The Marketing Bestie Podcast with zoeunlimited - you're hot & single, but nobody cares

Starting point is 00:00:00 Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IG Private Wealth.com.

Starting point is 00:00:30 Amazon presents, Laura versus Fruitflies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen, these little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Everyday with Amazon. Dating apps suck or do we suck at dating?

Starting point is 00:01:04 Because every time we turn on the TV, crap. Powerball. I hope you enjoyed that. How did Bumble go from the it girl of the dating apps worth $13 billion to an outdated billboard of cringe? And ew. When nearly 93% value gone, loss after loss after loss, this is yet another indication of how desperate they are.

Starting point is 00:01:32 The Bumbo truly fumble is $13 billion of hot girl privilege, or like your toxic ex is about to come back. I have too much pride to be on Bumbo, okay? Because you're telling me that I not only have to give birth to our potential future children, I have to push a watermelon out of a f***le but I also have to message you first. It's not happening. I'm not going to feel sorry for myself.

Starting point is 00:02:01 If there was one person born to be hated, it must be dating out founders. Meet Whitney Wolf heard. the youngest self-made female billionaire with an actual billion, Kiley, Forbes 30 under 30 in 2017 and 2018. I didn't even know that was possible. Business Insiders 30 most important women under 30, one of else women in tech, are from capitalizing on the Zichai's dating walls.

Starting point is 00:02:24 Just kidding, or am I? The declining birth rate, dating apps, the high divorce rate, dating apps, the high cheating rate, dating apps, the chronic isolation that's occurring, dating apps. Even male loneliness, fucking dating apps. Well, let's be honest. The three most hated inventions in this era are probably Instagram, smartphones, and dating apps. Ah, the root causes of all our miseries.

Starting point is 00:02:49 That made all the founders billionaires. Bottom line is they're here to make money off of you. We love to hate them. We hate them, we use them, we complain, we log back in. This is how making the first move got me the man of my dreams. According to Forbes, survey respondents spent nearly 51 minutes per day. day on dating apps. Yet, 78% report feeling emotionally, mentally, or physically exhausted by the dating apps with singlehood on the rise. After another man wasted my time during a talking stage,

Starting point is 00:03:25 I honestly don't know if I want to do it anymore. You went from strangers to going out together as if you're a couple. That's not normal. What is it that made the dating apps ultra successful and the founders multi-billionaires? An empire. Or perhaps a bubble based on love, hate, confusion, and hope. It's all marketing babe. It has been some time since I thoroughly look through my stock portfolio, lots of good growth, and some thick tuition paid for the stocks I bought as a new, and one of them has a pretty yellow stripe on it.

Starting point is 00:04:00 Because guess who was so excited about the potential of an app called Bumble when it first IPOed? Yes, four years later, the Bumble stocks I bought originally at $61.13 are now worth an impressive $4.27 per share. Entirely minus 93% of all value loss. Which isn't too surprising because come think of it. I've actually never gone on a date from this app I felt so optimistic about. Or perhaps was I purplashed by their genius marketing?

Starting point is 00:04:35 That created a $13 billion bubble and has now gone from genius to stale. Stay tuned. The reason that I want to dive into Bumble specifically is I actually have a lot of respect for the founder, Whitney Wolf heard, who is indeed a rare self-made female billionaire and a genius marketer. If you can genuinely say you are creating something that would help you, that would solve a personal problem, a personal struggle for you, you are going to find success. I'm really fascinated by the stories of self-made female billionaires, especially the rare woman

Starting point is 00:05:10 also in tech because as a mission for the channel, I want more young women like yourselves to see that you are so much more capable than you think. And these stories are the living proofs that these mega successes are not only possible, but also possible for you. Let's get into it. This is a bumble deep dive no one else is doing a full-scale dissection into its rise, rebrand, and what went right and very wrong. know when you're on Bumble and he's typed left on someone and it's like, oh, you just missed a match. Thank God. Moreover, did the dating apps ruin dating or did we ruin the dating apps? How did the once a girl app Bumble create $13 billion of value from marketing?

Starting point is 00:05:57 Are there strategies to help them regain a girl status and what is a major problem that no dating app has yet to solve? It's 2025. I don't know when as a society we're going to collectively agree. that the dating apps had a problem. Watch carefully through the video for all the marketing secrets you can apply to your dreams. As your marketing bestie, who graduated top 1% UCLA business economics. With a background in marketing, we're going to explore how a $13 billion brand can still fail you,

Starting point is 00:06:26 even if you have the luckiest of Lucky Girl Syndrome, because no brand is impeccable. Now, why is this even relevant to you? Other than the fact that you're part of the statistics that spends 51 minutes a day on dating apps, Or you took an L and bought shares of Bumblestock that lost 93% of its value. Which, by the way, can happen to you way easier than you'd imagine because my bet is you're not using VPN right now. That's literally like putting your stock portfolio password on a billboard or forgetting to wear pants outside. You might be surprised who already has that information.

