The Best One Yet - Bumble launches a physical magazine, Snapchat gets into gaming, and 1 problem in the “perfect” jobs report

Episode Date: April 8, 2019

Ladies-first dating app Bumble just published a physical magazine as it transitions online to offline. Snapchat stock popped last week after its big move to make video games for non-video-gamers. And the March Jobs Report showed continued economic growth, but we look into one number that’s a real problem.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. And this is Snacks Daily. It is Monday, April 8th. And what do you think about this one? This is the best one yet, Nick. My favorite Snacks Daily we've ever done. We've got three awesome stories for you. Jack and I spent all weekend, we jumped right into these. kicking it off with Bumble. It's launching a physical magazine. The dating app. Do not tell the CEO it's just a dating app. It is so not a dating app. Second story is about Snapchat. It's getting into video games for non-video gamers. Investors have been desperately wanting a reason to love Snap. Here it is. It had a huge week. week. And the third and final story is about the huge U.S. American jobs report. Everyone's excited about it, but we got one reason not to be. Paychecks, the size of them will get into it. Now, before we get into all that, we got to talk about the market seven-day win streak. How did you celebrate that? The S&P 500 rose seven days in a row heading into Friday. We need a rest after seven days. What did you do all weekend? I celebrated with a pepperoni pizza. And then on the way back to the car, stopped into a movie theater. Just did the classic. Poppins.

Spontaneous? My fiance and I, we didn't even know what the movie was. We just went in. No expectations. I don't even know what movies are playing these days. It was all gravy. The movie was soft. I did a yoga, and then I fell asleep in Chivasana.

And I'm cool with that. Congrats, next. All right, before we hit up the rest of the Snacks Daily pod, enjoy this key message. You're tuned in the Snacks Daily. We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something legal out the way. It snacks about to hear ain't food. It's air candy. They don't reflect the views of the rob of her family.

It's all lift. informational just so you know we're not recommending any securities nope it's not a research report or investment advice not an offer or sale of a security right snacks is digestible business news for you robber her financial LLC member fenra slash sipc for our first story we got to talk about bumble which is the dating app where ladies make the first move they are launching a physical magazine right And remember, Bumble is like Tinder, but far fewer cheesy opening lines from men. And full disclosure here, I'm married, Jack is engaged, but we are in love with this strategy and this business. Love at first sight. Last week, Bumble announced Bumble MAG, which is a physical print magazine publication.

Remember what those were? Yeah, looks really good on a coffee table. Now, this is from a partnership they're doing with the magazine company, Hearst. Yeah. Hearst is an OG magazine publisher, and issue number one has 100 pages. This This is the real deal. This is thick. This is coffee table material. This is like a paperweight becomes a coffee table book. Now, this is key because it's elevating the Bumble brand very significantly because it's not just about, you know, hookups.

This is the kind of thing when you have this magazine, you know, you'd be proud to show your parents that. This says to the world Bumble should not be a taboo subject. Like show Bumble off. We are dignified. And Bumble is big. Bumble has 50 million users. Totally surprise me. That is a big number.

deal with this magazine. Anyone can request them and get it delivered to your door, but the first 3,000 are going to the brand ambassadors that have helped Bumble grow. Now, if you want to flick through the pages, you're going to see some good stuff from contributors like Bumble advisor Serena Williams. Yep. And Jen Rubio, who co-founded the luggage company away that everybody loves. Now, this is why we're fascinated with this strategy. This is a huge differentiator for Bumble before it plans to IPO. Right. And Bumble needs to differentiate because the giant in the dating Room is Match.com. Match group dominates this space. It owns Tinder. OkayCupid. It owns our time, which I just Googled and realized is a dating app for 50 plus year old. Fantastic. Now, Match,

by the way, has 25 or more of these dating apps. They've just been acquiring and they bought a majority of hinge last summer. Yeah. So the Bumble CEO, Whitney Wolf, who is a legend. She used to be the co-founder at Tinder. Then she started Bumble. And she referenced last year that she wants to IPO the company like soon. And on this path to the IPO, this magazine is part of a really interesting theme because Bumble's been focusing on offline. Again, not just a dating app, things in real life where real life people can see. Can you, can we talk about the hives here? Yes, the Behives. Actually, we should call them Bumble hives because we don't want to confuse this with Beyonce. No. But it's a club space where professional women can get together. They can find people to date. They can find friends or they can just network. Check out the Hive website for the location of Vancouver. Here is the opening quote on the website. Meet your match in real life or network with interesting people.

