In the early days of dating app Bumble, CEO and founder Whitney Wolfe Herd realized something. Twitter and Instagram were two of her most popular apps, but she had never seen an ad for them.
She wanted to make dating apps as popular as social media giants, and the idea of ​​not spending money appealed to her. Wolf Herd said in a masterclass course published Thursday that Bumble had a “modest budget” at the time.
Instead of a traditional marketing campaign, Wolf Herd designed a series of “crazy hacks” to drum up interest in her Austin, Texas-based startup, she said. In one, she went to a cookie shop and paid a baker $20 to decorate a yellow frosted cookie with a white Bumble logo. She then took the box to a nearby college sorority.
Other gifts for sororities included balloons, koozies and yellow hanky-panky underwear in exchange for downloading the app and sharing it with friends, Fortune reported in 2016. That’s what it means.
Wolfe Herd used a similar tactic at her college fraternity, delivering pizza in a cardboard box with a Bumblebee brand sticker.
“It’s not like we had countless marketing dollars…we actually had to really squander them,” she said. “Lo and behold, some sorority women downloaded it, a few fraternity men downloaded it, and they started matching. And that’s when the snowball effect really started. is.”
Bumble was founded in December 2014 with $10 million in funding from Badoo co-founder Andrey Andreev, as reported by Forbes. Most of that money appears not to have been spent on marketing. Instead, Wolfe Herd noticed a sign outside a local university lecture hall banning social media platforms during classes, hung an additional sign, and added Bumble to the list.
“Nobody knew what Bumble was yet, so when we associated these products, we built in the assumption that this was the app they would want to use in class. ,” she said. “All of a sudden, the downloads started increasing.”
For Wolfe Herd, the momentum was justified. She told the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colo., last year that the app, where women start conversations with people, had been rejected by previous investors who thought it violated social norms and wouldn’t be adopted. .
“I retrained my brain from day one. Every time I received a hurtful email or tweet or statement from an investor, [the idea for Bumble] Wolfe Herd said: “It was stupid. I was just really excited. People generally don’t know how to see something that doesn’t exist yet. So you just have to believe in yourself.”
Seven years after launching the app, Wolfe Herd became the youngest female founder in history to take her company public. Bumble Inc. currently owns a group of apps such as Bumble and Badoo, and its current market capitalization is $1.91 billion.
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