Whitney Wolfe Herd Deep Dive

Founder at Bumble. We swipe right on her excellent career to date. 🤳

Author

Bill Kerr
May 29, 2024

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Disaster has struck. Literally three days of bed-ridden-ness, not being able to walk after some of the worst back spasms I have ever had. The great news is my partner has bought me, not only breakfast in bed, but lunch and dinner too. It’s been somewhat of a harrowingly painful staycation.

I did leave the house for the first time in half a week tonight to do an interview with one of my favourite founders in the world, Dom Pym, of Up.

The team at Up might be the best product team in Australia right now. I have been an obsessed user of their product for five years.

Let me synthesise the absolute brain smackdown Dom laid on me and put it into a piece for you.

It’s so dense with good stuff I want to post the interview but do a second piece as a deep dive. Let’s see.

Oh and Loom signed me me up to a free trial of Loom AI. Audio didn’t work. And above you can see the transcription they gave me in six different languages—or is it Esperanto maybe?

LEADER DEEP DIVE 🕵🏻

Whitney Wolfe Herd - Founder & ex-CEO at Bumble

Whitney Wolfe Herd (born July 5, 1989) is an American entrepreneurial mega-star. She is the founder, executive chair, and former CEO of Bumble, the online dating platform we all know and love, and also co-founded Tinder where she was Vice President of Marketing.

Herd was named as one of 2017's and 2018's Forbes 30 Under 30, and, in 2018, she was named in the Time 100 List. In February 2021, she became the world's youngest self-made female billionaire when she took Bumble public. 

She is also the youngest woman to have taken a company public in the United States, at age 31. An innovator. A leader. A powerhouse. 

The Queen bee herself.

But more than all of that, she more or less single-handedly reshaped the mechanism of how humans procreate. Let’s be honest, there might not be a human being on earth that doesn’t know some happily married couple, who ‘met on a dating app’.

Met on a dating app is short for ‘met on Bumble or Tinder’. Not only has Whitney reshaped love and relationships, but she has also played her part in many a successful, efficient, booty-call along the way. Let’s see how she did it.

Early years

Whitney was born to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father in Salt Lake City, Utah, home of the Mormon Church. She grew up with a pretty standard upbringing, attending the local Catholic high school until around grade six, when the family went on a sabbatical to Paris, France.

Young Whitney + other + dog. We believe Whitney is on the left.

After returning from France, Whitney attended college in Utah. She planned to study marketing or advertising but bombed the exam—crazy right—so she wasn’t accepted. Instead, she majored in international studies.

During her formative years at college, Whitney discovered her entrepreneurial, and somewhat humanitarian side, starting her first business selling bamboo tote bags to benefit areas affected by the BP oil spill. Proceeds were donated to the Ocean Futures Society.

‘Help Us Clean Up’ tote bags.

The project, named the Help Us Project, was a hit, receiving national press after celebrities such as Rachel Zoe and Nicole Richie were photographed with them.

After her studies, Whitney took off backpacking; “that was my dream” she would say later. “I wanted to be a Nat Geo photographer … so I went traveling through Southeast Asia”. During her time in traveling in the region, she took thousands of photographs, spent time working in orphanages and had her first ideation around the idea of building a dating app. Or at least an app that connects like minded people.

I want to ride around on the back of a moped in Laos and I want to go understand what do they do here, like, where do the 18 year olds go? What was their life like? What does their day look like?

And I thought, ‘Why is there not an app that does this? Why is there not something on my phone that can put me in touch with these people?’

- Whitney Wolfe Herd

But that was still to come. Upon returning, Whitney would move to LA and cut her chops by joining startup incubator, Hatch Labs, followed by Cardify, one of the companies in the Hatch Labs incubator.

It was there that she would make fateful connections that would open up the doors for the next stage of her career.

The Tinder years

Whitney’s first big hit was in 2012, at age 22, with Tinder, where she was credited as a co-founder and held the title of VP of Marketing. Tinder to this day is the largest and most well known dating app in the world.

