Love is the oldest business on the planet, but it is not free from the crisis. Match Group, parent company of Tinder and other dating applications such as Meetic, OK Cupid or Hinge have lost 60 percent of their market value since 2020, and this February they laid off 200 workers from their entire workforce globally.
Among the reasons are the poor economic results of Tinder, its flagship, motivated, above all, by a decrease in consumption and a greater than expected weakening in the productive execution of the application. But the rise of another ‘digital matchmaker’ gestated, precisely, in the hard core of Tinder also influences; considered so far, the mobile application most profitable in the world.
sex scandal
Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and CEO of Bumble, launched the app in 2014 with the goal of creating a comfortable and empowering online dating space for women. The co-founder of Tinder, where, among other things, she came up with the app’s name and spearheaded its push on college campuses, she left the company after a high-profile sex scandal.
Wolf Herd and company co-founder and CEO Justin Mateen dated in 2013 until, he has repeatedly explained, he became controlling and “verbally abusive”. Ultimately, she was forced to resign from Tinder in 2014 and, as she explains, she was “erased from the company’s history.”
The one who would later found Bumble, filed a lawsuit for sexual harassment against Tinder and eventually settled for over a million dollars. Since then, Bumble has expanded beyond dating, specializing in networking and friendship as well, and she’s currently valued at almost 4 billion dollars.
Bumble Features
Bumble is sold as an application focused on breaking stereotypes, where its main attraction is that women take the first step as they are the ones who should send the message. Its operation is similar to that of Tinder (swipe to the left if you don’t like someone and to the right if you like someone), but once the match is achieved, the woman has 24 hours to start a conversation. If she doesn’t, the match will disappear.
The application was born as a counterpart to Tinder, where there is an unwritten rule that the man should start the conversation. In addition, it is a good way to give that push to women more introverted. But what makes the difference in this application is the fact that the actions of the men are quite restricted.