Despite being skeptics and considered an "underdog" in the tech world, Whitney Wolfe Herd has achieved remarkable success with the dating app Bumble at the age of just 30. All of that success is attributed to the "crazy" but extremely effective and extremely economical marketing tricks of Bumble's CEO.
Bumble launched in December 2014 with $10 million in funding from Badoo co-founder Andrey Andreev, but most of that money didn’t go toward marketing, which startups often consider a critical springboard to future success.
Instead of traditional marketing campaigns, Wolfe Herd used a series of “crazy tricks” to attract public and social attention to his startup.
In the early days of her dating app Bumble, Wolfe Herd realized something: Twitter and Instagram were two of the most popular apps, but she had never seen ads on them. She wanted to make her dating app as popular as the social media giants, and the idea of “not spending a lot of money” appealed to her, since Bumble had a “very modest budget” at the time.
One time, Wolfe Herd went to a bakery and paid the baker $20 to decorate cookies with gold frosting bearing a white Bumble logo. Wolfe Herd then took the box of cookies to a nearby college sorority.
Wolfe Herd used a similar tactic with college fraternities, delivering pizzas with the company logo plastered on the surface of the boxes.
In 2016, Wolfe Herd began offering female students various gifts, including balloons, lingerie, and more, in exchange for downloading and sharing the app with their friends.
“We don't have endless resources for marketing, so we have to be really resourceful,” says Wolfe Herd.
“When sorority members downloaded the app, the guys had to download it too to connect with each other. That’s when the snowball effect really started.”
When Wolfe Herd noticed signs outside her local college lecture halls banning social media platforms in class, she took it upon herself to add Bumble's logo to the list of prohibited signs.
“No one knew what Bumble was, so when we listed ourselves as one of these products, we kind of assumed that this was the app that students would want to use,” Wolfe Herd said. “All of a sudden, the downloads started going up really quickly.”
In 2021, Wolfe Herd became a billionaire and the youngest female founder in history to take a company public. Bumble Inc., which owns a group of apps including Bumble and Badoo, has revenue of $903.5 million and a market cap of $6.7 billion by 2022.
(According to Janamanab)
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