The original Tinder; Match Box.

It was Wolfe who came up with the name, Tinder. She reportedly took inspiration from the flame logo and the idea of tinder, which is easily combustible material used to start a fire.

Tinder hosted pool party.

But the Tinder story was not a pleasant one for Whitney. Sure, she can look back with pride on creating one of the largest companies in the category, but it came with a massive amount of emotional scarring.

An (un)happy family at Tinder.

The Tinder exit

The end at Tinder came after Whitney and co-founder Justin Mateen’s relationship ended after dating for large parts of 2013 and 2014. It was a short lived romance that would bring a lot of pain to Whitney, claiming she was called things such as a ‘slut’ and a ‘liar’. Some which can be found in text messages from the subsequent court case Whitney would file through the California courts.

She claimed that she was sexually harassed and discriminated against at work, stripped of her co-founder title, and unfairly pushed out of the company.

The harassment came at the hands of her ex-partner, Justin Mateen. A small snippet of the conversation can be seen below.

How not to be a good human #1.

How not to be a good human #2.

If you want a deeper dive on the sad situation, TechCrunch did some great reporting on the story and this Business Insider piece delves into each and every text thread from their court case. My recommendation … don’t waste your time with it. It was nasty, it was gross and it’s in the past.

Let’s talk about sex, baby

It really is worth taking a moment to sit back and congratulate Whitney on her achievements. Not only did she re-invent a category, founding not one but both of the category leaders, she also rang the IPO bell younger than any woman has done it before.

These achievements on their own are momentous. When you consider how far back women start in the game of business, they are orders of magnitude more impressive again. Take a look at some statistics.

On ownership and funding.

Let’s look at something else interesting.

Women in the workplace. Source.

So let me get this straight…

You’re telling me that nearly half of the businesses in the US are owned by women … but they get only 1/50th of the funding of men … even though balanced and women led orgs crush it from a performance perspective.

The only things I can put this facts down to when I lay them bare, side-by-side.

HuMans. arE. DuMb.

The same BlackRock study, cited above, showed that companies with the most diverse workforces outperformed those with the least diverse workforces by an average of 29% a year between 2013 and 2022.

The only thing I can put this whole thing down to is that women don’t get funding because it’s hard for women to get funding. For example; a VC firm assessing a strong female founded startup may be interested in investing but gun shy due to the fact that they know the landscape doesn’t help female founders.

So the lack of funding, leads to a lack of funding, leading to a lack of funding. The cycle continues. I am not a VC, not an economist, so I do not have the answer. What I do know is that we should work our butts off to find one.

A digression - when analog dating turned digital

For time immemorial, dating was something you did in-person, eye-to-eye, mano e mano. From visiting your local dance-floor, to arriving uninvited to an old friends birthday party because that cute guy or girl was rumoured to be going.

It wasn’t until 1976 that the first pseudo-online dating startup took sprout. Great Expectations was a service where you would film a 3-minute video tape of yourself that would be shopped to prospective mates.

But like all pre-internet, internet-ish ideas, things didn’t really heat up until the 1990’s. The era that bought us Baywatch, the Spice Girls and Michael Jordan also brought us Kiss.com in 94’ and Match.com in 95’.

You could now log on via your dial up internet, waiting patiently for 7-12 minutes to send a digital message to the potential new love of your life. “Hey I hear Batman forever is supposed to be great, wanna hit the cinemas Saturday night” (bonus points if you were hitting Blockbuster, wink wink nudge nudge).

But it wasn’t until the turtleneck king, Steve Jobs, rolled onto the stage and announced the iPhone, that things really took off. Now you could find a date while sitting on the toilet. Ahh, the internet.

Online dating skyrockets. Courtesy; Stanford.

