How the Bumble founder revolutionized the world of dating apps

new York Whitney Wolfe Herd went down in history on February 11, 2021: The IPO of her dating app Bumble made her the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. On the day of the IPO, she posted a photo of herself with her baby in her arms. “Women can take the first step” – Wolfe Herd has revolutionized the world of dating apps with this simple concept – also “to break outdated heterosexual norms”, says the dating portal that the 32-year-old founded Has.

Wolfe Herd wasn’t just the youngest female boss to go public in the United States. Unlike most of the male founders, it has already made profits on its IPO. In the first quarter, the company exceeded all sales expectations and also posted a profit. In addition, the important number of paying users increased by 30 percent in the first quarter.

There were also setbacks on Wolfe Herd’s path. She left the company Tinder, which she co-founded in 2012, in a dispute in 2014. She even sued Tinder for sexual harassment and received $ 1 million and shares in the company in an out-of-court settlement.

Today, with her lemon-yellow brand Bumble and a fortune of $ 1.2 billion, she is one of the few self-made billionaires in the United States. And analysts paint a bright future for their app, in which women have to speak to men in order to establish contact at all.

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Wolfe Herd owes at least part of the success to her ugly departure from Tinder, which made her start all over again. After her allegations of sexual harassment, she first felt the impact of social media.

Injured and, according to her own statements, also slightly depressed, she turned her back on California in 2014 to work on her own new idea in Austin, Texas: Merci – a social network only for women, where a friendly tone should be the rule. While she was still working on Merci, she received an offer from Andrey Andreev, the founder of the dating app Badoo, who wanted the Tinder veteran on board as director of marketing.

One week of compulsory leave for everyone

But she did not join Badoo as head of marketing, but won Andreev as an investor: Badoo received the majority of the shares, made its technology available and otherwise gave Herd a free hand with Bumble.

Both Bumble and Badoo are now part of the parent company Bumble, with Wolfe Herd at the helm. Badoo founder Andreev has since sold all of the shares. Today around 700 people work for the company in Austin, Barcelona, ​​London and Moscow. According to its own information, Bumble has more than 100 million users worldwide. The dating app is also successful in Germany.

Not only people who are looking for a partner like Bumble. Investors are also convinced by Wolfe Herd’s model: The investment house Susquehanna praises the management: Bumble has “firmly established itself in the market by creating a solid niche for itself with its women-centered dating app,” it says in one Study.

Series: Women Entrepreneurs Worldwide

Analyst John Blackledge also believes that Bumble still has a lot of potential as dating is increasingly shifting to the Internet. “We expect the positive tailwind to continue for many years to come, and Bumble will not only benefit from this ongoing trend, but also drive it,” writes Blackledge.

The CEO shows an unusual management style. In June, Wolfe Herd unceremoniously sent all employees on compulsory leave for a week. Their reason: they want to prevent burnouts before they occur.

The US leads the way in social and cultural norms for start-ups

The Utah-born daughter of a building contractor and housewife already demonstrated her entrepreneurial talent while studying as an activist. When she was 19 years old and the BP oil platform Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, Wolfe Herd had bamboo bags made to raise money for those affected. Together with the fashion designer Patrick Aufdenkamp she founded the aid organization “Help Us Project”. It was successful not only locally but throughout the United States.

The fact that more women are starting companies in the US is due, among other things, to the fact that everyone who leaves high school must have submitted a start-up project including a business plan. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) shows that entrepreneurial education is also considered more important after school, for example at universities, than in other countries.

Apparently it also helps women founders that the “social and cultural norms” in the USA, as it is called in the GEM, motivate them to start up companies. The US leads the world in this category. In addition, the example of Wolfe Herd clearly shows that the change between entrepreneurs and salaried managers is more fluid than elsewhere, precisely because the standards are open to such changes.

After graduating from university, Wolfe Herd traveled through Southeast Asia. There she got involved in various orphanages where she volunteered. Today, with Bumble, she mainly helps lonely hearts looking for a partner and, more recently, people who are simply looking for friends.

Dating apps can also be used to make friendly contacts

After the long pandemic, it hit a nerve again, as several surveys show: According to a study by Morgan Stanley, 87 percent of current users of dating apps want to use online dating even more in the next twelve months – especially millennials and people with a high income.

A survey by market researchers from Evercore ISI shows that in the future more people will use dating apps who do not yet. According to this, 53 percent of those surveyed who do not currently pay for dating apps would also consider doing so in the future. In addition, more than three-quarters said they would use dating apps to make new friends.

And anyone who wants to meet in a safe place for a real date in New York has been able to go to “Bumble Brew” since the end of July. Wolfe Herd has dared to step into the real world and opened its own restaurant: a restaurant in the trendy Nolita district – in squeaky yellow, of course.

More: Israeli founder: “Don’t meet investors when you’re pregnant.”

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