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Starting point is 00:07:30 All the information is encrypted, blurred out in a way, so your online activity is hidden from all the snoopers. And you can actually buy cheaper travel, or stream your favorite shows by easily switching your IP address. But if you're not sure, they have a flexible 30-day money-back guarantee. Even better if you go to surfshark.com slash Zoe today and use co-Zozy at checkout, you get four extra months free of Surfshark VPN. It's all about maximum protection of your brand because, well, you may see yourself

Starting point is 00:07:59 one way, but how does your dream college, dream job, dream boyfriend see you? That's the importance of brand. And yes, you have one. I'm creating the series to analyze pop culture brands from our marketing perspective because I want all of us. Yes, all of us can unlock the potential to be or create brands that change our future. Which includes unlocking financial freedom. Officially becoming the youngest self-made female billionaire. Can you believe it? The youngest woman ever to take a company public.

Starting point is 00:08:31 And guess what? You can already make a huge impact right now. In fact, you get to decide what future episodes are about. Just fill out the form to join our free email list of trends inside deeper dives. And tell me what is it that you want to learn, whether in business, marketing, personal finance. Whatever you want, if you don't put it down, I won't know you want to learn about it. And I want the series to be as valuable to you as possible. And grow it to a production to have guests on like Whitney herself,

Starting point is 00:09:00 which will happen if more of you support and share the show. So if you want to give value back, simply give the show a five-star rating on Apple and Spotify. Share the knowledge with someone you love. Because the greatest gift you can give to someone is the power to succeed. And it's completely free to you. We are going to break this down into clear eras because Bumbo's trajectory isn't just a dating app story. It is a marketing case study in brand differentiation, cultural timing, and the risk of losing your edge.

Starting point is 00:09:31 But if you had a magic wand to change one thing about a dating app, What is one feature you will add or take away? I'm personally super curious about this. Drop the comments below. I will pick out my favorite answer and share it on my Instagram. Now, how did dating apps become more like baiting apps? Less than ideal. Before the cascade of branding crises,

Starting point is 00:09:51 we need to first roll it back to Bumble 1.0, the feminist tech darling. 2014 to 2019. This is how Whitney Wolf Heard's revenge plot turned into a $13 billion brand. branding masterclass through four key factors. Girls, guess who's getting excited? Let's dive into Whitney Wolf Hurd's origin story because surprise.

Starting point is 00:10:15 Bumble didn't start in a garage. It started in the ashes of Tinder drama. Techboro toxicity and a lawsuit that changed everything. Whitney Wolf heard probably never guessed that enrolling in the sorority, the Kappa Kappa Kappa Gamma, could as cliche as it sounds, actually change her life. But we're getting a bit too ahead of ourselves. A student of Southern Methodist University of International Studies, when he had a natural inclination towards entrepreneurship.

Starting point is 00:10:42 At just 8.20, she started a business selling bamboo tote bags to benefit areas affected by the BP oil spill. As a natural marketer, she knew the power of associations from her earliest projects by partnering up with celebrity stylist Patrick O'SIMG to launch the nonprofit organization called the Help Us Project. The bags received national press after celebrities such as Rachel Zoe and Nicole Ritchie were photographed with them. Post-college, she joined the startup, Cardify at 22, which was abandoned. I had just graduated college. I had no idea what I wanted to do.

Starting point is 00:11:17 I was literally crashing at my mom's house. And all my friends were getting these amazing jobs and my dad was calling me every day like, what's wrong with you? Where's your job? And so I met Sean one night at a dinner and I basically told him I could do anything he tasked me with. and faithfully led her to joining the development team for the dating app you may or may not have heard of, Tinder. Whitney not only became the co-founder and CMO of Tinder, but she was also reportedly behind the name of the app taking inspiration from the flame logo and the idea of Tinder, which is easily combustible material used to start a fire.

Starting point is 00:11:56 She was in the trenches since day one. And so I remember, you know, literally getting up on chairs and tables at my old sorority, surprised they even let me in, but you know, rallying everyone to download it and then running over to the fraternity house and saying, well, all these women are waiting for you. So it was this really interesting thing. Literally naming the app, growing its user base on college campuses and designing the hot, a wholesome branding that made Tinder go viral. But the startup dream turns sour really quickly. Whitney was dating one of the Tinder co-founders, bad idea number one. And after they broke up, things got ugly.

Starting point is 00:12:32 really ugly. She was allegedly harassed a sideline and eventually forced out. It was devastating and what could I do? I couldn't do anything. In 2014, she sued Tinder's parent company for sexual harassment and discrimination. The case settled privately but the headlines did their job. Whitney by default became the face of everything wrong with brocentric tech culture and suddenly she had the kind of PR setup you literally can't buy. So what does she do next? She teams up with Andrew and Dreeve, the founder of Badoo,

Starting point is 00:13:06 a uro-dating giant who gives her funding and infrastructure. And in 2014, the very same year she resigned from Tinder and filed a lawsuit, Bumble is born. A dating app where women make the first move. This was one of the most seamless and beautiful marketing campaigns I've ever seen, whether unintentional or strategically planned. It hit four genius marketing factors. First, the ultimate underdog narrative. I was getting rape threats, death threats.

