Bumble Inc

For those who have been following the trajectory of the phenomenal success of dating app Tinder, for the founders of the app, it wasn’t such a successful match.

Whitney Wolfe was one of the founders of Tinder along with Justin Mateen and Sean Rad, who were the face of the company  as it launched to great success. Then Wolfe and Mateen became romantically involved and when that ended, so did their professional relationship – through reports of abusive behavior and a lawsuit that ended in a $1 million settlement for Wolfe.

The young entrepreneur wants to put all that behind her however. In a recent interview with Business Insider Australia, she addressed the lawsuit, her critics, and the launch of her new dating app Bumble.

Wolfe claims she has moved on, but her history with Tinder is still a bit convoluted. According to Wolfe, she came up with the name and first shepherded the dating app herself by reaching out to students on college campuses, urging them to try it. However, Mateen and Rad have stated that Mateen was the one who brought Tinder to potential users, mainly through the fraternities and his contacts with large social networks at college campuses.

The fight between Mateen and Wolfe got nasty, with text messages back and forth that were exposed in the media. From an outsider’s perspective, neither one of them looked innocent, but in the end, it was a case of he said she said.

Wolfe took her experience at Tinder and decided to try her hand in launching her own female-friendly dating app called Bumble. Although it has the same user-friendly photo-based structure and ease of Tinder, Bumble encourages women to make the first move by giving them 24 hours to reach out to a match before he disappears. (The guys have to sit back and wait for the women to message them.)

Other female-friendly dating apps have come before Bumble with their own spin – like LuLu, which allows women to rate their dates and discuss them with other women on the app. There’s also JessMeetKen, which allows women to promote one of their single guy friends to other women on the site, in order to give them a little endorsement for potential dates. But Bumble is showing promise too, with Wolfe reaching out to college students and encouraging them to give it a try.

“We’re definitely not trying to be sexist, that’s not the goal,” Wolfe told Business Insider. “I know guys get sick of making the first move all the time. Why does a girl feel like she should sit and wait around? Why is there this standard that, as a woman, you can get your dream job but you can’t talk to a guy first? Let’s make dating feel more modern.”

According to Wolfe, 60% of matches on Bumble turn into conversations, and in a little over a month since the launch, there have been more than 100,000 downloads. 

This month, Tinder began rolling out its new premium service Tinder Plus in select European markets, and the feedback hasn’t been good.

The popular dating app surged to the top of the online dating market when it launched in 2012, attracting users who had never thought of signing up for an online dating site. Its easy-to-use format and free game-like service offered more entertainment than dating stress, and users flocked to check it out.

But in an effort to make money from this hugely successful endeavor, it was only a matter of time before Tinder’s owners developed a paid model for the app – opting for a premium service over adding distracting in-app advertisements. (Although the company has strategically lent its brand to marketing campaigns, like Gillette’s facial hair survey and Domino’s Pizza Valentine’s Day campaign.)

But Tinder Plus has not been greeted favorably, at least in its initial roll out – and the free service is suffering as a result. Although Tinder Plus is not set to launch in the U.S. until March, and prices are still to be determined, the company needs to find a new strategy - considering the backlash it has gotten in markets where the roll out has already taken place, such as the U.K. Tinder users who are not opting to pay for Tinder Plus and want to stick to the old free version of the app have been leaving bad reviews in the iTunes store (enough to drive the free service’s rating down to one and a half stars).

The problem has to do with new restrictions to the free service. Once a user has swiped a certain number of times, they are blocked for 24 hours from seeing any new profiles, unless they want to pay for the new Tinder Plus service. Since most users log in to Tinder multiple times a day to swipe through matches, this puts a serious hindrance on Tinder’s competitive advantage. Other dating apps that have restrictions on the number of profiles a user can see per day – like Hinge - have been easing up on their requirements, and seeing a surge of new downloads as a result.

With all the promising new free apps coming on the market, such as Bumble (started by an ex-Tinder employee), Tinder will need to think outside the box to keep its market share. After all, any online dating app or site’s currency is their user base. If Tinder loses theirs, then they stand to lose a lot more than the revenue from the premium service. Perhaps they should stick to advertising deals, or instead of taking away features from loyal users, offer more enticing new features.

Bye Felipe has become an Instagram sensation, with female daters posting their awkward, annoying, uncomfortable and sometimes even harassing message trail with other online daters, mainly men. It seems that in the wake of Tinder’s popularity, there have been a few casualties and women are looking for a more genuine tool to meet guys, sans the weird pick-up lines.

While there isn’t a dating app that can screen or prevent all creeps from making their way into your matching possibilities, at least some apps give women the power to decide what we will and will not tolerate.

Following are a few to watch for in 2015:

Bumble. While I’m not a fan of how this app came about – it’s the brainchild of Whitney Wolfe, one of the former Tinder executives who also filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against co-founder Justin Mateen. And since she walked away with a bit of money from a settlement, she has decided to launch her own dating app, where women decide who they want to meet (and have 24 hours to make that decision before the option disappears). According to its marketing, the app “promotes a safe and respectful community…Bumble suggests matches based on more relevant signals than other, more shallow apps.”

