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BloombergBusinessweek January 27, 2020thecompany,andshewouldget20%.
Badoo’s engineersinLondon would
buildit,butitwouldbemarketedin
Austin,whereshelived.
When Bumble started in
December2014,it lookeda lotlikeexist-
ingdatingapps,exceptfortherequire-
mentthat womenmessagemenfirst.
This rule becameBumble’s defining
characteristic,anditstagline—“Makethe
FirstMove”—appearsinbright,yellowlettersinthecompa-
ny’soffices.WolfeHerddescribesthefeatureasa waytogive
womentheupperhand.“It’ssomuchmorethanjusta prod-
uctgimmick.There’sa trueimpactfromthat.It completely
reducesallofthetensionandfrictionbetweenthegenders,”
shetoldme.“That’swhywehavethelowestabuseratesofany
platform.”WhenI askedwhatthoseabuserateswere,shetold
metotalktoherpublicist.Thepublicistpromisedtogetme
numbersbuteventuallyadmittedBumbledidn’thavethem.
It knewaboutitsownapp(7%to8%ofBumbleuserswere
kickedoffforbehaviorthatviolateditspolicies,a figurethat
thecompanysayshasremainedsteadyforyears),butit didn’t
havecorrespondingnumbersforotherappsbecausethere’s
nothird-partysourceforthatdata.
Theonlypieceofinternalresearchthecompanycould
pointtowhenaskedwhyit claimedtobesaferthanitscom-
petitorswasa 2018SurveyMonkeypollofusersof 14 dating
apps,conductedbyCarbino.Butthissurveycontradictedthat
assertion.Init,26%ofrespondentssaidthey’dbeenharassed
onBumble—alowerpercentagethanonTinder,OkCupid,and
Match,buthigherthanthepercentagewhoreportedexperi-
encingharassmentonHinge,EHarmony,andothers.Bumble’s
surveydidn’texplainhowmanyuserswereoneachsite.
Andwhathappenedaftera Bumbleusersentthatinitial
message to a possible date? Wolfe Herd liked to say that
women were “empowered” when they talked to men first.
“It’s a recalibration of what society expects,” she said. But
the app forced them to do it. New relationships are full of
firsts: first dates, first kisses, first conversations about mak-
ing things official. Did Bumble know if these newly empow-
ered women took the initiative there?
“No,” said Priti Joshi, Bumble’s vice president for strategy.
“We don’t have a way of saying, ‘Women are asking to move
this into the real world more than men are,’ or vice versa.”
For user privacy reasons, Bumble and other dating apps don’t
read messages unless they’re flagged as inappropriate. The
company knows women send the first message, but after that
it doesn’t know who’s making what move, or when.
People who use Bumble said that a relationship (if there
is one) unfolds the same way as it always has. “The major-
ity of the time, I still ask women out,” said Ian Sanderson, a
29-year-old engineer in New York. “Sometimes a woman will
be more aggressive, but that’s not because of Bumble. It also
happens on other apps.” There’s still ghosting on Bumble, and
rudeness, and men who reply to a question about their tattoo
with, as one woman received in a message, “I’ll let you see itin person when your [sic] giving me a bj.” Andrea Silenzi, who
used to host a dating podcast in Los Angeles, said she likes the
women-message-first feature, but not because it’s empowering.
“It’s more like a screening feature,” she said. “That’s about it.”A
lthough Bumble was built by Badoo, in Austin it
looked and acted like a scrappy tech startup. For
the first few years, Wolfe Herd and a small, mostly
female team worked out of an apartment. Early
on, they wanted to name the app Moxie, but it was already
trademarked, so they went with Bumble because of all the
marketing possibilities it afforded (queen bees, buzz, a com-
munity called the Hive). Wolfe Herd’s early hires were people
she knew: two Tinder designers, her sorority “big sister,” a
friend of a friend from SMU, a family friend of her husband’s,
and so on. Around the office, they were known as the OGs. In
2017, Bumble moved into a squat, sunshine-yellow building
with plush couches and honeycomb-shaped shelves for an
effect that fell somewhere between a ’60s cocktail lounge and
a blowout bar. Instead of perks such as foosball and kegera-
tors, Bumble offered free manicures. At the time, the com-
pany had about 40 employees and was 82% white.
Bumble’s message of female empowerment earned it a
flurry of positive press. (“Bumble is changing the face of dat-
ing apps,” Harper’s Bazaar declared when the app wasn’t yet
3 weeks old.) Within a year and a half it reported 5.6 million
users; at 2 years that figure had almost doubled. As Bumble
took off, Wolfe Herd, who’d never given up on her idea of a
female-only social network, looked to expand. In 2016 the com-
pany introduced BFF, a version of the app for people who
wanted to make friends. A year later it added Bizz, a profes-
sional network that Wolfe Herd described in an interview as
an “empowered LinkedIn.”
As millennial women grew more politically vocal during
andafterthe 2016 presidentialelection,Bumblereflectedtheir
mood,becomingmorebrazenlyfeminist.Itssocialmedia
postschangedfromcutesyquips—“Bethehotex-girlfriend
your ex-boyfriend stalks on Instagram”—to information about
Planned Parenthood fundraisers, minirants about the pay
gap, and inspirational quotes from Gloria Steinem. In New
York, subway cars were plastered with Bumble ads that said,
“Be the CEO your parents always wanted you to marry.” The
day after Christine Blasey Ford testified in September 2018
that, as a teenager, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh
had sexually assaulted her, the New York Times ran a full-page
Bumble ad that said, “Believe Women.”
“We’re not here to capitalize on equality,” Wolfe Herd
said about Bumble’s marketing. “We don’t need to slap ‘The
Future is Female’ on a T-shirt and put it on our store.” It had,
however,postedthephrasetoInstagram.
Aroundthistime,thecompanyalsoannouncednewanti-
harassment features. In 2016 it banned shirtless mirror self-
ies (“offensive”), nude or underwear shots (“bad manners”),
and shirtless or bikini photos taken indoors (“too similar to
underwear”). A year later it outlawed hate speech and symbols
as defined by the Anti-Defamation League and implementedAndreev
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