Starting point is 00:13:35 I mean, all sorts of horrible behavior and it felt like they were in my living room. It felt like they were in my bedroom. Let's be real. Winnie's exit from Tinder was the PR gift that kept giving. She sued Tinder for sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Then launched a direct competitor that flipped the power dynamic on its head. Women make the first move. A story sells and hers was irresistible.

Starting point is 00:13:59 It's literally turning trauma into branding, a compelling market position that seems groundbreaking. Bumble was marketed as the safe space for women in dating, friendships, and eventually networking. Hence, the second factor, perfect product market fit. I'm downloading Bumble. No marketer can escape the curse or blessing of timing. And for Bumble 1.0, it was a god-given blessing. To not leverage this Lucky Girl syndrome would have been a disgrace. Bumble wasn't just an app, it was a movement.

Starting point is 00:14:33 Its growth perfectly lined up with a peak of the hashtag Me Too movement, which began to spread virally through the Harvey Weinstein case in 2017. By December 2015, the app had reached over 15 million conversations and 80 million matches, and as of November 2017, Bumble had over 22 million registered users. By January 2018, CNBC reported that Badoo was seeking a sale that could value the company at about $1.5 billion. And by 2020, and I saw this really cute guy on there,

Starting point is 00:15:05 so I swipe right and we matched right away. Bumble hit over 100 million users worldwide. Then the $13 billion in valuation after listing the shares on NASDAQ exchange in 2021. And that was exactly when I bought my overpriced stock. Suddenly, Bumbo became a female empowerment brand, a social statement. And so did it.

Starting point is 00:15:29 many other brands that recognized purple washing is pretty damn profitable. Companies like Dove, Cover Girl, and Swiffer have used feminism to advertise their products but were notorious for perpetuating unrealistic beauty standards or traditional gender roles. Famous women athletes are used as examples of quote-unquote girl power in advertisements, yet only 0.4%. Of total commercial investment in sports goes into women's sports. Because here's what they won't tell you. We already have it.

Starting point is 00:16:04 To what extent was it genuine for Bumble? And would it eventually bite the brand back? Stay tuned for the next era. But another success factor? Third, insane brand consistency. Just like personal branding for iconic artists, like Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, in the digital world of pixels,

Starting point is 00:16:25 a brand without a signature look where color is a waste of internet space to be destroyed in an algorithm tsunami. The yellow branding, the busy beam metaphor, the girl boss energy of Bumble. Every single touchpoint screamed, we are not Tinder. What was more advantageous was that Whitney herself as the founder served as the perfect ambassador. She wasn't hiding behind the app. She was the app. Young stylish articulate, TED talk ready, she was the girl boss,

Starting point is 00:16:53 Jen Y, wanted to swipe right on, and her association, or should I say, direct embodiment of the brand made it aspirational the it girl so rare in entrepreneurship let alone tech entrepreneurship Whitney will have heard Whitney gave bumble this unique halo of an it girl in the apps bumble wasn't just the it girl and dating apps bumble was the it girl of all the apps the it girl of tech the it girl of stem the it girl of business but what was even smarter that would blow your mind was fourth her extremely creative expansion strategy that brings us full circle into her sorority experience.

Starting point is 00:17:37 As Steve Jobs said, the dots will always connect in retrospect. Which is why my mantra is no effort will ever go to waste. Whether that's in business and relationships, anything. You either win or you learn, which is also a win. And never have Whitney Wolf heard probably dreamt that her sorority experience brought Tinder than Bumble to life. Why is it that so many new apps fail? And why is it that it's almost impossible to create another dating app?

Starting point is 00:18:08 Despite the fact that all the current ones don't work too well. I'm crashing out. First, the product and algorithm dilemma. I don't like dating app. They're not fun, spontaneous, or sexy. And I really think that my 20s should be fun, spontaneous, and sexy. Really annoyed. Which we will touch on in the end on one obvious and one hidden reason.

Starting point is 00:18:27 of why dating apps don't quote unquote work. And if there is a way to counter both fatal flaws. Second, monopolization and first mover advantage. The first mover advantage is a strategic business concept where the initial entrant in a market gains a competitive edge due to being first to introduce a product, service, or technology. Do you believe in love at first sight? IDK is striking my name.

Starting point is 00:18:53 Do you? I do now. This is due to five hindering products. products for the latecomers. First, strong brand recognition. Being the first to market can help establish a strong brand identity and make the company synonymous with the product or service. For example, we often say, oh, I'll just Uber to somewhere, when in reality we're using Lyft or other services. Second, customer loyalty.

