Leveraging Spatial Analytics for Market Expansion: A Bumble Case Study

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 was seeking opportunities to expand in under-penetrated markets. Traditionally, they gauged their market presence by looking at monthly and daily active users. While this gave them an idea of their user base size in a particular market, it did not provide a clear picture of their actual market penetration. For instance, markets with large populations like the US, China, and Brazil naturally have larger user bases. However, the number of active users does not necessarily reflect the company's market position. Therefore, Bumble needed a more accurate method to estimate their total addressable markets (TAM) and market penetration.

Bumble utilized CARTO, a spatial analytics platform, to accurately estimate their total addressable markets (TAM) and market penetration. This was achieved by combining internal and external data, which allowed them to contextualize user base numbers and identify opportunities in under-penetrated markets. A key aspect of Bumble's approach was the ability to enrich their internal data with external population data using CARTO’s Spatial Features dataset. By augmenting their data with new variables through 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. This data-driven approach enabled Bumble to allocate their marketing budgets more effectively, thereby reducing acquisition costs, improving conversion rates to premium propositions, and increasing advertising revenues.

• The use of spatial analytics provided Bumble with a more accurate understanding of their market penetration, enabling them to identify and target under-penetrated markets more effectively. By enriching their internal data with external population data, they were able to gain a more comprehensive view of each city’s total population disaggregated by age band and gender. This allowed them to tailor their marketing strategies to specific demographics, thereby improving their conversion rates to premium propositions. Furthermore, the data-driven approach enabled them to allocate their marketing budgets more efficiently, leading to decreased acquisition costs and increased advertising revenues.