We couldn't figure out how many Bumble hives there are, but we've seen them popping up in lots of different places. There are a good number of hives. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Bumble? Bumble can't just be a dating app if it wants to IPO. No, it's got its core product, and now it's introducing something completely different than its core product. And the result is a lifestyle brand. They've taken a dating app, and they've turned this into a community. for professional women, not just on the dating app.

In life. If you become a lifestyle brand that will keep your users loyal and it will get users to pay more. That's the beauty of a lifestyle brand. Now, all this makes us think about now is when is the Snacks Mag coming out? And will it be a monthly or a weekly? I think it may be an annual.

For our second story, Snapchat shares jumped last week. Finally. After a big event and like an even bigger new product. The company needed this really badly. Can we talk about the last three? three quarters. You want to rattle them off? Snapchat's parent company is called Snap. In the last three quarters, it's the number of users using Snapchat has fallen. We're not talking about slowing user growth. We're talking about shrinkage. Three quarters in a row. It's been falling, falling, and then just

barely flat last quarter. There are two key reasons for this. The first is Facebook copied its main feature. That's the number one issue that's always been snapped problem. In 2016, Instagram copied and pasted its entire business model, and it's called Instagram Stories. And now Instagram Stories has like 500 million daily active users, and we're Snap at? It's at 186 million. So about a third as many people use Snap as it's copycat at Instagram. Now, Snapchat's like other drama issue was almost exactly a year ago when it redesigned itself. Yes, that was a disastrous redesign. Users hated it. Kylie Jenner hated it so much. He tweeted out about it and that erased like billions of dollars of snap value. Now, we're going to step a little further back. Two years ago is when Snapchat

IPO, and the stock since then is down how much? Fifty-eight percent. Fifty-eight percent since its IPO. It's a shadow of its former cell. Now, let's Snapchat fast forward right now to today. Over the last week, Snapchat shares jumped six percent because of this first ever partner summit. It looked like so much fun. Sounded like a blast. I wasn't there, but it was in Los Angeles. I saw the whole thing on people's Snapchats. It was great. Serious FOMO, and the whole thing was about its new gaming feature. Can you walk us through what's going on here? This hasn't rolled out to everyone's Snapchat app.

It hasn't even rolled out to me, which is annoying. It's only gone to like 10% of users so far, but I checked out the Google, and I found that there is a tab at the bottom of Snapchat. It looks like a little rocket chip, and that is the gaming feature. You can invite friends to play games with that little button. Now, the key game that Snapchat's promoting here is Bitmoji Party. Yes. Now, Bitmoji being the company it bought in 2016 for $100 million.

It's a combination of emojis and avatars. Right. It's a better-looking virtual version of yourself. It's a customized cartoon version of yourself that looks way cuter than you. Now, the fun thing about this little bitmoji party is you get to like virtually fool around with your friends, like throw them into a pool or something. Yeah, it's like a summer camp for your Bitmoji and you get to play. It looks real.

There's all sorts of different game. But you don't actually have to like schlep up to a summer game. And during the game, you are talking. and chatting with your friends. So it's like you're hanging out, but not physically. Snapchat's like using this basically to just squeeze engagement out of its user base, because its user base isn't growing. Not just that. It's also trying to get people to come to Snap finally by differentiating from Instagram. Because remember, Snapchat's key focus is ads. Yes. It needs to sell ads. That's how it pleases investors. So Jack, what's the takeaway for

a buddies over in L.A. at Snapchat? Snapchat is now a gaming company for non-gamer. Fortnite, EA, Activision Blizzard, e-sports, those are chasing serious guy and girl gamers. Right. Those are serious games. The ones who have like three joysticks, two headsets, and those monitors. And like a command center for playing matrix.

Snapchat, on the other hand, this is just a phone. It's just an app. And it's chasing chill social gamers who are addicted to their phones. People who just are on their phones all day. I read an article this weekend, Nick. Cosmopolitan, another magazine company.

They're chasing 18 to 36-year-old women and the CEO mentioned that those customers open Instagram 42 times a day. Let that sink in, 42. Users at this age that Snap's targeting, they love their phones. They want to do everything on their phones. Socialize or play Snap wants them. For our third final story, we got to talk about the jobs report. It happens the first Friday of every month.