Starting point is 00:19:17 Early adopters can develop strong loyalty to first mover, making it harder for competitors to gain market share. Why download another app when the current one you have solves the problem? Third, early market share. First movers can capture a significant portion of the market before competitors enter, potentially leading to a dominant position. Remember, Bumble was launched after Tinder already took off. And Hinge also existed a year before, which leads to 4, the network effect. A dating app, just like a social media app, is dependent on social behavior,

Starting point is 00:19:50 which is why it's almost impossible to build another Instagram. The network effect describes how the value of a social media app, of a product or service increases as more people use it, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where the growth leads to further growth and vice versa. Surely a cooler social media app can be created, but it will never catch up to the self-reinforcing skill of Instagram. And for a dating app, it's all the more hard when you inherently need users to make the futures work, but to start from a zero user, while the other apps like Tinder already have 50 million active users and Hinge at the time had one-fifth of the market share.

Starting point is 00:20:29 It really feels like Bumble was trying to catch up to a Lambo and a Ferrari that drove off last week by going on foot. And fifth price premium. In the absence of competition, first movers may be able to charge higher prices, leading to increased profitability, which better squeezes out competition. Which is also why in the early days to compete for first mover advantage, Companies like Uber gave crazy, crazy discounts and incentives that operated at losses before killing off competition, then raising their prices. I kid you not, one time I accidentally set the Uber location from LAX to LAX,

Starting point is 00:21:07 and it literally tried to charge me $50 to move 6 feet. So how in the world did Whitney and our team even create the slim, slim chance of fighting in the ring of existing giants? Curiosity, curiosity, and culture. Quote, I remember we would make these signs that had the big axes. You know, like you're not allowed to. And they said no Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Bumble. This was week three of Bumble and we would post those all over the university. So there was this association where it was, wait, I can't do all the things I really want to do,

Starting point is 00:21:44 I want to sit in class and Snapchat, I want to sit in class and Instagram, what the hell is Bumble? And so we were essentially seeding this psychological curiosity. And then to capture more organic attention. Then we were actually sending young women wearing bumble shirts into classes 10 or 15 minutes late. Interrupting a class of 300 people and saying, oh, sorry, wrong room, but everyone's looking at this young woman or young man, whoever it was, wearing a bumble t-shirt. So we were seating curiosity in this like, why is Bumble everywhere type of thing? On top of which, Bumble was really one of the first brands to

Starting point is 00:22:19 really leverage meme accounts with millions of following and reach. I actually know one of the top girl culture meme creators, millions of followers on Instagram, and she helped blow up Bumble back in their growth days by doing viral meme posts that literally cost Bumble only a few hundred dollars, where the earned media value was way over hundreds of thousands, if not millions, because this was before influencer marketing was really a thing for faceless accounts. Thus, they were able to really appeal to a high high,

Starting point is 00:22:49 highly, highly targeted audience at super low cost. What's more genius about Whitney's marketing strategy is that she didn't waste her energy targeting everyone. Because if you target everyone, you target no one. She picked out the best C group to start her own network effect, which, just like Mark Zuckerberg did with Facebook, with college students. Get ready with me to go on a first date. And this was already tested in her Tinder days, where as a freshly graduated college student with sorority and Greek life connection,

Starting point is 00:23:21 Whitney infotrated into the student body and converted them into users. Not to say only I could do this or only somebody else could do this, but there was a superpower in the timing of it all because I just graduated. I knew all of these people. So if some random startup founder knocks on a sorority door, the police are coming. You can't do that. So I felt like I had this insider hook, right? because I was technically an extension of that by proxy because I had just been on the college campus.

Starting point is 00:23:51 And all my girlfriends were still there. And then she put a very attractive female and male students face on a Tinder screen with the caption, Find out who likes you on campus. And I printed a thousand cop and I quite literally handed different students on campus $20 to go distribute them under dorm doors and to put them on windshields and to put them in their different social clubs and to essentially distribute these flyers everywhere. She printed out custom t-shirts that her girlfriends wore to the bar that essentially said don't ask for their numbers, just download the app. The sheer amount of creativity and resourcefulness of these tiny little campaigns is just next level. And Whitney herself said, quote,

Starting point is 00:24:31 and so a lot of people think I can just go start an app and I'll just buy some Instagram ads and I'll just be successful. But if people only knew, the fraction of the insane everyday little hacks that I did and our team did to bring this to life. And this is the art of marketing. To not just follow the blueprint and learn ads manager on meta, but think about the nuanced ways to actually effectively reach the ideal customer base, which if done once to dinner, sure, you can call that luck, but done twice to growth hack bumble as well. Regardless, what you think about the app, the founder, the initial branding and marketing are iconic. and beyond just a tactical side of growth hacking against existing giant companies,

