder and CEO of Bumble.
Now, she’s facing a seemingly impossible task: to once again catch lightning in a bottle.
As Bumble’s stock tumbles, so, too, does engagement with dating apps overall. When Wolfe Herd retook the helm at Bumble in March, it was in a much different dating environment, one marked more by frustration than excitement.
As with any other app developer in today’s world, she’s had to ask herself a difficult question: How do I convince a disillusioned generation to return to dating apps?
Where Bumble Went Wrong
“My opinion is that I ran this company for the first several years as a quality over quantity approach,” she told The New York Times.
In the early 2010s, when any and every tech startup had a shot at success in Silicon Valley, Bumble’s female-first approach was downright cutting-edge. Most importantly, Wolfe Herd said, is how she held onto the conviction that Bumble wasn’t actually a social network at all, but “a double-sided marketplace.”
“This is not a content platform where you can just scroll and scroll and scroll and scale drives results,” she said.
Dating app developers know better than anyone how challenging it can be to grow a company that is dependent on human vulnerability, and not on escapism. Wolfe Herd pointed to the pandemic as the height of the “growth” mindset.
And after every peak, there’s always a sharp decline. But according to Wolfe Herd, Bumble hasn’t experienced a fall from grace so much as a cultural recocking. “Bumble’s not perfect, nor was it perfect then,” Wolfe Herd said.
Long described as a “feminist” version of Tinder, Bumble has been criticized for not living up to its female-first standards, something Wolfe Herd directly acknowledged in the interview.
“Women have been treated very badly on Bumble,” she admitted. “There are times when we have overshot the benefit to women in a marketing moment. A woman sending a message on an app is not going to save the world … We are a part of the problem in this bigger cultural landscape of online love. We’re not perfect.”
Still, she wants to be part of the solution.
“A good business does not focus on outputs. A good business focuses on the core inputs that matter most,” she explained. Somewhere along the way, she said, Bumble stopped focusing on core inputs and instead focused solely on growth — a detrimental mistake. “When you chase growth, you get it, but then you lose it.”
To get Bumble back on track, Wolfe Herd plans on returning to a core question: “Are our members actually getting what they came here for? That question stopped being asked for too long.”
Gen Z is Disillusioned with the Dating App Experience
It’s easy to assume that the current downtrend of dating apps is a result of generational dating app fatigue. In other words, kids these days aren’t as impressed by the convenience and flash of dating apps as people were 10 years ago.
While this is partly true, Wolfe Herd explained that Gen Z’s disillusionment springs from a less obvious place: fear.
“I think the reason Gen Z has abandoned the apps is because they’re getting on the apps and they’re not seeing who they want to see and they’re feeling two things, which I take full accountability for at Bumble. They’re feeling rejected and they’re feeling judged,” she told the New York Times.
Wolfe Herd said she believes that the solution to this growing problem is to re-embrace humanity.
The Future of Dating Apps, According to Wolfe Herd
Wolfe Herd plans on bringing Bumble back to basics while exploring the burgeoning AI boom.
“The goal for Bumble over the next few years is to become the world’s smartest matchmaker,” she said. To do this, Bumble will have to use AI strategically. “I don’t want an AI to be my therapist, personally,” she said. “I want to talk to a real person who has heart and understands.”
Ideally, an AI will analyze hundreds of profiles to facilitate only the most compatible matches. It’s up to human beings to turn compatibility into long-lasting romance. “I do think AI is unbelievably beneficial – it can condense and summarize information like I’ve never seen before.”
To bring humanity back to online dating, Bumble will also start to offer the services of human dating coaches.
Bumble is developing quizzes that will help people match up by values, not only by vibe or looks alone. These quizzes will be made with “very, very experienced therapists and relationship experts … leveraging technology to make love more human at the end of the day.”
Perhaps the beauty of the modern tech world is in its ability to reinvent itself. Some have tried to conduct a post-mortem on Bumble, but the app is still kicking, and according to Wolfe Herd, there’s no reason to assume that the prognosis is anything but good.
“I think we’re just back to connection and we’re back to relationships,” Wolfe Herd told the Times at the end of the interview. “I’m staying out of all the fodder and all the ickiness of the world and I just want to focus on love. I genuinely just want to drive a love company.”