Circle your calendars, tell your friends. This past Friday was for the month of March. And this was record high employment. America showed us its progress report. just like a third grader. Put it on the fridge. But this was for how many jobs were created in the United States of America in the month of March? Give me the number.

$196,000. Unemployment rate? 3.8%. And Jack, I'm a history major here. Give us some, I want some historical context I can bite it. We are in a blessed moment. There have been 102 straight months of positive job creation. And, Nick, that follows in 2008 and 2009.

we had a streak of 23 straight job losses. During the financial crisis. Yes. And let me give you a couple more. You're overloading. I can barely take notes here. November 2008, 800,000 jobs lost. January, a couple months later, 700,000 jobs lost.

In the middle of the financial crisis. So we are gaining now significantly. So Jack and I, you know, we spent our weekends when we're not doing yoga or movies jumping into jobs reports and econ data for you. We found some interesting highlights. Yeah, a couple highlights. education and the healthcare sector added 70,000 jobs. That was the top growing sector.

Yeah. And that is nearly double the next best industry. Right. The next best industry was services, like white collar jobs. Lawyers, accountants, consultants, they added like 37,000 new positions. Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum, manufacturing did not win last month. People with hammers and nails and actually building real things that had its first decline since 17. And then retail, the retail sector selling of things in stores.

It's actually the only sector that has had three straight years of jobs declines. They lost 12,000 jobs last month. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for what seemed like an epic jobs report? Wages. Yes. Wages are the problem. We haven't talked about wages yet. It's about how much paycheck am I getting.

Can we talk about wages? Let's do it now. All right. So in the last year, wages have risen 3.2%. Exactly. In March, if you look at the jobs report, you see that Americans on average made something like $26.22 per hour. Which seems like it could be okay, except the cost of living in life that you're going to actually

spend those wages on, it's been going up to. Right. So you got paid 3.2% better than last year. But cost of living, your rent, your food, everything else, it might have gone up by the same amount. So you're basically, A, no better off. And B, this is even worse because meanwhile, we're talking about all this incredible job street gaining we've had since the financial crisis. Right. So if you look at paychecks,

the bottom 60% of earners in America, they actually have no real pay increase since 1980. While the high income earners are doing just fine as the jobs growth has continued at a record pace. Right. And the summary of all this is inequality. And it's why we're seeing dramatic changes to our economy, like minimum wage increases, strikes. A lot of things on the ballot and a lot more things in 2020 for proposals. Right. So things. are not good for everybody. Jack, why don't you whip up the takeaways for us? Snapchat has developed games,

but they're pretty much for non-gamer castes. And our like better looking than us emojis, we're still waiting for this thing to happen. Okay, and then Bumble came out with a magazine because it's not just a dating app. It is a lifestyle brand because lifestyle brands are stronger, especially when they're offline and online. Finally, jobs report Friday was nice,

but the big asterisk was wages. It's still a problem in this economy. Lots of jobs out there, just lots of jobs out there, just lots of them aren't getting paid promotions. All right, time for our snack fact of the day. This one, this one I like. Finally, a saracha-based snack fact of the day. The people have asked, and we shall deliver.

Hoyfong Foods, which is based in Irwindale, California, has a rooster on the label of every sarahcha bottle because the founder was born the year of the rooster. And he is ethnically Chinese. And also, we looked into the numbers a little more. Saracha is impressive, to say the least. He's doing pretty pretty well. 9.9% of the U.S. hot sauce market is dominated by spicy saracha.

Not too bad. The rest of the week, we cannot wait to be with you because this is a big week. We're kicking off first quarter earning season. So the first companies are reporting their January through March results. We will be there every day with you on the Snacks Daily Pod to break it down. And in the newsletter, thanks for joining us to start. Talk to you tomorrow. The Robin Hood Snacks podcast you just heard reflects the opinion.

of only the hosts who are associated persons of Robin Hood Financial LLC and does not reflect the views of Robinhood Markets, Inc, or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates. The podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to serve as a recommendation to buy or sell any security and is not an offer or sale of a security. The podcast is also not a research report and is not intended to serve as the basis of any investment decision. Robin Hood Financial LLC, member FINRA, SIPC.