How is vengeance Tinder, the world's second most profitable dating app, Bumble?
Author | Yu Heng
It is no longer a strange concept for strangers to socialize, Momo Inc in ChinaWell-known APP, such as Exploration, soul and so on, have all started a trend of making friends online. But in fact, the idea of making friends through software was not pioneered by Momo Inc, but came from the United States on the other side of the ocean. Dating site Match.com opened the prelude to strangers socializing in the PC era, and then Tinder started a wave of strangers socializing in the mobile Internet era, and created a large number of related listed companies represented by Tinder parent company Match group.
On January 15th, another American company that specializes in socializing with strangers filed an IPO application with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bumble, which prepares for NASDAQ.Listed on the stock market, with an estimated valuation of $60-8 billion. It has two APP, Bumble and Badoo, which focus on making friends, and Bumble is undoubtedly the top priority.
Bumble is a social software similar to Momo Inc, users can choose who they like according to their own preferences on the platform, and if the two sides like each other, they will have the opportunity to communicate further. In terms of realization, Bumble mainly depends on membership fees. To put it bluntly, the company earns money for young people's desire to make friends, and users who want to improve the success rate of matching will become paying members to get extra benefits. In addition, users can further purchase toolkits for additional benefits, such as increasing their exposure to other users' phones.
Bumble2019's annual revenue is $489 million, up 35.8% from $360 million in 2018. Of this total, Bumble APP realized revenue of $276 million, up 69.7% year-on-year. Total revenue of other social apps, such as Badoo App, was $213 million, up 7.9% from a year earlier. It can be seen that Bumble APP is the main driving force for the company's future growth.
Unlike the dating software that we are usually familiar with, Bumble APP has a clear female-dominated social tendency, which is closely related to the experience of founder Whitney Wolfe.
Wolfe was originally the co-founder of social software Tinder, but later broke up with another co-founder and boyfriend Justin Mateen, and the breakup rose to a sexist level. Wolfe made public the words Mateen used to insult women in text messages. On the other hand, the other co-founders of Tinder also want to remove their co-founder status because of Wolfe's female identity. So Wolfe, who left Tinder, founded Bumble and began to compete with his old employer.
From the point of view of product commonness, Bumble retains Tinder's interactive logic of "slipping to the right and giving likes to the left without feeling", but the difference between the products is more obvious.
The biggest difference is that Bumble encourages women to take the first step, so after the match of both parties on Bumble, the woman must send a message to the man within 24 hours before the two sides can continue to chat, otherwise the two sides can not continue to communicate.
In this way, the female-dominated atmosphere of making friends can play a role in purifying the environment of making friends on the platform, avoiding a lot of men who want to date P to reduce the user experience of female users. As a result, there will be a relatively higher proportion of female users on the platform. According to the prospectus, the ratio of female users to male users on Bumble is 30 per cent higher than the average of similar apps. The higher the proportion of female users of the platform, the more attractive it will be to men. As of September 30, 2020, the number of monthly active users of Bumble APP reached 12.3 million.
On the other hand, in today's increasingly prominent female spending power, the benefits of having a high proportion of female users to the company's growth potential are self-evident. According to SensorTower statistics, Bumble has become the second largest dating app in the world in June 2020 in terms of revenue.
The online dating market that Bumble has cut into is booming. In 2020, except for China, the world has 190 million monthly online active users, and the North American market alone has 44 million monthly active users. At a time when the younger generation is increasingly delaying marriage, the dating market is expected to expand further. Bumble is expected to rely on the preferential treatment of female users to achieve a more high-quality user experience, so as to build a more harmonious community atmosphere and achieve sustained growth of users and revenue.