Bumble is one of the best examples of how women have become empowered in online dating. Bumble was launched in December of 2014 by founder Whitney Wolfe Herd (hereafter Whitney), who originally had co-founded Tinder but left after suing Tinder for sexual discrimination which was settled for over $1 million in September 2014.
Long before she sued and started the rival company, Bumble, Whitney was a key player in Tinder’s

initial success (today Tinder is the world’s top dating app). She was one of its first employees and as the vice president of marketing, successfully built up Tinder users by targeting college students. In the early days of the Tinder app, Whitney dated her boss, Justin Mateen, Tinder’s CMO (Chief Marketing Officer).
According to the sexual harassment lawsuit that was filed in 2014, after Whitney had broken up with Justin Mateen, he repeatedly called her derogatory names, including in front of co-workers and Sean Rad, the CEO; threatened her multiple times, including telling her he would fire her if she ‘hurt his pride’; and told Whitney that he would take away her co-founder title because having a young female co-founder ‘makes the company seem like a joke’ and ‘devalues’ it.
After leaving Tinder Whitney met with the founder of Badoo (normally considered as the number 2 dating app in the world), Andrey Andreev, and the two made a deal where Andrey would invest $10 million and offer the use of Badoo’s infrastructure for a new dating service while receiving a 79 per cent stake, and Whitney would serve as CEO of the service and receive 20 per cent ownership.
Like many other dating apps, including rival Tinder, Bumble used Facebook to speed up and simplify the process of registration and login. First-time users shared their Facebook profile with Bumble, which imported their name, age, school or occupation and photos to build a profile. Following the controversy about security of Facebook user data, Bumble changed its login system in April 2018. Bumble’s new registration lets users login with their phone number instead of a social profile.
Bumble is one of the first female-friendly dating apps. Bumble displays a profile and the user must either swipe left or right before they can see a new match. Like Tinder, both members must mutually swipe right on each other before a conversation can begin. The main difference with Bumble is that female members must initiate the conversation (males cannot for heterosexual relationships). Males then must continue the conversation within 24 hours or the match disappears. However, men can extend the time window for an additional 24 hours if they pay a fee.
In 2018, tensions between Bumble and Tinder increased. In March 2018, Tinder’s parent company Match Group filed a lawsuit against Bumble claiming its use of right and left swipes infringes on Tinder’s intellectual property. Bumble quickly fired back.
First, it published a fierce open letter that declared itself unintimidated. Then, Bumble countered with a lawsuit of its own, accusing Match of asking Bumble to reveal confidential information under the guise that Match might purchase it.

Questions

1. Which of the internationalization models presented in this chapter best fits the internationalization of Bumble?

2. Why is Bumble’s global business model so successful?

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