War, inflation, and general civilizational anxiety couldn’t keep the horny and lonely from swiping right. Bumble posted Q4 revenue of $224.2 million against estimates of $221.3 million on Wednesday, sending shares up about 20% after hours as investors decided a turnaround story is still a story worth buying.
The turnaround in question belongs to Whitney Wolfe Herd, who founded Bumble after a lawsuit against her former employer, Tinder, stepped away from the CEO role, and then walked back through the front door about a year ago to find the product stale and younger users drifting. This week, while she was busy beating estimates, Tinder’s aqcuirerer Match Group, got quietly dropped from the S&P 500. If Wolfe Herd is keeping a “Count of Monte Cristo”-esque revenge scrapbook, that one gets a full page.
Her answer to Bumble’s malaise is Bumble 2.0, a redesigned app that swaps the flat swipe carousel for a chapter-based profile structure meant to give users something to actually read before matching. She’s also floating a no-swipe option in select markets, which is either a genuine rethink of the medium or the boldest pivot since Netflix mailed you a DVD and called it streaming. An AI dating assistant that learns your preferences through private conversations is in testing too, dystopian undertones included at no extra charge.
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The numbers underneath all this are interesting. Revenue per paying user climbed 7.9% to $22.20 even as the paying user base shrank 20.5% to 3.3 million. Fewer people, spending more because randy loneliness has apparently very solid unit economics. Performance marketing spend got cut over 80% year-over-year, a bet on organic growth over paid acquisition that Wolfe Herd is framing as a features-first pivot. First-quarter guidance of $209 to $213 million clears Street expectations of $210.9 million, narrowly but cleanly.
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