Contributed by: kellyseal on Wednesday, March 27 2024 @ 07:31 am
Last modified on Wednesday, March 27 2024 @ 07:36 am
Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones is reconsidering the app’s signature selling point: a dating app where females make the first move. The app is scheduled to relaunch later this year, and it seems everything is on the table.
Bumble’s longtime marketing strategy and company mission was to appeal to women and help them feel empowered while using a dating app. Jones however feels that things have changed, and it has become a “burden for a subset of our customers today," according to Yahoo! Finance[*1] .
The company has been testing out alternatives, from sending prompts to help women start conversations (and reduce their anxiety about doing so) or they can choose to let their matches start conversations instead.
She told Yahoo! Finance: "What it means to be an empowered woman today [is] that you feel in control of your experience."
She added that her main objective is to improve the “quality of profiles” – namely that users add enough photos and completely fill out their bios. This could likely get better with AI-based assistance, such as tools that help select photos and help write bios. Tinder plans to roll out features like this in the coming months.
"Especially for younger users, there's greater need of flexibility ... innovation ... that doesn't put everybody in the same box," she said.
Bumble has started testing message prompts and allowing people to choose to allow their matches to make the first move in New Zealand and Australia.
Jones has also reduced staff by a third, laying off 350 Bumble employees to improve the company’s falling bottom line. She has restructured the internal workforce, removing the general managers for each platform (including Fruitz, Badoo, Official, and Bumble for Friends), and has brought in former colleagues from Slack and Sonos. A head of technology oversees all the company’s apps.
The app’s founder and former CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd stepped down in November as the app’s revenue was struggling to meet analyst expectations. Other dating app companies like Match Group have been seeing similar struggles as downloads have fallen and Gen Z turns to other methods of meeting people besides through dating apps.
Jones is hoping to buck the trend. As she told Axios, she wants all the company’s platforms to be accessible and easy to transition from one to the other. For example, transitioning from Fruitz (a dating app geared towards Gen Z daters) to Official (a couples-based app), or going from networking on Bumble for Friends to dating, so that people will stay engaged with its platforms.