Shortly after we saw Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Grindr, Plenty of Fish hit the app store. Finding love was easier than ever. But the market was becoming saturated. And the business model was intriguing too. Retention should be at the heart of every good subscription business model. But the idea was that these were ‘the apps design to be deleted’.

Smart brand marketing by the team at Hinge.

But winners did emerge. People want love. And as Victor Hugo put it; “Nothing else in the world … is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” Let’s get back on track and here the story of baby Bumble through to IPO.

Bumble, the startup

The idea for Bumble came from Whitney’s frustration in what she’d helped create with Tinder, and the problems with all other dating apps that had come before it.

‘Wait a second, I know the problem, women don't go first, men do’. Men message as many women as they can, women are getting inundated, they never respond, the lack of response is causing a rejection, and the rejection is triggering an aggression, and that aggression is now translating into harassment and this is why women are being abused on the dating apps because if only they would go first the man wouldn't feel rejected, they'd feel empowered, it would totally calibrate this whole experience.

- Whitney Wolfe Herd

By giving women the chance to approach first, it created a safer space for women to find their next date. And it was working. Bumble quickly sprinted to 1M users within their first year, and 8M users shortly after.

“Changing the rules of the game”. A powerful positioning move.

Let’s look at a few of the tactics they employed to get to their first 1M then their first 8M users.

Network effects

On a two sided marketplace like Bumble, it needs considerable network effects to work. As more users, or in this example, let’s call them lovers … As more lovers join both sides of the marketplace, more matches are made, and more love is found.

When more love is found, more best friends hear about it, and more users join the network, strengthening the network, and improving the chance to find love.

A good business has a lot of ingredients, not just one. You have a lot of business that may have a great marketing team, but a poor product – or an incredible product, and poor marketing.

At Tinder, I’d been a big part of engineering network effect and I knew how to do it, and understood how to speak to a consumer and build an authentic brand – that said, I had the perfect partner, because Andrey brought everything to the table that I didn’t have; a robust infrastructure, 12 years of user data points, and the incredible technology he had spent so many years building. 

He and I were very much the ying to each other’s yang in the sense that he could not have been further disconnected from the branding and marketing world, and I could not have been from his world. Together, it was the perfect storm!  I was able to go to market and build an incredible brand with network effect, build a team culture and spirit, but the product worked beautifully because of Andrey’s contributions.

- Whitney Wolfe Herd

Guerrilla marketing

Bumble hustled, hustled and hustled some more in the early days before the network effects could really kick in. And a big part of it would fall under the guerrilla marketing umbrella.

*Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that uses unconventional tactics to delight and attract customers.

It is an alternative to traditional marketing, such as print media, television commercials, billboards, and direct mail.

Here are some great examples courtesy of Hubspot.

No, that’s an actual gorilla.

I mean we've done things that are ridiculous. So I remember we would make these signs that had the big X's, you know like you're not allowed to and they said, ‘No Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Bumble.’ This was like week three of bumble and we would post those all over the universities so there was this association where it was like, ‘Wait, I can't do the things I really want to do. 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 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 seeding curiosity in this like, ‘Why is Bumble everywhere?’ type of thing.

- Whitney Wolfe Herd

Whitney would go on to say about the early days of Bumble that; “Our small but mighty team of four would do anything and everything to spread the word when we first launched in 2014: whether it was wearing Bumble merchandise to bars or handing out stickers at college football tailgates, we were there.”

What the heck is this Bumble?

Incredible execution. This type of marketing also positions you as a rebel, as a pirate, as the underdog. And everybody loves an underdog!

Press, PR and turning a negative into a positive

A powerful way to grow a company is through free press. But for most early stage companies, free press is almost impossible to acquire. Not so for Whitney and Bumble. Whitney had the story of being a part of the Tinder success and also the unfortunate press related to the court case.

These two ingredients, albeit Whitney would likely have preferred go without the latter, were the perfect storm for PR for the young Bumble.

Early outlets who featured Bumble included; TechCrunch, Washington Post, Business Insider, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, NYT, and man, many more.

