Whitney Wolfe Herd. She revolutionized dating apps for women. Bumble. On Bumble, the ladies are required to make the first move. At 25, started Bumble. 42 million active users. You've raised a couple of billion. You became the youngest woman to take a company public in U.S. history. It's going to be incredibly, as we say, hot IPO. You famously left the company. Bumble shares have been down about 45%. Whitney Wolfe Herd will be stepping down. You've returned trying to turn it around.
Love seekers abandoned dating apps for the old fashioned approach.
Should we expect this return to be permanent?
It's interesting. I'm just so in love with Bumble. I don't—I mean, it's just one of those things that I don't see Bumble as a job. I really don't. I don't wake up in the morning and say, 'Oh, I've got to go to work.' It's funny, I have three children, but I do see Bumble as almost a form of a child to me in some degree because I built this from sheer passion and grit, and it's just been this labor of love and resilience for so long. So I don't have a time horizon for how long I'll do something. But I'm always the type of person that says, 'I'll show up when needed.' And if I'm the best person for the role, I'll be here as long as it needs me.
This company is undergoing a major shift, and you are at the helm of that. Can you just give me a quick summary of why you think Bumble needs a reset?
Yes. So I think every company has to grow, evolve, and change, or companies die. That is life. And if you look at every great company, no company just stays flat or stagnant. If you look at Apple, there's new products, there's new releases, there's new launches. You're not using the iPhone that you had seven years ago. Bumble's product is still the product you had seven years ago. We have been operating on legacy tech infrastructure. And we are now overhauling that, building a modernized system so that we can deliver the product that members today both need, deserve, but also want. Behavior has changed. When I started this company, it was very novel and very revolutionary to be using your phone to date. A young woman just out of college would have never imagined online dating when I was starting this company. It was revolutionary. Now, the revolutionary component of Bumble has worn off. People are feeling exhausted. They're feeling fatigued. They feel like the swipe has degraded their love lives.
I saw something posted on your Instagram this morning that Bumble is maybe getting rid of the swipe. Is that true?
We are evolving into our next chapter. And we are synonymous with being the product where we put women in control. Our first move as a company was really having women go first and make that first move. And what we're saying internally is it's time for that next move. And that next move is not merely a better profile. It's not merely a better UI, UX, or simply a better recommendation engine, which by the way, we're doing all of those—the algorithm is the key to everything, making sure you see who you want to see, connect with who you want to connect with. But it's time for a new interaction model. It's time for the next Bumble. And so to answer the question, we are going to be saying goodbye to the swipe and hello to something that I believe is revolutionary for the category, and I'm very excited about it.
Wow, okay, so if the app reset is coming in Q4, we should expect the functionality of how we say yes or no to a potential match to not be a swiping mechanism.
In select markets in Q4, the swipe will be gone.
Fascinating, and let's talk a little bit about why we're doing this reset. One of the things that you have said is that you want to have sort of a more intentional user base. The business though is interesting. You've had paid users decline. You said that's part of this new reset, right? To get the company back to a healthier place. But is losing paid users really the way to get there?
So not all paid customers are created equal. What people fail to realize is a portion of the payer drop was low quality spam-like behavior. Why would we want a payer in the system that is degrading the experience, particularly for women? So we would much rather take a short-term hit on total payer numbers to really do the job that we set out to do as a very multi-stage process, which we're now entering phase two of. The first phase was cull system of low quality, low intent behavior, enforce better authenticity and better checkpoints to create a higher quality member base. We are member obsessed. The number one member complaint when I stepped back in as CEO was that women said they felt like the people they were seeing were not who they actually were. They felt like the quality of behavior was low. They felt like they were experiencing low quality. So we said, 'Okay, let's reset and overhaul the supply.' Step two is really overhauling the UX, the backend, which we're almost done with, and the interaction model in the profile and the way in which we interact with these higher quality members. And so that's the way I think about payers. The other interesting thing about payers and what I think a lot of the investment community fails to realize as well is people will go to the ends of the world for love. If you actually look at how much people are willing to pay to go out on high quality dates through, whether that's real life matchmakers, or coaches, or people to help them show up better, it is a lot higher than the subscription costs that we have. And we haven't even entered into this phase of a re-imagination of our revenue potential. So I fundamentally believe when you have all of the pieces in place—a higher quality member base, check, a new interaction model, a modernized profile, a next-gen recommendation engine, a modern tech stack—and all of those components to come together with a more premium subscription offering, this is poised for the turnaround that I came back for.
You're sort of suggesting that Wall Street doesn't fully understand the current and potential value of this app. Why keep it public? Is there a chance that you would consider taking it private with investors that are strategic and would understand this vision?