Starting point is 00:25:18 the product itself on Bumble made it distinguishable. Regardless of how effective the features really are or are not, that's a whole separate issue. Part of their smart expansion plan was the introduction of Bumbo BFF and Bumble Biz, positioning themselves as a relationship platform, not just a hookup app. I went on another Bumble BFF date and that's what a girl's gotta do, okay? I need to make friends. were just like building a strong personal brand, Bumble was playing the long game of developing trust through building Goodwill. But despite the four marketing wins, exciting story of the underdog, with perfect product market fit,

Starting point is 00:25:55 insane brand consistency and creative expansion strategy, every action has a reaction. And below the glory of Bumbo 1.0 also had two major ticking time bombs. That will lead to their branding crisis. You guys are gonna think this is crazy. The first branding warning was leaning too hard into the men or the problem narrative. Bumbo's initial differentiation worked because it framed women as in control. But at some point, it felt like Bumble was scolding its male users.

Starting point is 00:26:29 You can't alienate half of your audience and expect engagement to stay very high. And if half the users don't find the experience enjoyable, you'd find a major matching problem. Bumble is a stupid app. Correlated with the second branding warning of not innovating fast enough. It almost felt like the biggest revolution of Bumble was making women make the first move, which A, some women prefer not to. Studies showed that 86% of women say they want a man to make the first move.

Starting point is 00:27:00 Even when the app requires them to make the first move, they still don't want to make the first move. And B does not actually solve the matching rate issue nor the success rate after two people match. The app experience barely changed while Hinge ate their lunch with video prompts, voice notes, and better matchmaking algorithms. But there was no time to worry because Bumble 2.0, the IPO High, was calling for a worrisome celebration. We are building something for the long term. You're not joining us on our journey today just for tomorrow. You are signing up for our very long road ahead of us to try and make relationships healthier and more equitable

Starting point is 00:27:39 and to build a brand that resonates, not just with women, but makes connections better for everyone. 13 billion dollar valuation, feminist Wall Street icon moment. It seems like the Bumble universe was invincible, but the cracks were forming. In this era, both Whitney and Bumble's Lucky Girls Syndromes were peaking high, with two notable success factors while the hidden cracks soon to become hidden gaps. The first marketing win was, of course, hitting 100 million users worldwide in 2020. then going public as a female-led tech company, which topped $13 billion in valuation after listing shares on the NASDAQ exchange.

Starting point is 00:28:17 Whitney became the youngest female CEO to take a company public, and she did it with her 18-month son on her hip as she ran the NASDAQ bell. This wasn't just a winning moment for Whitney, this wasn't just a winning moment for Bumble. This was a winning moment for women. The underdog that every woman and ally supported finally got the crown, of the deserving a girl boss babe. Moreover, the second marketing win

Starting point is 00:28:44 is our old friend timing of the market again. With the COVID lock-in love surge, that made every single lonely person ever more lonely in a physical and emotional pandemic. All the dating apps thrived, and it was a great time for the macro landscape. And Bumble capitalize on it with video dating features and branding that leaned into slow dating.

Starting point is 00:29:06 But as they say, the higher you rise, the harder the fall. Because by 2021, the B seems to hit our hard wind through first loss of cultural relevance. By 2021, Bumble's branding felt stale. The feminist dating app hook wasn't feeling fresh anymore. The repetition of feminist sounding ad begin to feel overdone, thus inauthentic.

Starting point is 00:29:32 And Gen Zs weren't resonating with it, the same way millennials did. Bumble is not for the girls. Do not go on Bumble. Why should I have to start the conversation? I liked your profile. And that's a huge problem because as with any product or service, there is always a turn. So in order to stay profitable, you need to acquire new users.

Starting point is 00:29:52 As more and more mature demographics settle down or stop using dating apps, the future of the app depends on the affinity with future generations. And as Genzi myself, I could say that Bumble was more of a niche app as compared to Hinge in the last five years. Which brings up second. Tougher competition. Hinge was skyrocketing with better UX, with a catchy and hopeful phrase made to be deleted. When you find the real thing, you won't need us anymore.

Starting point is 00:30:18 Which is kind of the point. Which is also very debatable. The League and Raya were catering to the elites. There are all these other apps dedicated to specific racial demographics and non-heterosexual relationships. And Tinder was still the go-to for casual dating. Bumble was stuck in the middle. Sure, it's great to feel impactful.

Starting point is 00:30:37 as a woman user. But if another app ultimately comes up with a better solution with dating, whether it's higher quality matches or simply more users, then making women move first doesn't seem too much of a privilege anymore. It seems almost like a chore. Thus, not surprisingly, third, the stock crashes really left a dent on Bumble's public image. The market is really interesting. It does not automatically readjust like a magical invisible hand that it's supposed to.