Bumble, the scaleup

By the end of the first few years, Bumble had turned into a behemoth with $10M in revenue in 2016, $100M in 2017, and $190M in 2018. But what got you here with, not always get you there.

So let’s take a look at some of the other growth mechanisms Bumble employed to go from up and coming phenom to global tech mega-star.

Queen Whitney at your service.

Socials and UGC

Bumble have always been incredible on the discovery platforms, such as, in their case, Instagram and TikTok. They are the perfect example of knowing where your customers hang out and meeting them there.

UGC on TikTok.

Brand marketing through COVID.

Not only do they foster brand loyalty and love on the social platforms, so much so, that they have an incredible backlog of user-generated-content, but they work with ambassadors and micro-influencers through their Bumble Honey program.

Leveraging socials, UGC and ambassadors has meant Bumble stay firmly top of mind as the place to go if you are looking for your next encounter with a new friend.

*It may be just me but the brand seems to be entrenched as where you go to find a mate, whereas Tinder is where you go to find a booty call. Maybe it’s just me but I feel like they have done a great job here.

Experiential and IRL marketing

Bumble began by gatecrashing frat parties at colleges, guerrilla style as mentioned earlier, but they have matured into hosting in-person events through their Bumble IRL program.

Add to that, the new Bumble Hive initiative where Bumblers get together in incredible, Bumble branded ‘hives’ all around the world.

Giving a brand a tangible feel makes it more than an idea, it makes it a reality. People are not only out there talking about Bumble, they can see it, touch it, feel it too. It’s the kind of thing that fosters incredible brand loyalty.

Partnerships

Partnerships are the next key piece to how Bumble scaled to the monster it is today. From Airbnb experiences through COVID, to music swiping partnerships with Spotify, to an OpenTable partnership helping plan your perfect date.

Babe x Bumble partnership.

Churn mitigation - going broad

Bumble has put a lot of energy into deepening it’s relationships with it’s users. Not only can you go on Bumble to date, but to find friends, to network, and more. This is to try to make Bumble more than just a dating app. But an app to help you find more meaningful connections in your life.

Bumble - the everything app?

Today Bumble has three main products. Bumble Date, which was the original and still the core of it’s business. Bumble BFF, a buddy finding option, which was launched in 2016. And Bumble Bizz, aimed to grow your professional network, added in 2017.

International expansion - going abroad

And lastly, moving into and conquering new markets. Whitney and the Bumble team have been able to amass a strong foothold in companies all across the globe. Bumble, as of 2023, has established an international presence of 58 million active users.

2.4 million of which subscribe to Bumble's premium features, such as additional likes, rewinds, and the ability to see who liked their profiles

Whitney, the leader

It goes without saying that Whitney is a phenomenal leader. I have taken a number of excerpts from her thought on entrepreneurship, management and leadership that hopefully we can all learn from.

Whitney speaking at Forbes 30 Under 30 event.

I really just tried to look for good humans that had potential. So actually, it’s interesting, a lot of the folks that I hired early on, they would not have gotten jobs off of LinkedIn, like, no one would have hired them based on a series of just random criteria, but my god when you spoke to them and when you just got in their mind for two minutes, you’re like, ‘You have so much potential’.

- Whitney Wolfe Herd on hiring.

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.

- Whitney Wolfe herd on grit.

When we have this type of scale, the world is literally your oyster, you can work with anyone, you can team up with any brand, you have access beyond, you know, our early founding wildest imagination, and so I think when you’re starting your company it’s like, ‘What can we do? We’ll do anything. We’ll take anything that we can get.’ And now it’s really about being extremely protective and very precise about what not to do.

- Whitney Wolfe Herd on focus.

The best thing I’ve ever invested into is time and dedication into my team at Bumble. That’s 100 percent the best thing I’ve ever invested in. And it’s been such a dedicated effort over the last 3.5 years, but really investing that extra hour or that extra day or that extra thought or that extra get to know someone. That’s the stuff that counts the most because, when you do that, you instil more than just a job opportunity.

