Great! Well, good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us. My name is Nathan Feather, and I am Morgan Stanley's Small and Mid-Cap Internet Analyst. I am excited to be joined by Lidiane Jones and Anu Subramanian, Bumble's CEO and CFO. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you for coming, for having me.
Yes, absolutely. Well, before we get in, a few quick housekeeping items. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative, and also please note Bumble's Safe Harbor. This presentation, including our comments and answers to questions, may include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and reflect our current expectations based on our beliefs, assumptions, and information currently available to us.
Descriptions of these factors and other risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are discussed in more detail in our earnings press release dated February 27th, 2024, and our filings with the SEC, including our annual reports on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2023, and our subsequent periodic filings. With those out of the way—
Well done.
Well, Lidiane, I wanna start with you. You know, congratulations on the new role, and can you walk us through your background and what led you to take the position at Bumble?
Thank you. Thank you all for being here. I joined Bumble about two months ago, and I was excited by a couple of big things. First, the category is still incredibly under-penetrated. There's 2 billion single people around the world, and only a very small percentage of that are using online dating, so a lot of tremendous opportunity. Some of the key factors for growth in this category is innovation, and that's what I am incredibly excited to coming to Bumble, bring much more of a tech-forward consumer innovation to our investments, both in dating and friendship that I described in the earnings call.
Bumble for Friends has been a big part of what we've talked about for the last few years, but transparently, we've had some execution challenges that we are addressing very quickly to give us the opportunity to fulfill what I believe Bumble's all about. Bumble has always been about healthy and equitable relationships, both from a romantic but also a platonic way, and there's a lot of demand for that. So I'm really excited to be joined by such a great team at Bumble and to start the year with a strong set of foundation for what we're gonna do this year.
Okay, great. Well, a lot to unpack within that. But maybe just starting, you know, you're about two months into the job. You know, I'd be really interested to hear about your early learnings and kind of key takeaways in that time.
Yeah, I've learned a tremendous amount. The team has been just so welcoming. Whitney has been a great partner as part of my onboarding. A couple of key things are, you know, transpiring. One is that there was a huge demand for a set of new experiences in dating itself, so we're moving very quickly to launch Bumble in the quarter ahead, in Q2, with the goal of bringing much more of a human set of experiences, helping our users really feel great about the entire journey of dating. So it's gonna be a pretty comprehensive overhaul of Bumble Date, and we've been testing not only some of the features related to profile experience, but also enhancing the quality of matching, more safety capabilities and quite a bit more.
Bumble has always been about women's experience, and this release is gonna be a huge statement about how we're reinvigorating women first. So I'm really, really excited. So that was, you know, opportunity one: how do we get that going? The second is observation, is that we, we're not operating as effectively as we could. So one of the big set of changes that you may have heard at earnings is that we are moving away from a GM model to a functional model, which gave us a ton of efficiencies. We're also centralizing our operations, especially from product and engineering, into fewer locations.
Again, all with the goal of faster pace of innovation, more efficiency, and we're proving that, you know, with our Q2 launch, which I'm really thrilled about. It's a time of transformation for us. We see a tremendous amount of opportunity, and all the actions that we're taking is to help us seize that opportunity faster.
Okay, great. Well, maybe let's talk a little bit more about something you touched on at the start, which is industry saturation. It's certainly one of the most common industry questions we get. You know, how do you view, how do you view the maturity of the online dating industry, both within the U.S., but then also globally?
Yeah, certainly. Can you guys hear me a little better now? I am very soft-spoken in general, so thank you, my team. I've heard this a lot, actually, even the last couple of weeks, certainly, that there is, you know, an investor concern about the saturation of the market. But I have also spent, since the announcement of my role about four months ago, months, meeting customers, looking at our customer feedback, backlog, hearing directly from people who are eager to just share their stories. There is a huge demand for connection still. Like, I, I don't think that has changed. Quite the opposite. Post-pandemic, there is this surge of young people that are looking for connections. What has really been this disconnect is that the experiences that we're bringing to our customers are not matching consumers' expectations.
You know, the set of experiences that we see in the dating category haven't largely changed, and so that's what we're really leaning into, is that we're gonna deeply tune our innovation and our experiences to fulfill what we already see from a customer's experience perspective. So, as a technologist and a product person, that's the best of both worlds. Huge market, huge demand, lack of innovation, so we can really solve that. This is one of the reasons why I took this job, is because I felt there was a tremendous untapped set of potential in the category because it hasn't been looked at with fresh eyes. And that's what we started the year with, is we are going to be bold, we're gonna make some big changes, and we're gonna be a very customer-centric company.
With everything that we do, not only the product experiences, but customer support, safety guidelines, every aspect of what we deliver is going to be optimized for customer experience.
Okay, great. Well, I also want to talk about over the past year, you did see some user volatility. You know, and particularly in new user growth across kind of the online dating market, not just Bumble, but a couple of key competitors as well. I guess, can you walk us through what you're seeing with top of funnel and payers as we enter 2024?
Yeah, sure. I want to just start by saying that, you know, growing users is our top priority, right? And we are a freemium product, which effectively means we have a lot of users that use our product for free, and then a subset of them convert into paying users. So ensuring that, you know, we continue to improve top of the funnel and then converting those users into paying users is a strong priority for us, both from a product experience, customer experience, and from a marketing perspective as well. And as you know, we've been very successful in growing users over the last few years. Two years in a row, we've increased paying users more than 500,000, and, you know, that is a testament to the work that the teams have done.
