How Bumble use Spatial Analytics to Grow Market Share

Bumble Inc. is the parent company of Bumble and Badoo, two of the world’s highest-grossing dating apps with millions of users worldwide. The Bumble platform enables people to connect and build equitable and healthy relationships. Founded by CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd in 2014, the Bumble app is one of the first dating apps built with women at the center, and the Badoo app, which was founded in 2006, is one of the pioneers of web and mobile dating products. Bumble currently employs over 800 people in offices in Austin, Barcelona, London, and Moscow.

The team at Bumble wanted to find opportunities in under-penetrated markets which historically they would have performed by looking at monthly and daily active users. This gave them a sense of how big their user base was in a particular market but meant very little in the context of how much of the market they had actually penetrated. For example markets with large populations such as the US, China, and Brazil will automatically have larger user bases, but the number of active users say little about market position.

Using a combination of internal and external data the Bumble team were able to use CARTO to help them accurately estimate total addressable markets (TAM) and market penetration to allow them to contextualize user base numbers and find opportunities in under-penetrated markets. This allowed them to focus their marketing budgets more effectively to decrease acquisition costs, improve conversion rates to premium propositions, and increase advertising revenues.

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Key to Bumble’s work was the ability to enrich their own internal data with external population data which they were able to do with the help of CARTO’s Spatial Features dataset. By augmenting their data with new variables by means of a spatial join between their data and a dataset within CARTO’s Data Observatory they were able to quickly and easily extract each city’s total population disaggregated by age band and gender.