- Whitney Wolfe Herd on team.

So, what I’ve told the team, and what the team has really learned, and they do it on their own, which is amazing, if you have a problem, please don’t come talk to me about it, unless you have a suggested solution.

I can’t just listen to problems. Come with two potential solutions. Like, hey, Whitney, we’ve got a huge issue. This situation has completely crumbled, and we’re committed to this or whatever happened. My suggested solution is either A) we do X, Y, and Z, or B) we could do this. And here are the consequences of both. And this is what is going to happen in each scenario.

And then, we can talk through that. And it goes to show that someone has actually thought through the other side of the fire. How do we get out of here? What’s the exit strategy? Not just oh, we were in a fire.

- Whitney Wolfe Herd on solving problems.

Bumble’s core values are kindness, accountability, equality, respect and growth. These values are a part of our DNA and will continue to guide us along with our north star and mission to end misogyny and to create a kinder internet in all corners of the world.

- Whitney Wolfe Herd on values.

I’m a firm believer that just as hate can spread hate, kindness spreads love. By creating a platform like Bumble that’s rooted in kindness and respect, it’s been so exciting to see this ripple effect of change in the way that people are connecting online.

- Whitney Wolfe Herd on impact.

It’s also worth mentioning that absolutely none of this comes without hard work. Real hard work. Wolfe claims to rise at 5:15am and immediately start work.

"I get no downtime. I don't get a weekend, I haven't lived like a twenty-something since I started Bumble in 2014”.

Playbook

  • Grit, determination and hustle. Early at both Tinder and Bumble, Whitney was scrappy, determined and employed tactics that do not scale to get traction. This is what it takes to go from zero to one.

  • Innovative thinking. Looking at an industry that is designed for churn, Whitney was able to continually invest in depth of product, but also breadth of offerings. Allowing them to build deeper connections and greater value to their users.

  • International expansion. Whitney built a playbook that landed Bumble in 150+ countries studying local customs, building partnerships and adapting the app to fit each region.

  • Leadership and vision. Whitney’s mix of ambition, creativity and feel for brand helped her craft a company that people want to join and turn her into a leader people want to get behind.

  • Impact. The most impactful products are those that actually do good in the world. Through lowering sexual harassment online to the Bumble women’s only investment fund she has built a truly impactful company.

Future

This year, in November 2023, Whitney announced that she was stepping away from her role as CEO of Bumble and handing over the reigns to ex-Slack CEO, Lidiane Jones. Whitney, stayed on as Executive Chair of the Bumble board.

What will come next for Whitney we are not altogether sure, but what we do know is that she has earned the right to take some time to decide. Enjoy some time with her young family, go fly-fishing in the river.

Whitney and bubba.

More of this to come.

Hopefully, at least for the short term, she can enjoy both of these two experiences with her phone on silent. Well done Whitney.

Fun facts

  • As of 2019, Bumble had an 85% female workforce with a women majority C-suite.

  • The name "Bumble" and its bee-themed branding were chosen to reflect the vision of creating a platform where women can make the first move, similar to the matriarchal society of a bee colony.

  • Due to Iceland's small population there's a special dating app for Icelanders that warns users if a potential partner is too closely related. This helps prevent accidental relationships between relatives in a country where everyone is somewhat connected​.

Iceland - where you cousin and your can inadvertently be one and the same.

  • 21% of LGB singles have found long-term partners via dating apps, compared to 11% of straight singles.

  • Men using the emoji ":-)" receive 13% more replies, but using ":)" leads to a 66% decrease in responses.

Extra reading

And that's it! You can learn more about Bumble here and follow Whitney on her LinkedIn here (she’s not very active and deleted her Twitter).

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Two weeks old but in case you didn’t see it.

Jeff Bezos on writing well as an organisation.

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