The pandemic has left Sonali Misra unable to see her family and friends for more than a year. The PhD researcher, who is from India but based in Edinburgh, says she began feeling “extremely isolated” and made her turn to Bumble’s friend-matching service called BFF.
“I matched with a few women and really clicked with one,” says Misra, who recently published 21 Fantastic Failures, a book on missteps that preceded huge successes like those made by Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey.
“We have similar interests — we’re both writers and love books and languages. We made a plan to meet up for a socially distanced walk in the Meadows in Edinburgh, and it began pouring — like rain smashing into our faces at a 60-degree angle pouring — but we hardly noticed because it was so great to interact with someone interesting and new for a change.”
Misra is one of more than a million people who regularly use Bumble’s friend-matching feature.
Some have spoken of starting book clubs with their new friends while others have suggested their Bumble BFF could eventually become a housemate.
The dating app, which only allows women to message men first, says its friend service now accounts for almost a tenth of its 12.3m monthly users.
The approach taken by Bumble — whose founder Whitney Wolfe Herd is now a billionaire after Thursday’s float — represents a marked departure to Tinder. In 2016, the swipe-left app launched its “Social” feature allowing users to hang out in groups and arrange to meet up.
However, Social — launched four months after Bumble’s BFF feature — was abruptly shut down a year later. At the time, Tinder said it did not fit “cleanly with its future direction” where it is now focusing on video and AI.
Bumble intends to keep pushing beyond dating, saying this week: “We started with online dating and now have insights from our community that have encouraged us to extend Bumble into many more areas of life.”
It is at the early stages of building products for platonic friendships and business networking with Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz. The “Bizz” feature resembles BFF but focuses more on how nearby professionals can connect with each other.
Bumble aims to make money from the new offerings through premium subscriptions for services like being able to skip profiles that have already been liked.
Bumble could make “selective acquisitions” beyond dating and its focus beyond dating has undoubtedly helped it lure investors too.
Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd
Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, says we are in a “golden age” for dating apps and that Bumble was scratching the surface on a “massive market opportunity”.
“In this age of Covid across social media many consumers globally are yearning for social interaction in an environment with lockdowns across the board,” he says. “Bumble focuses on this area as part of its broader strategy. While it’s not natural for some to make friends through a platform such as this, Bumble has found success in this area and they are trailblazing ahead.”
Bumble priced its shares at $43 but they opened at $76 as investor demand soared, making 31-year old Wolfe Herd’s stake worth more than $1bn. Investors have likely to have been impressed by Bumble’s surging revenues which soared 35pc to $488m in 2019 and totalled $416m for the first nine months of last year.
The listing ends a long period in which Match, the owner of Tinder, was the only publicly traded dating firm.
Friend and work-based matching is likely to keep driving growth for Bumble, although it will face stiff competition.
While Tinder’s previous foray with Social was short-lived, the company has entered new markets where hook-up culture is less appealing.
In Thailand, the company launched a new ad campaign in a bid to reposition the app beyond dating. An agency working on behalf of Tinder came up with a campaign called “Friends with (Other) Benefits” based on research that found Gen Z users were likely to soon abandon the app because they did not want to participate in hookup culture.
For Misra, the benefits of friend-based app dating are clear. “I made a random tweet about it and got a few curious questions from people who’ve been thinking of giving it a shot because they’re starved of new social interactions as well,” she says. “It’s especially useful for people like me who are in foreign environments.”
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