The Bumble story: if you need it, build it

They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – especially when that woman goes off to build a business that becomes your direct competitor.

In one of the most memorable scenes from Quentin Tarantino’s seminal revenge epic, Kill Bill, we witness the yellow-jumpsuit-wearing, katana-wielding heroine (a wronged woman mysteriously referred to only as “The Bride”) slice through scores of henchmen on her quest to, well, kill Bill. It was hard not to envision this scene when I first saw the footage of Whitney Wolfe Herd, clad in yellow from head to designer heels, ringing the bell at the launch of the Bumble IPO in 2021.

The similarity goes beyond the blonde hair and the yellow outfit. Like The Bride, the Bumble founder and CEO was a woman scorned. And just like The Bride, she didn’t just roll with the punches – she chose to dish out a few of her own.

Love’s keen sting

In April 2014, Whitney Wolfe Herd was in a bad place. Her tumultuous relationship with one of her Tinder co-founders had soured to the point where her workplace had become too toxic to endure. Unable to see a way out, she resigned from the app that she had helped to put on the map. By 2015, credit for her contributions to Tinder – which included coming up with the name of the app and marketing it extensively on college campuses – was practically erased.

Things had started off well enough: the Tinder dream team, composed of Wolfe Herd, Sean Rad, Chris Gulzcynski and Justin Mateen, first met in 2012 while working together on the startup Cardify, a project led by Rad through Hatch Labs IAC incubator. While Cardify was eventually abandoned, it provided the springboard for the development of Tinder.

Wolfe Herd became vice president of marketing for Tinder, reporting directly to Mateen. She and Mateen dated on and off throughout 2013 until, according to her statements, he became “verbally controlling and abusive”. When the relationship finally ended, Mateen turned the remaining founders against Wolfe Herd. Wolfe Herd approached her co-founder Sean Rad for help, sharing screenshots of harassing messages that Mateen had sent her during work hours. In response, she was told that the continuation of her employment was “unlikely at that point”.

Unsatisfied with this outcome, Wolfe Herd chose to resign. Three months later, she filed a lawsuit against Tinder for sexual harassment, referencing Mateen’s messages, as well as incidents where she was called a slut and a liar. By the end of the same year, she reportedly received more than $1 million as well as stock as part of a settlement.

Out of the ashes

Unfortunately, this was not the end of the abuse, which flooded into Wolfe Herd’s DMs from every corner of the internet as news of the lawsuit and settlement went public. Strangers called her a gold digger and a dumb blonde, an opportunist who rode the coattails of her male co-founders and then “Me Too”-ed them to get the big payout. Fed up with the unsolicited negative messages that she kept receiving, she conceptualised an app where women could compliment each other. But before she could build it, she was approached by Badoo founder Andrey Andreev with a different suggestion: to build another dating app.

At first, Wolfe Herd baulked at this idea – but the more she thought about it, the more it made sense to her. Harassment from an abusive ex is what had derailed her career in the first place. And now these negative comments in her inbox were making her doubt herself. What if there was a way to create a dating app that could protect women from these things, the way that she would have wanted to be protected when she needed it?

And so, the characteristic that distinguished Bumble from its peers was born. Wolfe Herd agreed to come on board, but only on the condition that she could build a feminist dating app, where heterosexual matches required the woman to make the first move before anything progressed. Wolfe Herd recruited two fellow Tinder departees to help design the interface, and in December 2014, Bumble was launched.

Conviction fosters change

From the start, one of the driving forces behind Bumble’s success and growth has been its founder’s dedication to creating a safer dating app for women. Guided by her personal experience and her vision of what online interactions could look like, Wolfe Herd has introduced groundbreaking ideas, both online and in the real world.

Unlike her counterparts in the tech space, who often resort to making excuses when confronted by the actions of users on their platforms, she embraces a proactive approach, recognising her company not just as a digital entity but as a powerful instrument capable of influencing and moulding human behaviour. It is the first major social platform to embrace behavioural guardrails and content moderation, not as an extra or a fix, but as part of its business model. And it’s not just talk either.