LuLu. This has been around for a couple of years, allowing women to rate their dates and share information about men with other female app users. While LuLu sounds like it has the potential to be a giant slam book, many women also use it to promote their guy friends who are looking for love – kind of an online voucher for a guy’s character. The Grade is another new app that has a similar kind of review system through – you guessed it – grading them. If you get an “F” guys? You’re off the site.

Siren. True to its name, Siren allows women to put a question out to men they choose on the site (or to all men in their area) to schedule a last-minute date. For instance, a woman could ask: “want to meet up for a jog?” - and then see who responds. She can also browse profiles in private without revealing herself.

JessMeetKen. This online dating site works through Facebook connections, and allows women to post a profile of their male friends who are looking for love, recommending them to other women. (Think of that guy you really like but just aren’t attracted to.) The guys all come recommended by a woman, so it’s less likely the men you’ll be meeting will be creepers, which makes it worth it even if you aren’t a match.

Happy dating!

Get out of the pajamas. Put down the Seamless delivery containers. Log out of Netflix. It's time to make a change around here.

If you've been avoiding online dating like the plague, no one would blame you. Sometimes it feels like online dating is a plague, except instead of the usual symptoms this plague comes with shirtless mirror selfies, terrible pickup lines, and unwanted dick pics.

Luckily, there's a new crop of dating apps designed to prevent exactly that. These apps hope to decrease the creep factor that's keeping many women away from mobile dating, by offering women more control over the process. Try out these five female-friendly dating apps in 2015:

Earlier this year, Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe left the company after raising a lawsuit against her colleagues over allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination. In case you need a refresher, Wolfe alleged that she was sent inappropriate messages by one of Tinder's male co-founders, who pursued a romantic relationship with Wolfe and then publicly shamed her. She also says she was stripped of her co-founder title over fears that her age and gender would damage the company's perceived valuation.

Heavy stuff, but it looks like Wolfe might soon get her revenge. TechCrunch reported that she's teamed up with Tinder alumni Chris Gulczynski and Sarah Mick to create a similarly swipe-based dating app they've dubbed Bumble. According to its Facebook page, Bumble is “an exciting, new place to meet people” and “everything you've always wanted from a social discovery app with none of the things you don't.”

Ok, sounds good so far. So how does it actually work?

According to TechCrunch, the app looks (unsurprisingly) much like Tinder. The famous swipe interface is in play, as is the basic large photo/snippet of personal info structure. A key difference is that Bumble appears to use more detailed information than Tinder – including job position, company, college, and graduation year – supporting the idea that it is intended for more serous daters.

Bumble explains its process like this:

• Two people like each other and it's a connection
• The girl has to make the first move by starting a chat within 24 hours
• If she doesn't chat, the connection disappears forever
• But... guys can extend ONE match per day for an extra 24 hours

A 24-hour rule seems a little harsh, but otherwise the idea is interesting. Will flipping the traditional dating dynamic on its head actually work, or will Bumble end up being a service where almost everyone is silent?

Bumble's behind-the-scenes structure also raises some interesting points. Competing with Tinder is no easy feat, but if anyone stands a chance, isn't it a Tinder founder and former employees? They have experience and insider knowledge that no one else has, plus enough public visibility to spread awareness quickly.

Really quickly, as it turns out. A source told TechCrunch that Bumble has already raised millions of dollars from a number of different sources, including social dating service Badoo and a multi-millionaire heir to an oil fortune. Bumble claims the app will be launching any day now, so we should find out soon enough whether that's enough to take on Tinder.

Once upon a time, back in the 2000s, Hot Or Not was a phenomenon sweeping the Web. By now most of us had written the site off as a piece of early 21^st century nostalgia, but it’s just gotten a mobile makeover and has plans to join the booming online dating business.

The new version of the addictive rating game is owned by UK-based online dating company Badoo, and is now available in the iTunes and Android app stores. Like other mobile dating apps, Hot Or Not uses location-based data to show you the most attractive people in your vicinity. That idea is nothing new. What Hot Or Not hopes will catch users’ eyes is the app’s customized Hot Lists, which are based on how users vote on profiles created in-house of celebrities, politicians, authors, and other recognizable figures.

The Hot Lists feature calculates a person’s hotness based on user votes, then updates in real-time to show the prettiest people near you. The radius the real-time Hot Lists span depends on the number of users active in a given area – so the more users who are around, the more the radius will shrink to keep it localized.

The rest of the app works exactly as you would expect a mobile dating app to work. Users can connect their Hot or Not profiles to Facebook, which autofills their Hot or Not profiles with their Facebook likes and profile pictures. In the games section, users can browse the profiles of other members in their area and rate them with a heart (for “hot”) or an X (for “not”). If a user hits the heart, they can strike up a private conversation with the person who tickles their fancy.

Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev, who launched Badoo in Spain in 2006, is the man behind the plan to bring Hot Or Not back. Badoo is one of the largest international dating sites in the world, with roughly 200 million users in 180 countries, but its presence in the US is lacking. Andreev hopes Hot Or Not will change all that. So far, he claims the new Hot or Not app has amassed 10 million users in its short lifetime.

It’s impossible to prove the validity of Andreev’s claim, but according to the Google Play store, the app has been installed on Android devices between one million and five million times. In the iTunes App Store, shortly after its release, the Hot or Not app ranked 321st overall and 21st in lifestyle.

You can download the app for iPhone, Android, and Windows phones.