Bumble goes on the market just in time for V-Day (but don't call it a dating app)
Love at first swipe... More like: love on first trading day. Bumble saw its stock pop as much as 80% during its first day as a public company (#romantic). Shares of the female-focused dating app closed the day up 64% from their IPO price. And Bumble's 31-year-old founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd became the youngest woman to ever take a company public. Women are Bumble's competitive advantage, in more ways than one:
- Women make the first move... In North America, Bumble has ~30% more female users for every male user compared to the gender mix of users in the freemium dating market.
- Women make the cash move... A higher percentage of Bumble’s female users become paying customers than the market average.
- Not just Bumble: Bumble also owns European dating app Badoo. Between the two, Bumble has ~42M monthly users and 2.4M paying users.
But don't call it a dating app... Bumble prefers "preeminent global women's brand." In addition to Bumble Date: it also offers Bumble Bizz for career networking (think: swipeable LinkedIn), and Bumble BFF to connect with new friends (without benefits).
Bumble wants you for life... not just for your "single and ready to mingle" stage. It's a notably different strategy than Match Group's Hinge, which calls itself "the app that's designed to be deleted." To provide lifetime value post-DTR, Bumble is expanding into platonic categories. It's even planning to monetize BFF, Biz, and "other potential new categories." We're thinking "Bumble Bark" for dog-lovers.