In 2019, Wolfe Herd testified before the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence committee about the prevalence of unsolicited nudes being sent to women on dating apps, in an effort to get the practice outlawed. “If indecent exposure is a crime on the streets, then why is it not on your phone or computer?” she asked lawmakers.

In 2020, Bumble encountered 880,000 instances that ran afoul of their user guidelines, as disclosed by a representative from the company. In response, the platform took a range of measures, from issuing written warnings to imposing temporary suspensions, and in severe cases, permanently blocking users. Notably, Bumble employs cutting-edge artificial intelligence to proactively identify and tackle violations, such as hate speech, without solely relying on user reports. In other words: Bumble doesn’t need a victim to report a transgression – their AI is capable of registering a transgression without being flagged by a user.

The primary objective behind leveraging AI is to cleanse the platform proactively and preemptively identify individuals prone to disruptive behaviour before they exhibit it. A notable facet of this AI system is its ability to scan profiles for potentially harmful content, such as images depicting guns and swastikas. Furthermore, the AI is trained to recognize over 700 “stop words,” encompassing terms associated with suicide and a multitude of racial slurs, within chat interactions.

When the AI detects a violation, it doesn’t operate in isolation; instead, it triggers a referral process to a dedicated team of 2000 human moderators. These moderators are tasked with evaluating the reported behaviour and determining the appropriateness of imposing measures like account blocking.

Beyond racial slurs and sexual harassment, Bumble has embarked on a progressive initiative to combat body shaming on its platform, unveiling a ban on “unsolicited and derogatory comments made about someone’s appearance, body shape, size, or health.” This marks a significant step towards fostering a more positive and respectful online environment.

For women seeking love online, Bumble’s offering seems like an oasis; a welcome reprieve from unwanted advances and uninvited nudes. For men who are keen to prove that their intentions are pure, it is an equally attractive alternative to the Wild-West-like landscape of other dating apps.

So, that means the money is rolling in, right? Not necessarily.

But morals don’t always lead to money

In September 2019, Tinder and Bumble were the first and second most popular dating apps in the US, with monthly user bases of 7.9 million and 5 million, respectively. Despite everything that Bumble was doing to differentiate itself from its peers, the company was still lagging behind by the time it went public in 2021.

A month after the IPO, Bumble was valued at more than $14 billion. As founder and CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd became the youngest woman ever to take a company public, at the age of 31. For feminists everywhere she cut the picture of success: a beautiful, strong young woman, ringing the Nasdaq bell with her 18 month old son perched on her hip.

But it seems like the market was less enamoured with this image. After a $75 peak just after listing, the share price zigzagged around the mid-fifties and high forties before dipping all the way down to $18 a year later. While market performance alone isn’t enough to give us the full picture of what’s going on inside a business, what’s more telling is probably the fact that Bumble has sought to turn the quintessential “Tinder experience” on its head, but has not yet managed to overtake Tinder in the ranks of most-used dating app.

In fairness to Bumble, Match Group (the owner of Tinder) is down 77% over the same period in which Bumble has lost 82% of its value, so there’s a broader problem here.

In November 2023, Wolfe Herd announced that she would hand over the CEO reins to Lidiane Jones. The market showed no big reaction to this news, and the share price continued to trade steadily sideways as it had been for most of the year before.

What’s the lesson to take from this story? Perhaps a reminder that you can build a business that really means something to people if you are smart enough to fix a problem that you yourself have encountered. Build the business that you needed, as it were. But – and this is a big but – don’t expect the strength of your convictions to guarantee success. Good nature and good ideas will take you far, but at the end of the day, businesses still need to be run like businesses.

And when the market is expecting profits, you need to deliver them.

About the author:

Dominique Olivier is a fine arts graduate who recently learnt what HEPS means. Although she’s really enjoying learning about the markets, she still doesn’t regret studying art instead.

She brings her love of storytelling and trivia to Ghost Mail, with The Finance Ghost adding a sprinkling of investment knowledge to her work.

Dominique is a freelance writer at Wordy Girl Writes and can be reached on LinkedIn here.