The woman is the marginal price setter in the market. Dan McMurtrie wrote about this in his seminal piece on Tinder ~3 years ago. If you buy that argument, Bumble is probably correct to focus on this demographic (as you highlight, men will congregate where there is a significant number of women; it's the buyer-seller dynamic remixed. You have to have attractive things for sale; buyers will take care of themselves, at least initially).
Second, I'm not sure I intrinsically agree with the argument that you have to become an empire and compete for all of the pie. Valuations in these types of software infer that you *are*, but I don't know if I agree that you *have to*. I couldn't say for sure why I think this is wrong, either, but I think this would be worth exploring further. I personally feel that software is likely to fragment further especially in markets (like dating) where there are a substantial number of niches to explore. If you show "all of the women in the world" the profiles of "all of the men in the world" they still have to filter.
Universal problems like "how to keep up to date with social life / my friends" spawned universal solutions like Facebook. Niche problems like "how do I find someone just like me" will spawn niche solutions in dating apps. My guess is there are reasonable prospects of creating quite a good business in "dating apps for 25yo-40yo career women that don't want children" for example (to be hyper specific). Feels like there's an inherent tradeoff between "I can filter the whole market for you to find a subset that might fit" and "here is a tiny market of people just like you that you can go through manually". Can empire-scale companies win enough to freeze out the niche solutions? I'm not sure that they can. Valuation is a different story, however.
Thanks for sharing. Couple of thoughts:
The woman is the marginal price setter in the market. Dan McMurtrie wrote about this in his seminal piece on Tinder ~3 years ago. If you buy that argument, Bumble is probably correct to focus on this demographic (as you highlight, men will congregate where there is a significant number of women; it's the buyer-seller dynamic remixed. You have to have attractive things for sale; buyers will take care of themselves, at least initially).
Second, I'm not sure I intrinsically agree with the argument that you have to become an empire and compete for all of the pie. Valuations in these types of software infer that you *are*, but I don't know if I agree that you *have to*. I couldn't say for sure why I think this is wrong, either, but I think this would be worth exploring further. I personally feel that software is likely to fragment further especially in markets (like dating) where there are a substantial number of niches to explore. If you show "all of the women in the world" the profiles of "all of the men in the world" they still have to filter.
Universal problems like "how to keep up to date with social life / my friends" spawned universal solutions like Facebook. Niche problems like "how do I find someone just like me" will spawn niche solutions in dating apps. My guess is there are reasonable prospects of creating quite a good business in "dating apps for 25yo-40yo career women that don't want children" for example (to be hyper specific). Feels like there's an inherent tradeoff between "I can filter the whole market for you to find a subset that might fit" and "here is a tiny market of people just like you that you can go through manually". Can empire-scale companies win enough to freeze out the niche solutions? I'm not sure that they can. Valuation is a different story, however.