After years of chasing user growth, Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd now wants low-quality users off her service. Soon, people with grainy profile pictures or lacking a bio may be forced to leave the app unless they improve.
“Our product is people. The quality of someone’s experience, how they engage, find what they’re looking for, and monetize depends on the quality of who and what they encounter on the platform,” Wolfe Herd explained on the company’s earnings call on August 6. She outlined a strategy to create a healthier app ecosystem that involves categorizing users based on the quality of their profiles and pushing out people who are degrading the experience of Bumble.
The almost 10-year-old-app has struggled in recent years to regain the momentum it had during the pandemic. In March, Wolfe Herd stepped back into the role as CEO, after ceding it to former Slack executive Lidiane Jones just over a year earlier. Wolfe Herd is now overhauling the app, reorienting it away from a growth-at-all-costs strategy and toward one that prioritizes a higher-quality user base and real connections. As part of that, Bumble is starting to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Approve, Improve, and Remove
On the earnings call, Wolfe Herd said the app will use AI and human moderators to sort users into three categories: Approve, Improve, and Remove. Approve users, according to Wolfe Herd, are ones who have adequately filled out their profiles, complete with multiple photos, and offer a clear picture of who they are. Improve users have incomplete profiles that could be refined to get more matches.
Remove users are bots, scammers, people with multiple profiles, and those who have violated user agreement terms. They’re also people whose profiles are inadequately filled out and who refuse to improve them. Roughly 10% of Bumble users fall into the Remove category, while the majority fall under the Improve category.
“They’re not bad people,” Wolfe Herd said of the Improve members. “They’re not nefarious members. They have no clue how to build a profile. These could be extraordinary people that when you meet them in real life you’re like, ‘How are you single?’ But when you look at their Bumble profile, they have one photo, they’re wearing a ski mask, and they have no bio. There’s no chance for them on our product in that construct.”
Bumble is launching new features to help. The company recently introduced a dating app concierge that offers AI and human advice to help users fill out their profiles. This month, it plans to unveil an AI-powered coaching hub that will give users tips and actionable steps to make their profile more attractive and engaging. If they follow those tips, they may end up in the Approve category. If not, they could get the boot. (The app is also improving its identity verification tools to get bad actors off the platform.)
A return to quality
“Fewer better is always going to win when it comes to connection and relationships,” Wolfe Herd explained while laying out the strategy. “If you were to swipe through 100 people [who] you never wanted to meet, you would walk away feeling very, very disappointed. But if you were to go through even just 5 or 10 or 15 . . . very high-quality profiles, and everyone was actually quite interesting to you, you would feel very, very compelled to return.”
Wolfe Herd is banking that getting more users into the Approve category will eventually help the company make money. She noted that Approve users monetize at approximately double the rates of people in the Improve category. The average revenue per user on Bumble has dropped 15% since 2021. For the second quarter of 2025, total revenue decreased 8% year over year, and paying users decreased 11% compared to the same period last year.
“Everything we build is grounded in real-world outcomes, not endless engagement,” Wolfe Herd said on the company’s Q2 earnings call. As part of this, the company is winding down the digital marketing that it began during the pandemic. That practice attracted a slew of new users who diluted the app’s dating pool and diminished the user experience, according to Wolfe Herd.
The Hinge playbook
In this regard, Bumble’s approach mirrors Hinge’s playbook. Though parent company Match Group’s second-quarter revenue was flat overall, Hinge’s revenue jumped 25% to $167.5 million, beating analysts’ expectations. Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff said the company plans on investing $50 million in part to fund Hinge’s geographic expansion to Latin America and Europe.
Hinge has succeeded largely by creating an experience that focuses on showing users quality matches and getting them off the app to form lasting connections. To do this, the app has introduced friction in its user experience, putting limits on swipes and implementing penalties for ghosting to improve user behavior. Hinge is also using AI to refine its matching algorithm and launch new features like notifications to encourage users to keep up conversations with matches they are interested in. Hinge’s monthly active users rose nearly 20% in the first half of 2025.
In getting users to improve their profiles, Bumble is taking another cue from Hinge, which has a more extensive sign-up process than other dating apps. It requires users to answer a series of questions and sets a minimum requirement for the number of photos uploaded to their profile before they’re able to swipe.
In their Q2 earnings calls, both Rascoff and Wolfe Herd suggested that building algorithms and features that foster lasting connections is key to attracting younger users. Tinder has launched double-date options and college-specific features to help foster connections in lower-pressure environments. Bumble is doubling down on Bumble BFF—a separate app to help users find new friends—and plans to launch more off-platform experiences to increase serendipitous connections.
“A lot of the exact product solves that we are so maniacally focused on right now are specifically the issues Gen Z has with online dating,” Wolfe Herd said on Bumble’s earnings call. “For example, they don’t want to feel like they swipe endlessly through people they’re not interested in. They don’t want to feel judged. They don’t want to feel rejected. They don’t want to feel like they’re talking to someone that is not actually who they say they are.”
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