First, let me start by saying I like bumble dating app. I have a tremendous amount of respect for CEO Whitney Wolfe and how she successfully differentiated herself from Tinder and the bunch through endorsing the new-aged concept of “women make the first move”.
With a sexy looking UI, bumble is a very easy app to get a hang of. It operates exactly like Tinder and the other hot or not apps except for one huge difference; women MUST initiate the first message with any matches made. Bumble is pretty famous so this is common knowledge now.
Besides riding the recent wave of women empowerment, this whole “women make the first move” concept serves a larger purpose on dating apps. By restricting male contact through this one rule, bumble attempts to weed out creeps, reduce vulgar or pointless messaging, and aims to boost the quality of each match. Increasing the quality of matches is ideal for securing a date in real life because it’s more likely two people will find each other compatible enough to agree to meet.
Many of my male friends using bumble have told me they like the concept because if a woman messages a man first that has to be a good sign right? Well, I decided to put bumble to the test to get this concept is really making dates happen.
With that said, I used bumble for one week straight with only one goal, swipe right on everyone and score as many dates as physically possible and this was my experience.
DAY 1.
Obviously the first step was to upload some quality pictures of myself.
I also set my preferences and made sure to max out the age and distance to maximize the amount of people that would soon be introduced to me on my swipe feed. Getting started on bumble takes only 2 minutes to do.
The very first thing I noticed was the quality of the women on this app. Good sign right? But what made day one interesting was that in just the first 30 swipes of using bumble I managed to yield 11 matches! Honestly speaking, that’s more matches than I’ve mad on Tinder in over one year. This was very exciting for me because my thinking was if I made 11 matches at least one or two of them should convert into a first date right.
DAY 2.
I anxiously logged into bumble the following morning to check on my bounty. When I got to the home screen a sense of euphoria ran through my body as I noticed there was fresh honey in the jar (it’s really a beehive icon that takes you to your inbox, but I think honey jar sounds cooler).
When I stuck my hand in the honey jar looking to see what sweet goodness was waiting for me I noticed my matches had actually climbed to 14 overnight (up 3 more, cool). However, only three women had “made the first move” on me (roughly a 20% acceptance rate). A pretty low acceptance rate is what I was thinking, but for what it’s worth, this was a positive step towards achieving my goal in attempting to score some first dates. At this time, I began responding to my fellow female bumble bees in hopes to get acquainted.
DAY 3.
As I signed in, I was feeling pretty hopeful considering I had a lot of matches in the chamber, locked and loaded. However, when I double dipped back into the honey jar I noticed 13 of my matches (one in which I used the daily extend feature which allows you extend the time period before a match disappears) were gone. This was a bummer because I hoped at least some of my matches would message me by the end of day two. This wasn’t the case and those 13 matches were gone for good.
My sweet precious bees decided my honey wasn’t the right flavor for them. Though these beautiful bees buzzed on away ever so quietly, I was to yield 3 more matches on this day. I was still feeling blue about my slightly empty hive though.
A little confused.
How is it that 14 women did not initiate a message? It seemed pretty steep, so I started questioning if these users were even active or not. I mean why would they swipe right on me if they had no intention of meeting me IRL let alone send a message to see if the honey was compatible?
Feeling annoyed, but still hopeful, I focused my energy on the 3 women who had in fact “made the first move” on me. At this time I began having conversations with 3 of my matches who sent me an initial message.
DAY 4.
Things stated getting disappointing. Although I managed to make another match happen on this day, I had noticed since day 1 the amount of matches I was yielding was significantly decreasing each day at a time which I found rather bit bizarre considering how I made 16 on day one!
I’m not sure if this is an internal tactic bumble uses to boost retention rate, but either way I wasn’t going to let my mission end here. Single I am and dates was what I wanted.
DAY 5.
No matches were made this day. The “enthusiastic” women who I had been hopeful exchanging messages with back and forth slowly started evolving into quiet little ghosts one person at a time. Most of my conversations started looking like this:
DAY 6.
I began losing hope in scoring any dates. At this point, it’s been almost over two days since I’ve made a new match. To add to this frustration, all of my previous conversations had officially ghosted me completely (such a bad feeling when that happens). Nothing is more frustrating for guys one dating apps when your inbox looks like this after days of heavy usage:
With one day remaining, I decided to stay patient and keep pushing for some dates. I continued playing this dirty little swipe for likes game.
DAY 7.
At this point, it had been over three days since I last made a new match. Feeling defeated, there was officially no honey left in the jar, not a drop left for me to taste. Although it was an interesting week putting bumble to the test, today was the day I through in the towel but not volunterally. What really forced me to raise the white flag and surrender unconditionally was this screen:
Since I began I hadn’t tallied up my swipes, but according to bumble I had exhausted the user base in my area. I swiped a lot.
Conclusion.
Although my experience with bumble this last week was bit of a let down, it wasn’t the most negative experience I’ve had on dating apps. It wouldn’t be fair for me to say that this app doesn’t get dates as I only used it constantly for a one week period. I plan to keep using it for a while so I let’s see what happens.
It’s also quite possible that with a little optimization of my profile and pictures that I may be able get some more matches going. But getting matches isn’t the problem with bumble. The real issue with all of these Tinderish apps is that they’re not doing anything to fix the proximity issue users experience on dating apps. What I mean by that is even if you get to that inbox and start messaging, there’s still a long road to go down for men to lock down an actual real life date.
At this point. it’s sensory overload. There are just too many options and too many people who are really just not very serious about meeting for a first date which to be quite frank really sucks because what’s even the point of using dating apps then if users don’t want to meet up IRL?
I think a good solution for bumble could be developing and introducing a new feature that helps users coordinate a first date instead of just relying on the whole let’s throw spaghetti at the wall and see if something sticks method.
(Posted by Michael Tudda)
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