Starting point is 00:31:06 Often, optimism leads to more optimism leads to more optimism, hence a bubble until it bursts. And pessimism leads to more pessimism, until something is so undervalued, successful opportunists, buy low and make a ton of profit, then that leads to a new wave of optimism. That is, if the subject actually has intrinsic value higher than perceived. In Bumble's case, though, the IPO hype faded and user engagement started dropping. Bumble stock price plummeted. From $75 to under $15 by 2023.

Starting point is 00:31:42 Investors started questioning if it's a real growth company or just a good PR story, aka me. So for the first time, the underdog princess that everybody has been rooting for is now beginning to seem like a poser who just has a pretty story. And with that leads to the perfect storm of a branding crisis. Bumble 3.0. Desperation Bumble is in its We're Trying Everything Phase. New leadership, a less radical feminist tone, and an attempt to win Gen Z. Except while it is trying to be the cool feminist cousin at Brunch,

Starting point is 00:32:28 it is 2025, and it's still showing up in 2017 merch, quoting Cheryl Sandberg. What really went wrong? That led a $13 billion brand lose over $12 billion of value. How did the once a $13 billion valuation remain? only $467 million market cap as of April 2025 and how did Bumble go from our favorite it girl to cringe girl? What a disaster this was for Bumble. Two major branding crises.

Starting point is 00:32:59 The first one related to culture. Well, the irony of success is that it leads to complacency, which leads to failure, which produces learning, which leads to success, that leads to, again, complacency. And unfortunately, Bumble was stuck in complacency before the 2020s way too long, before now frantically trying to rebrand. Except how is the timing this time? Is it still Lucky Girl Syndrome or more of a curse?

Starting point is 00:33:27 How did Bumble become Fumble? We first need to understand why it really needs this rebrand. First, it got stuck in Girl Boss mode and the internet moved on. Bumble's entire brand identity was built during the era of Lean-in, Millennial Pink, and the future is female tease. Back then, women make the first move felt fresh, disruptive, even empowering. Now, it's giving Lives Laugh LinkedIn. Uh, Gen Z doesn't really want to be marketed like they're in a dove ad.

Starting point is 00:33:58 The whole aesthetic felt like corporate feminism, cosplay. Second, the app experience feels like a group project where no one's texting back. So, do you want to meet up this weekend? You match, you message, you wait, you question everything, you unmatch. And if you don't message within 24 hours, the match disappears like love wasn't hard enough already. Now it's on timer leading to an even lower success rate, hence lower customer satisfaction, hence lower active user,

Starting point is 00:34:26 hence lower annual recurring revenue, hence lower valuation. Third, men don't know what to do and women are tired of doing it all. Dating is exhausting. The women message first rule puts pressure on one side, but here's the problem. Some don't respond others, respond, weird look at the last guy now look at me back to the last guy now to me look down now look up where are you you're with the man of your dreams on bumble just like any other dating apps and women they were out there opening with witty lines curating bios like personal brand decks only to get a

Starting point is 00:35:01 hey back oh my god bro it's giving quote i want it equality not a customer service row fourth it's trying too hard to be more than it is. We need to have a very candid discussion about Bumble BFS.S. It's weird. Bumble wants to be your dating app, your networking tool, your platonic soulmate finder, your social impact movement.

Starting point is 00:35:26 But instead of doing one thing great, it's doing three things mid. Late to the party, Hinge has already claimed the relationship app space and Tinder still dominates casual dating. Bumble's niche isn't very clear anymore. It's not a cutting-edge dating app, and there's already Instagram, Snapchat,

Starting point is 00:35:43 I message everything else for friendship. And of course, LinkedIn for Career. When the brand was too focused on telling a killer story, it forgot the fundamental law of marketing that even the best marketing needs a product to sell. If you put crap on a silver platter, it is still crap. Like a genuine fucking problem that have infiltrated society and disrupted human behavior

Starting point is 00:36:06 and praying on human psychology. People might buy it once, but we all know the story of the boy who cried wolf with way too many dating apps, fighting for paid subscribers, and Bumble not offering enough unique value. Of course, it leads to subscription fatigue. With a quarter-over-quarter decline of approximately 60,000 paying users in Q4, with management anticipating a steeper drop of 100,000 to 120,000 in Q1 this year. Bumble never stood out as the app to win from a product angle.

Starting point is 00:36:39 Its competitive advantage plus its cultural relevance. But since radical feminism, Me Too, was out, then the only way to go is 180, right? Hence, Bumble went for a rebrand that gave desperation. First, it removed its big innovation, where women no longer need to make the first move. Then, it launched a few warm and welcoming celibacy as that read, quote, you know full well, a vow of celibacy is not the answer. Or, quote, Quote, thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun.

Starting point is 00:37:15 Neither of these landed very well. I'm shocked! And made all the marketing effort of Bumble in its glorious days a cheap act. As an app built on being a safe place for women, this sudden rebrand by completely removing their core feature, and then going for such a bold but opposing view, it feels like it will do anything and everything to get a new user. Basically addressed women in the most misogynistic way possible and completely sold out.

