#1- Women Entrepreneur series
Let’s talk about Whitney Wolfe Herd. Most of you may have heard of the dating app called Bumble. Well, Mrs. Herd founded it.
What is Bumble? It’s an app. But not just any app! It started off as a dating app and now it’s a dating app, friend app, business app. You can make friends, connect with business people for help/guidance and/or find your match. It’s created with the aim of equality. In order to achieve their aim, Bumble let’s women make the first move. If it’s a match in hetrosexual relationships, the woman has to text first. They have described this as “shifting old-fashioned power dynamics and encouraging equality from the start.”
Now that we have a brief idea about Bumble, let’s talk about Herd. She was an early exective at Tinder (ironic, right?). In June 2014, she sued Tinder for sexual harassment. According to her claims, her ex-boss, Justin Mateen, called her a “whore” and “gold digger” and other derogatory text messages that she attached to her complaint. The suit was settled for an undisclosed sum.
It wasn’t always her plan to make a dating app to compete with Tinder. Andrey Andreev, founder of the online dating network Badoo, reached out to Herd due to a previous impression she had made. Upon finally meeting her, he offered her a job but she declined it and recalled saying, “I don’t want to be in dating.” Over the next few months they kept talking about business ideas. After her Tinder lawsuit was settled, she took Andreev’s offer to stick to her forte: the dating sector. He’d make an initial investment of about $10 million for launch marketing and commit additional funds to fuel growth, taking 79% of the company. She’d be the founder, the CEO and a 20% owner, with all the autonomy those titles imply, while tapping into Badoo’s infrastructure and Andreev’s know-how.
One night, Herd came up with the idea of women making the first move. ” And if they don’t, the match disappears after 24 hours, like in Cinderella, the pumpkin and the carriage?” said Herd. And so they worked on the app and settled on the name Bumble (because of hives and bees).
More than 10% of Bumble’s users pay $9.99 for monthly subscriptions for extra perks. They are giving tough competition to Tinder by evolving with the market. Whitney Wolfe Herd became the world’s youngest woman billionaire (31 years) after taking Bumble public. Bumble’s initial public offering EXCEEDED EXPECTATIONS. It raised $2.2 billion and valued the firm at over $7 billion. What a success story at just 31.
The Echo-nomist 
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