Whitney Wolfe Herd. At 25, started Bumble. You became the youngest woman to take a company public in U.S. history. Incredible accolades. You famously left the company. You’ve returned, now as CEO trying to turn it around. Should we expect this return to be permanent? Is this what you’re doing forever? Or is this just a temporary thing?
It's interesting. I'm just so in love with Bumble. 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, new releases, 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 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 wanna 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. I think this is something that is very lost on the investment community, frankly. They look at numbers as an overall volume. But what they fail to realize is culling the system and forcing quality over quantity means that there are some low quality payers that we have intentionally said goodbye to. 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 overset, 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 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 tough as nails now. You really can't hurt me. So 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.' 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. 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.
What does that look like that's different in the future than what you get today? Because today there are a lot of different ways you can optimize with paid. Are you saying that those things will now move to free, and there's even different things that become paid?
So it's very hard to talk about this without telling you what this new product is. And due to the competitive nature, and we're not ready to launch it, it's still in testing, I can't give you all the details. What I will say is that right now, one of the major pain points that we hear from members is that the free experience is not great. They feel like in order to get any value from our product, they're almost ushered into needing to pay. And what we're realizing is not all cohorts are interested in paying. Some are looking to experience something great before they pay. There's different engagement mechanisms with different audiences. So the way we're really approaching this is building experiences that are so good and letting you have a bit of it for free. But just like you're seeing with the AI models, you cannot just go build on Claude Code all day long for free. You can try it, and then when you want more, you have to upgrade. So that will basically be the way we think about this: how do we give you something good, it's working, you're happy with it. But to access it further, deeper, more intentionally, there are going to be more premium offerings. Also, if you want a more curated experience, if you want a more high-touch experience, Bee, for example, is our AI assistant, our AI dating assistant. So what you will see starting in Q4 and through 2027, Bee will start to come to life as a premium offering. And the willingness we've already seen through testing has been extremely encouraging and illuminating. People are willing to spend a deep amount of time talking to our AI assistant... People want to be known. People want the product to know who they are and what they're seeking, because they're here for an outcome. They're not on Bumble just to passively engage. They're on Bumble to find an outcome, which is a relationship, which is a connection.
Okay. So question for you on that. I look at some of your competitors, like Hinge. Hinge's entire model is it's the app that's meant to be deleted.
Is that what Bumble is going for? Meaning once you get someone in a relationship, the relationship between the user and Bumble ends? Or is the goal different from Hinge, that once someone gets into a relationship, they maintain a relationship with Bumble through BFF or through finding colleagues and work cohorts?
Yes, so I would say we have a very different mission, very different strategy than Hinge. I certainly don't want to keep a member trapped in a dating loop online just to be able to make some money. That is not my intention. That's not who I am as a CEO. My purest intention is to help people find love and connection. How does that manifest into the actual member dynamic with us, and how does that convert to their lifetime experience with our products? I believe that we can do both. We can help you meet a special someone, in which case you don't need Bumble for that. But we are going to, also starting at the end of the year and early into next year, be introducing more dynamic ways for a social life, to engage socially through Bumble. IRL products. How do we help you meet groups of people? How do we help you come together to do the things you love to do in the real world? So I actually envision Bumble being this social life enabler. And this is one of the things that is missing the most in our modern lives. We have an app for this and an app for that. What my hope and dream is, is that Bumble as a brand, as a company, becomes the way that we as humans rely on building a social graph in the real world. Not just hoarding friends online. How do you use Bumble to find a friend to get out and do something? If you met the love of your life on Bumble, you can still use BFF to find a book club, to find a group of girlfriends to go to Pilates with. This should be the anchor to your entire social in real life graph.
So how do you plan to make money from that? Because right now, BFF does not really make money. You're making most of your money from paid love subscriptions.
Yes. That is not due to lack of ability. That is an intentional strategy. We have really focused, and this has always been our philosophy, focus on building the base, focus on delivering an experience that people enjoy, and then you can find ways to monetize through a more robust or more enjoyable component of that product. And so we are going to start exploring monetization for BFF in '27. And that will look different than it does dating, because frankly, the way people come together socially and platonically is inherently different than the way they will pay for romance.
And I wanna just quickly go back to something you said on the groups. Should we be expecting Bumble to introduce like group dates?
Yes. You should expect that. So we will start to roll out group dating hopefully at the tail end of the year, but definitely Q1 '27. Group dating will not look like the app that we had in college. What was that? Or post-college, Grouper. It won't be like that. This will be a more dynamic, modern way to essentially get out on group meetups and to meet as groups, but for romantic purposes.
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 gonna hide profiles that aren't robust and that the effort is not there. For some people, that's actually a reflection of their personality is 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, right? 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.' So that is-