Starting point is 00:37:44 That the brand has no backbone and will swing with whichever direction it's guessing the culture is going. Except trying to be cheeky came across as shaming women and a huge slap to the face to their prior years a brand building. Was a rebrand necessary? Absolutely. They can't keep using the same 2017 millennium feminism, but a rebrand is about making things refreshing, not shitting on your core brand value, especially when appearing so desperate to get people dating that they are calling anyone who doesn't a nun and killing their only innovation

Starting point is 00:38:20 that women move first. Quote, it is sad what has happened to this app, quote, it has become a place of crickets, quote, horrible money grabbing app to make matters worse. The second branding crisis is related to the bigger picture problem, but not just bumble. Match group, the company behind Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, Grindr, and plenty of fish has also seen its stock taking a beating. It's down nearly 80% from its peak in 2021. It's just that Bumble is struggling more at 93% due to its cultural fatigue factor on top of the wave of dating app fatigue. There are two reasons for this. The first one is more obvious and the second one I haven't really seen anybody talk about.

Starting point is 00:39:04 So, factor one first. It's that this overall fatigue is due to dating apps inherent contradictory revenue model. To get to the bottom of this, we need to first understand how dating apps make money. Contrary to what many believe online dating isn't a new phenomenon. As early as 1995, Gary Kriman, a Stanford graduate, had a light bulb moment of why not use the internet to help people find love. At the time, the internet was still a novelty, but dating was expensive. People had to use premium rate phone lines, that was a lot. charged $3 a minute to connect with potential matches.

Starting point is 00:39:39 So Creamman's idea was simple. Make dating cheaper and more accessible. And that's how Match.com was born. And that became the match group today. The parent of Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, etc. But there was one problem. Dating apps were too efficient. If people found the perfect match quickly,

Starting point is 00:39:57 they'd leave and fewer users meant less money. So how to keep the users hooked? This episode is brought to you by Tellus Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season? Sorry, what? Yeah, cybercriminals love tax forms. But I've got Tellus Online Security.

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Starting point is 00:40:40 Steep. Flip. Or that and enjoy. Via Rail, love the way. Putting out a less effective, premium version, where the premium features were locked behind a paywall. Want better profiles?

Starting point is 00:41:04 Pay up. Unlimited swipes, that will cost extra. Even visibility within that comes with a price tag. with a price tag. This is why an invite only $500 a month, aka $6,000 a year tier exists for Tinder. And wow, is it efficient. Po, I know a guy who did it and he went from 10 to 20 matches every week to 100. To which someone responded,

Starting point is 00:41:29 Po, you should just pay for sex directly instead. Loll. Sure. A lot of money is to be made through this revenue model. The match group easily did $3.4.79 billion in 2024. which was a 3.41% increase from $3.365 billion in 2020. But is this sustainable? Users started experiencing something called the dating app fatigue,

Starting point is 00:41:55 where sifting through endless profiles became exhausting. Even when they found a match, there was no guarantee that the other person was looking for the same kind of relationship. The cycle repeats, swipe, match, chat, move on. It doesn't surprise anyone that the global dating app downloads have been falling from 278 million in 2020 to about 237 million in 2023. But more importantly, is the singlehood epidemic really to be blamed on the bad design of the dating apps or something else? In other words, are dating apps the problem?

Starting point is 00:42:28 Or are we the problem? To solve the dating app fatigue for not just Bumbo but for any matchmaking services out there involve two problems. First is aligning the revenue model of the brand with the six match of the users instead of the continued usage. As long as this is not solved, the apps are just a Trojan horrors of dopamine hits of ego validation and meaningless time wasting. Instead of quote unquote for the noble cause of human connection, you can literally do that for free. By exiting your door, go outside, touch some grass, instead of going through 300 disappointing pixels of profiles seen on screen,

Starting point is 00:43:05 this of course would involve a rewriting of algorithms and recalculations of the cost to your host a user before delivering the match results to factor in covering that through either a fee charged the user upon successful matching or an entry subscription fee to incentivize faster matching or add placements. But the second, more complex problem that no one really talks about is adverse selection in the dating market. This brings back good old memories to game theory and econ class. We're more than just a misalignment of user versus brand incentives. We could be looking at a serious information problem. Economist George Ackreloff won a noble price for his work explaining how information problems like this can ruin a market. Classically demonstrated through the second-hand

Starting point is 00:43:51 car market example. It is well known that as soon as you drive a new car off the lot, its value drops a fat chunk. For a long time, economists explained this phenomenon by claiming that people just place a premium on having a brand new car. But Akrloff offered a different explanation. Buyers of used cars lack vital information of what they are buying. When you buy a used car, there is always a chance that it could be a lemon, aka the term for a piece of junk. And because of the risk of buying a piece of junk, buyers don't want to pay top dollars.

