Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Business Wars ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. It's spring 2024 in Austin, Texas. Inside Bumble's sunflower yellow headquarters known as The Hive, engineers and designers are working late. Empty coffee cups line their desks. Screens glow in the dim light as they work on something big. A new app. A new logo.
A new algorithm. A new version of Bumble.
Bumble.
And most importantly, a new feature that once upon a time would have been unthinkable. For the first time in the company's history, men will be allowed to make the first move. Down the hall from where the programmers are plugging away, the company's new CEO, Lydiane Jones, gathers her top executives in a conference room.
Behind them hangs a framed print that reads, Life Short, Make the First Move. For a decade, that line defined Bumble. It was the company's differentiator, the reason women chose the app in the first place. Now, Jones is leading an evolution. Jones comes from the work messaging app Slack, where she served as CEO for the past year, so she knows product.
She's been brought in to turn things around because, well, because there's a lot to fix.
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Chapter 2: What challenges is Bumble facing in 2024?
Bumble lost $32 million in the last quarter. Its stock has fallen sharply since its post-IPO peak, and users are burned out. Women are matching, but not messaging. Men are matching and waiting. The whole system has stalled out. Inside the conference room, Jones and her team start crafting their comeback strategy. Soon after, Bumble wipes its entire Instagram feed, every post gone.
In its place, Baroque-style portraits of women slumped in chairs, stamped with one word, exhausted. Bumble also ships packages to influencers, boxes stuffed with sleepwear and eye masks. The paid influencers, in turn, post photos from bed, teasing something called the Bumble wake-up call. Days later, that call comes with a new slogan. We've changed, so you don't have to.
To reintroduce itself, Bumble releases a promotional video that begins with a young woman entering a convent after she's sworn off dating. She beats carpets and does other chores alongside nuns dressed in Bumble yellow, until she spots a shirtless gardener working outside. One of the nuns catches her staring and slips her a phone with the Bumble app already installed.
The next morning, the woman packs up and heads back into the real world. The message the video hopes to convey is simple. Bumble has fixed dating. You don't have to opt out anymore. But the video doesn't land the way the company had hoped, as one podcaster explains.
This promo video they put out for the rebrand of the app is incredibly strange and disturbing.
That reaction spreads.
I do believe somebody, somebody needs to build a better mousetrap. And what they've come up with in terms of their changes ain't it.
On TikTok, the response is equally blunt.
Users were not super impressed with this rebrand. Just a lot of buildup and people were just disappointed that these were all the changes that Bumble actually made. Overall, I really don't think this was an incredible rebrand for them, especially because they're trying to grapple with such huge issues at the business level.
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Chapter 3: What major changes did CEO Lydiane Jones introduce at Bumble?
Kulho, lusikka ja sitä uutta valiojugurtti luonnonmakeaa, jonka makeus on hedelmien sokereista. Kulho, lusikka, valiojugurtti, luonnonmakeaa. Kuittiin. Arjen klassikka.
Valiojugurtti. From Audible Originals, I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. Whitney Wolf Hurd turned a breakup and a lawsuit into one of the most successful dating apps in the world. She built Bumble on a simple idea, women make the first move. And that idea turned Bumble into a cultural phenomenon and eventually a $14 billion company. But the buzz didn't last.
Since shortly after Bumble's 2021 IPO, their stock price has come to resemble the north face of Mount Everest. One long, brutal slide downward. By the start of 2024, Bumble's worth was down to around $2 billion. And Wolf Hurd is out as CEO. After 10 exhausting years running the company, she's handed the job to a new leader, Lydiany Jones, who now has the task of turning Bumble around.
Jones' first move, relaunching the brand, is bold. Maybe too bold. Because in trying to fix Bumble, she may have broken the one thing that made it work. Now, Jones will have to make more moves, but it will take a whole lot more than a rebrand to save the company. This is Episode 2, The Sting. It's May 3rd, 2024, in New York City.
Bumble CEO Lydiany Jones walks onto an NBC news set and settles into a plush chair across from an anchor. Jones is dressed in soft blues, a long skirt and matching sweater. Her look reads calm and controlled. Jones took over from Wolf Hurd four months ago with a mandate to take the brand in a new direction. And now, Jones gets to explain that plan on television.
She tells the NBC anchor that the centerpiece of Bumble's rebrand is a feature called opening moves. With opening moves, women can attach a question to their profile, something like, What's the one thing you'll never order at a restaurant? Men who match with them have to answer that question in order to initiate a conversation.
It's intended to be a subtle shift that still leaves women in control. But in practice, it does something much bigger. It erases the one rule that made Bumble different from every other dating app. NBC's anchor asks the obvious question. Why would Bumble make such a change? Jones tries to answer, but she can't quite stick the landing.
