Bumble App Expands its Reach Beyond Dating
Contributed by: kellyseal on Thursday, August 18 2016 @ 09:40 am
Last modified on
While Tinder is expanding its market share in the dating industry, Whitney Wolfe, one of Tinder’s ex co-Founders and now CEO of dating app Bumble, wants to take her app in a new direction outside of dating: business networking.
Bumble began as a dating app where women make the first move. Guys aren’t allowed to message or see a woman’s profile unless she allows it first, putting her in control of the interaction. Her app has gotten some buzz (excuse the pun), and has in the past year expanded its search and connection capabilities for friendships as well as romantic hook-ups with its feature BumbleBFF.
And according to recent articles in Gizmodo and The Verge, it seems the app wants to help you in another aspect of your life: your career.
Not that Bumble wants to be old school and resume-driven like LinkedIn. The Bumble execs wanted to create something fun and game-like to help grow your business connections and land you a dream job, so the app is the first in the career-networking industry to offer swiping. The new feature called BumbleBizz will match Bumble users by industry and location. The goal is to match people up with potential mentors as well as job contacts, leading to professional opportunities.
While in theory it’s good to have more access to job connections, do you really want to mix business with pleasure? That is to say, when you connect with a potential employer via BumbleBizz, you are also a user of the Bumble app, which is for dating. So it might make for awkward conversation to explain to a work colleague that yes, you are dating, but no, you’re not interested in dating him.
The BumbleBizz feature will also put ladies in a more advantageous position, making it easier for them to set the tone in a potential business relationship. A woman’s profile will only become visible if there is a mutual match, and like the dating app, the women will have to message the guys in their networks first.
Bumble has over 5.5 million users since its launch a year and a half ago, and aims to expand its user base with the launch of its new feature. Wolfe recently told Tech Crunch that BumbleBizz “was always part of the overall vision – to enable people to connect at the key engagement points in life. For love, for friendship and now for network.”
We’ll see if the app can intrude on LinkedIn’s territory, or if people are weary of mixing their dating apps with potential business connections.