Thread by @signulll

why is bumbling collapsing & why is it likely on the road to irrelevancy?

lots of people having been asking, let’s break it down, shall we?

you see the downfall was inevitable but these people below managed to accelerate & change the trajectory of it from a 10 degree glidescope down to pretty much straight vertical drop.

so what happened?

let’s start with a shit product that’s no longer really working in any meaningful way created in the era where deep feminism was almost forced upon women by ppl like sheryl sandberg & whitney wolfe.

whitney & sheryl ended up becoming the faces of women’s empowerment—the message was every man was trash, the patriarchy was your enemy, & now you must behave like a man (maybe not explicitly, but implicitly for sure).

when whitney left tinder, a russian dating app billionaire noticed the me too pattern & recruited her to be the face of what is now called bumble (she never really had the idea, the tech, or the finances, it was all andrey). whitney was the face for all women to aspire too, rich, beautiful, & a ceo!

as bumble launched, it was novel, all women had to message first and women became the men. a breakthrough in the time of harvey weinstein (true scumbag btw).

it grew rapidly thanks to its subtle marketing around “you can have it all”. the reality is whitney & sheryl were the most privileged women on the planet (both had been born rich & they had plenty of money from google and tinder settlement). whitney & sheryl promoted this era among others from a place of the most incredible privileges, live in staff, etc. of course you can have it all (if you’re rich).

most of america makes $40k a year and women make even less than that. the reality is having it all is not easy, ask most women they will tell you.

whitney and sheryl never related to the plight of average women in the united states.

as bumble grew, it took over the zeitgeist (esp from match group)—whitney had a complex relationship with match.

well, since then bumble has been steady degradation into what it is today, the latest a $3 billion investment in 2019 from blackstone. why the fuck would black stone get into the dating app business? truly idiotic but anyway, in the long term that investment has been a disaster mainly because after the women message first idea (which women despise) there was nowhere bumble to go.

one of the ideas explored was bff, what if we allowed people to find friends on bumble? truly stupid for anyone who has ever been around social apps. pretty heavy investments were made particularly by whitney—even a stand alone app which no one uses. there is pretty much nothing to show for it.

some women used it & found success but the vast majority found it to be weird as fuck.

the biggest use case was men using it to swipe on other men to convert them for gay sex. that was such a big hit that bumble shut down the bff product for men.

as things became stagnant & women basically would get thousands of likes & fuck tons of attention, the average expectations for a woman changed drastically. you see, women absolutely suck at figuring out who wants just sex from them & who wants an actual relationship.

hint: nearly 100% of the people swiping on them on bumble actually just want sex.

every man will lower his standards for just sex (see @ItIsHoeMath for breakdown videos).

when women see top notch men and they get attention & sex for them, it’s pretty much over for their love lives. they won’t be able to settle with an average dude. the amount of pure ghosting & just using women for sex on bumble is/was so rampant that basically bumble is just now uber for sex. in fact, most women think that if they sleep with a guy they would be able to “lock him in”.

the product does not work for relationships (this is the rule, there are obviously exceptions).

let’s fast forward, as the app became stagnant and young people realized (especially dudes who are the paying customers) that all women just want few dudes, there had to be a change in leadership. whitney had to step down because frankly she had zero business running a now public business like that. zirp was over. and i’m sure she was tired and wanted to vacation with her rich husband (who she did not meet on bumble lol).

as the ceo search began, it focused only on women… how could you ever have a man run bumble?!? that was be truly blasphemes.

the board of directors was pretty much all middle aged married old women who have zero ability to relate to anyone on the planet let alone young people & millennials trying to actually find love.

here are the esteemed directors of the board.

the needed a seasoned woman to run the business, so they picked lidiane jones, who basically has built productivity software her entire career (slack & salesforce) with zero background or understanding of a very complex non technical business like bumble. bumble isn’t a tech company, it’s an emotional company that has to understand at a deeper level what women want (good luck with that hahahaha).

instead of letting the gas run out of the company, she decided she needed to make a big change to how it all works to make herself known as the savior for an already dying business.

i’m sure they paid an enormous amount of money to consulting companies to do “research” on their users because again none of these people running to app are single or have any relatability to their user base of (mostly older) single women now & especially not men.

this was like an airplane crash, usually if the pilot doesn’t do anything, the plane continues to fly… however if the pilot does something disastrous, you’re fucked. that’s exactly what she did.

this is where the product leadership disaster happens, we’ll get the marketing disaster in a little bit.

whitney had ignored women’s demands of “we don’t like messaging first” because that was the only value in the app, if it went away suddenly everyone would be confused and basically the entire app experience would fail in the way that it’s designed.

well, the new ceo decided to take on this absolutely dumbass problem. in a true moronic way, they solved it by making the app even more complex to use for average users. they introduced “opening moves” by both sides, which most users had zero understanding of. now suddenly the entire app felt strange & weird and 100000x more complex.

it would’ve been so much better if they decided to swallow the pill and just make it normal messaging but you see that’s too easy for the product team, we need something bold… so we can make our tool which is already failing even harder to use.

their CPO, another slack exec, also has zero background in social apps or the plight of anyone fucking dating.

that was a huge product disaster, now on to the marketing disaster. as part of the “reboot”, bumble needed a strong marketing campaign to make the users aware and make sure it’s still relevant. so they hired some agencies and probably did some work. but what’s truly amazing is that they managed to fuck this up so bad that they pissed of the only valuable demographic on their app (successful women who were now even paying).

lmao, the tiktok’s, the memes, the articles were insane.

they told women “celibacy is not the answer” among other things.

these were rigid in their ways women who had likely been ghosted hundreds of times after being used for sex on its app. incredible how you mess this up.

talk about a lack of empathy?

well, now they had made a cardinal sin, pissing off the only valuable part of your app (women) who were used as bait to get the men to pay money.

congratulations to the marketing department on a historic achievement.

and now my friends here is the conclusion of this entire effort… i don’t know how most of these people don’t get fired for all of this.