Starting point is 00:44:25 They will treat every car like a potential lemon and demand a discount, even if the cars they are buying may actually look and run great. And that creates a problem for high quality sellers. Just imagine someone trying to buy the Ferrari you only drove once for 10K. Of course you wouldn't sell. And so people who do not sell junk will get lowballed, leading to them leaving the market. The result is a market where lemons, aka junk cars, become more prevalent.

Starting point is 00:44:54 It's a vicious spiral, where as more buyers become more suspicious that every single car is a lemon, they demand further price markdowns, and owners of good used cars become even more unwilling to sell at the lower price. Ultimately, the entire market gets destroyed. No one's buying and no one's selling. Now, putting this in the situation of dating apps, it is very possible that a similar dilemma occurs. A new app starts up and hopeless romantics looking for real love begins lock into it.

Starting point is 00:45:21 But so do sleazy types who lie on their dating profiles. Over time, the earnest daters go on a bunch of bad dates encountering people who have no interest in real relationships or whose profiles are completely misleading. So it drives to people looking for high quality, authentic. connection out of the market. Who might go to a new app with the hopes of finding something better and the cycle begins again. But one or two bad apples can ruin the whole damn tree.

Starting point is 00:45:48 To solve the car problem, warranties exist where companies like Carfax offers trusted information about the history of used cars, which in the case of a job market is like a trial period or having references and dating people met organically through friends of friends who have been vetted. But within an app, unless if they can figure out a solution like Airbnb's rating system to bridge the information asymmetry, which opens up its own can of worms. The quality of the data's on the app is going to deteriorate if the growth of new users do not match up the turn rate, which is why you often hear or no friends who found their true love on apps like Hinge or Tinder when the apps were still good. Because the average

Starting point is 00:46:30 selection problem is only going to make your chances slimmer and slimmer. Unless, of course, you pay 6K to unlock more informational advantage on your end. All this is way more than just a branding problem, but a product problem. However, for our lovely Bumble, having not just a product problem, but also a branding problem, puts Bumble in a dangerously fumbling position.

Starting point is 00:46:56 So what are some potential branding strategies that could at least alleviate the almost $13 billion of Bumble Fumble? So hopefully my stocks can rise up again. But more importantly, real authentic connections can actually blossom through the tools. First, bold new differentiation strategy. The women first branding strategy alone won't cut it. They need a new era definition. Maybe AI-driven matchmaking, exclusivity, or a stronger IRL social element.

Starting point is 00:47:25 Their biggest branding crisis right now is the lack of a competitive edge. Their whole edge was their woman forward story. Now that's gotten stale and also stepped on by their own. genius rebrand, it's got to shift again. I like the kindness for his prioritization, but it's too vague right now. Because at the end of the day, the users are there to solve a problem focus

Starting point is 00:47:48 on solving one dating problem really, really well for a specific group of people first. Market the hell out of that winner feature before worrying about noble but empty goals like kindness and confusing users with many features like BFF and networking. Second, stronger Gen Z marketing. Less corporate, more unhinged TikTok strategy. Think hinges voice prompts, but taken further.

Starting point is 00:48:16 Make it a brand with personality. Heck, the B can become its own main character by Duolingo. The Amelia de Moldenberg collab, perfect, culturally relevant, very, very on brand. In or out. Okay. Do more like that. I also think a podcast focused on all the day. dating tea and help seeking from the actual bumble users could be super engaging.

Starting point is 00:48:53 Obviously, legal and PR would have more work to do, but it creates a real community. Instead of only using it as a buzzword. I was gonna pull my hair out and really contemplate on a third strategy, but I'm gonna level with you. I've been so chat-liked and sleep-deprived and waking up at 4 every day this week and feel very brain-dead at this moment. So if you want more elaborate branding strategies, that request down in the free email list pre-sounding form and if you happen to be bumble or Whitney just shoot me an email happy to chat happy to do an episode together this is a critical

Starting point is 00:49:28 moment for bumble they can either reinvent themselves or fade into being just another dating app to go from 13 billion dollars to 2 to 0.4 to who knows what's next with so so much potential in the beginning and all the favorable market conditions it's honestly quite sad to see the ones a girl of the apps the symbol of hope for women-led businesses women-led tech to go downhill like this but who knows perhaps with the help of AI product innovations and shift in branding to reappeal to gen z and gen alpha miss bumble can come back stronger than a 90s trend so let me know in the comments do you think bumble fumbled or do they still stand a buzzing chance let me know what brand you like me to analyze next through clicking the email list link in the description

Starting point is 00:50:17 If you could share this episode with someone, you'd be gifting them the greatest gift to help them grow. And it's completely free to you. This is your marketing bestie, Zoe Unlimited. Episodes are available on all podcast networks, Apple, Spotify, YouTube. Have a beautiful day. And I will see you next week. Rosen lasagna, medium power. 15 minutes.

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