So we are always exploring what's best for the shareholders. I obviously cannot comment on what the structural future of the company would or would not be. But what I will say is I think the benefit that I have garnered over the last few years of being a public company CEO is I'm thick as—I'm tough as nails now. I mean, you really can't hurt me. So, you know, my stock drops 40%, it goes up 40%, I keep showing up with the same level of passion, purpose, focus. You cannot rock me. And I think that this has been truly a masterclass in just learning how to stay focused on the long term, because you get pulled all over the place being a public company CEO. Whether this is forever or not, we'll see what's best for the company at the right time. And in the meantime, we just keep delivering good product and working hard behind the scenes.
I think the model you're describing where you have fewer members that pay more because they're more deeply engaged, it makes sense. But at the same time, your mission really is about making dating accessible to everybody. So how do you make sure that your app remains accessible to anyone who wants to date when you're trying to push people more towards a paid experience?
So I think if you look at the way monetization has been working at Bumble historically, we've almost monetized in the capacity of saying, 'Hey, this freemium experience is maybe not great. Pay us and you'll get a better experience.'
Yes. It feels almost like engagement bait.
So the future of the monetization model in this new interaction and relaunch is let's give everyone something great. Let's just make the free experience great. But you're going to want more of a good thing. And what I could say here is, instead of paying for less of a bad thing, let's actually find interesting modalities to allow you to opt into more premium offerings to get more of a good thing. And that's the way we're approaching this.
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When I think about the people who took Bumble by storm, it was millennial women. Now we are in the era of Gen Z. Gen Z hates dating apps. They keep saying there's dating fatigue on these apps. So how do you plan to build the business when the biggest demographic coming into this dating game doesn't want to be dating online?
We showed our new product to a group of what I would consider the target demo, young Gen Z women. Unanimously, every single woman said, 'This is it. I will use this. This I will use.' And so we have been in the trenches with Gen Z, talking to them, hearing them, understanding what they don't like about Bumble, what they don't like about our competitors, what they don't like about dating in general. And we have put ourselves through this hybrid of a psychology and sociology experiment. We've gone so deep with what people want. And I would say my superpower is really understanding consumer behavior and seeing around the corner and being able to kind of pick up on that with women making the first move. That was precisely what made Bumble, Bumble. I believe we're on to the next horizon of that, and we have picked up on the thing that has been missing. It's so simple, but it's so powerful. And that will be the next product.
And in this new version, the emphasis on women making the first move, is that going to go away and remain?
You know, it's so hard to give you the answer without kind of giving you the answer. And we want to be delicate with how we roll this out towards the end of the year. We will not force one gender over another to do something first, but we will be basically bottling the essence of what was always meant to be women making the first move. A confident experience, a safe experience, a dynamic experience, to get you offline, in person, on great dates and meetups. The essence of that has been redesigned but very much intact, and now this is the next move. And that will be the core of how this new interaction model works.
One of the things you're doing to make sure that that user base is more intentional and authentic is you said that you're going to hide profiles that aren't robust and that the effort is not there. For some people, that's actually a reflection of their personality—that they're not the biggest try-hards in dating. That's kind of the point. So do you worry that in doing that you're alienating some people who could be great partners, they're just not great profile builders?
Yes. That's where AI comes in. This is where Bee will be such a catalyst to help the folks that are like, 'Listen, I'm a great person, but I have no idea how to have a profile.' I mean, if you made me build a dating profile right now, I would not know where to begin. So that is such an opportunity, both from a revenue opportunity, but also just helping people show up better. That's table stakes here. We just want everybody to show up as the best version of themselves. Low-hanging fruit. How do we help people get better photos? How do we encourage people, 'Hey, listen, you're great. That photo is not doing any favors for you.'
No, no, no. Absolutely not. Everything is about authenticity. So things we will not do, which I think is important for people to hear in the era of AI, we will not let you falsify who you are with AI. You cannot have falsified photos with AI. You cannot use AI to message people. We will not be leaning into AI as a replacement to human connection. Our goal is to leverage AI to make love and connection more human. So how do we actually keep the components of humanity that are great, but help people get there easier? Because you made a great point. Some of the best people have no idea how to show up. That's where AI can help be a catalyst to them learning how to do it, or making a few small tweaks that they didn't even realize were pertinent or relevant to how they could get some better outcomes.
Bumble has so many features that you can filter to match with someone maybe from your religious preferences or your demographic or location preferences. That functionality competes with a lot of niche apps that are built very narrowly, specifically tailored for people looking to connect on those levels. How do you think about competing against the niche? Do the niche have an opportunity to survive against the new Bumble?