We hear our customers. That's the key message. Our customers are telling, especially women, that they are tired, that dating has become difficult. And we are really embracing listening to our customers and helping women make that journey more fun, more enjoyable, more, you know, what it's supposed to be. You're looking for love. You're supposed to be having a great time.
So we are, this is the first step in our journey to making dating fun again and getting women to be in control and not be so, exhausted by that journey.
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Chapter 4: How did Bumble's rebranding efforts receive backlash?
She's still the face of Bumble, and her personal story still defines Bumble's brand. But today, Wolf Hurd has a new vision to share. A moderator asks her about the future of human connection in a world where AI is quickly evolving. It's a big, open-ended question. Wolf-Herd leans forward and clasps her hands and starts talking.
She introduces the idea of an AI dating concierge, a digital assistant that learns who you are, coaches you through dating, and helps you become your best self. And at first, the audience seems to be eating it up. But then, they start laughing, assuming that Wolf Hurd is pranking them.
for example you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge and you could share your insecurities I just came out of a breakup I've commitment issues and it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself and then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people if you want to get really out there there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierge at
No, no, truly. And then you don't have to talk to 600 people. It will go scan all of San Francisco for you.
Let's pause for just a second. AI tools had been around for a while by this point, but this isn't yet the age of AI-generated emails and widely used chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. So the audience's reaction to Wolf Hurd, it makes sense.
It makes even more sense when you remember how Whitney Wolf Hurd built Bumble on a single radical insight that women wanted more control over their romantic lives, not less. That principle shaped the very architecture of the app. By messaging first, women could filter out unsolicited contact from men, especially, you know, creepy men.
But now, the woman who built all of that is on a stage in San Francisco suggesting these same women hand control of their love lives over to a machine. On the internet, Wolfherd's vision doesn't play any better than it did in the room. Some critics call the idea dystopian. Others call it a bad take. And now, things are about to go from bad to worse for Bumble.
Because while Wolfherd is on stage imagining the future, back in Austin, Bumble's marketing team is finalizing a new campaign that will do serious damage in the present. It's early May, 2024. Across America and Europe, new Bumble billboards are going up. The ads are hard to miss. Bright yellow backgrounds, bold black text.
They're plastered across highways and subway stations from Los Angeles to London. The campaign is aimed at burned-out daters, especially women who are thinking about quitting dating apps altogether. Women who've grown tired of the swiping and the ghosting and the endless conversations that never seem to go anywhere.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the 'opening moves' feature?
Plus, the company reports losses of more than $900 million. after another large impairment charge for the underperforming assets. Despite all of that, investors latch onto something else. In after-hours trading, Bumble's stock price starts shooting up. As the stock rises, Wolf Hurd and other Bumble executives dial into an earnings call from Austin.
They explain that Bumble 2.0 is almost ready for beta testing. The new version of the app is built around AI, the very same kind of AI that drew derisive laughter when Wolf Heard first talked about it two years earlier. But the world has changed quickly.
AI tools are now part of everyday life for many of us, from writing emails and making spreadsheets to helping us figure out what to cook for dinner. Amazing how much the narratives flipped, eh? The idea of AI assistance didn't fundamentally change, but the adoption of the concept sure has. I'm reminded of the Newton. Ever heard of that?
It was supposed to be Apple's digital assistant, only it came out a little more than a decade before we were all running around with smartphones to help us get stuff done. Back when Newton was introduced, people were laughing then, too. Now? Seems almost visionary. This speaks to an uncomfortable truth about innovation. Being early and being wrong can look the same in real time.
Sometimes the difference is whether you survive long enough and stay positioned well enough for the rest of the world to catch up. Now, Bumble plans to use this same AI technology to transform dating.
The redesigned AI-driven app will help daters, Wolfherd says, but it will also include features that enable the kind of in-person group meetups that are popular with Gen Z. On the earnings call, Wolfherd emphasizes that all of these new offerings revolved around one key principle. You guessed it. Women first.
women and the trust that we have with women and the authentic design system of putting women first beyond just a function of who goes first or who doesn't, this is inherently what sets us apart.
Even though Bumble's turbulent 2024 severely dented that trust, investors appear willing to buy into Wolfherd's new vision for Bumble's future. The next morning, shares jumped 50% with news of the company's improved fourth quarter revenue and overhaul plans. Later that same day, a video goes up on Instagram explaining Bumble's new AI-powered app.
Enter Bea, Bumble's personal dating assistant. Bea powers dates, a new intelligent way to take you from match to meet. Sarah starts a conversation with Bea to help discover what really matters to her. Then Bea gets to work searching while Sarah goes about her day. Bee finds Jake, a potential match for Sarah, and explains why they're a good fit for each other.
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