And, you know, if you look at 2024 right now, our top of the funnel continues to be strong globally. What we had called out last week on our earnings call was that, you know, we've seen, especially in the—specifically in the U.S. with within a certain cohort, within our younger cohort, that we are seeing that the top of the funnel trends, especially coming from Q4 into Q1, which normally would be a seasonal change, has not materialized, right? So we are keeping a close eye on it and ensuring that a lot of the work that we're doing from a product perspective enables us to bring back the strength that we normally see. You know, we've given our paying user guidance for the year.
You know, we are guiding to 350,000-400,000 net adds for the year. The way you'll see that play through this year is at Q1, we've guided to 30,000-40,000. And as we go through the year, you'll see that accelerate. So Q2 net adds will be higher than Q1, Q3 will be higher than Q2, and then Q4, as we all know, seasonally tends to be slightly lower, so it'll be lower than the Q3 net add. So that's the cadence that you'll see, but, you know, we still continue to be very excited about, to Lidiane's earlier point, the growth that we see, and the demand that we see in the market. So, excited for what's to come.
Okay, great. And one more. On the flip side of payers is also our RPP.
Yeah.
I guess looking to 2024, how should we think about that balance between the payer growth you just mentioned and then our RPP and how that should trend through the year?
Yeah. So, you know, our focus is, as we've always said in the past, is on maximizing revenue, right? And, within that, we focus on maximizing payers in every market and in maximizing RPP i n every market as well. The RPP that you see at a Bumble app level in aggregate, you know, is impacted by the geographic mix shift that you see between different markets. So, that's why you see when you see negative trends, it's often because of the mix shift difference, because the U.S. RPP tends to be the highest compared to the RPP that you see in some of the international markets.
Within each market, if you broke it down individually, you'll see that RPP is still growing pretty strongly. So, for example, in the U.S., RPP is still growing, and that's really been a function of a lot of the work that the teams have been doing around pricing.
There's still a lot of price elasticity work that the teams are doing, ensuring that, you know, we are giving the customers the best price possible. And then also on, you know, introducing new products that enable, an existing payer to pay for more products, right? So when, a payer that is paying for a subscription opts in for more consumables, that also leads to growth in our RPP. So you'll see us, deploy all of these mechanisms all through the year, and our goal will be, as we progress through the year, to continue to increase our RPP, as much as we can.
If I may add a couple of points to what Anu shared. When we look at net adds, one of the key factors that we are looking at is quality net adds. We want our users coming into the platform that are going to engage and stay in the platform. And so we're really measuring the duration and engagement of those users. We're not trying to just get a total number of net adds that churn out. So that's a really important part of our growth strategy moving forward. And then the RPP, one of the big things that we're doing, especially with our Q2 launch, is looking at the value, clarity of value across the different tiers that we're offering. And as we've seen, Bumble has been tremendously successful at this, at the in its history.
Customers—a lot of our customers are at the Premium tier, but we didn't see as much retention of our customers when we launched Premium Plus. So we are adding more capabilities to Premium Plus so that users stay there. So you'll see a natural, to Anu's point, natural sustainability of our RPP towards the higher tiers because our users will see greater value of staying out there. So we're really excited about that. I think that release is going to provide, you know, greater value to our RPP goals this year and moving forward as well.
Okay, great. Well, I wanna take just a touch more into that, on Bumble Premium Plus, the high-end tier. I guess, what do you think were the primary reasons why that wasn't getting the adoption you had anticipated? And then with the relaunch, I guess, how should we think about the payer funnel between Bumble Premium, Bumble Premium Plus, and how that should move going forward?
Yeah, we learned a tremendous amount since the December launch of the Premium Plus. One of the areas that we emphasized this particular offering with, was just giving more of everything. You know, so you think of more swipes, more highlights, and that certainly drives demand, and we saw really solid demand for it. A lot of users signed up. So we're still net, you know, revenue positive with it. So it's not, not a terrible release, but we're not seeing the sustainability of people staying in that Premium offering. They're going back down to Premium instead of staying on Premium Plus. So what we, what we're focusing on is adding features, unique features, that you only get if you are a Premium Plus, so that way, there is a sustained value at staying at that offering.
Premium has been incredibly successful, so, you know, we know we're not churning out our users. They're staying with us. They're just going down to Premium, staying—instead of staying in Premium Plus. So great demand, just not sustaining those users. Features now that will add regular value, some of them focused on engagement metrics and insights. What, you know, what are people reacting to the most in terms of features or Opening Moves or opening statements that users are making to that initial matching connection? We can provide a lot of that, those insights. Again, those are AI, you know, powered capabilities that help our users gain more insight and more value to what they're getting out of that offering. So we just wanna, you know, again, seize the demand that we saw and sustain it, which will help our people overall.
Okay, great. Now, we talked a little bit about the relaunch earlier, but I wanna really dive into that, you know, planned launch coming up in 2Q, so relatively soon. You know, can you talk through in a bit more depth, the real rationale behind going through the relaunch? And then how should investors think about the features and product goals, and what would really mark a successful relaunch there?
Yeah, it's a great question. The team had been looking at a lot of different areas of customer feedback and different pockets of improvements on the product. But if you heard in my earnings call, one of the key learnings for me coming in is that things are being done very siloed. Even some of our own testing was being done very siloed, you know, is this particular feature testing. And what we've done is done a full, you know, end-to-end look at what is driving engagement, what is driving actual conversion and retention of these users. It's the full experience. It's not just one isolated feature. So this release is really focused on the end-to-end customer success. So some of the features that we, you know, pockets of customer, you know, feedback, profile experience.
We haven't dramatically changed that over the last few years, so we are really revamping our profile experience. We're shortening that overall set of steps. We're still using questions that are more comfortable for people to engage in, which is translated in terms of what we have seen on the rollout of it from a testing perspective. We are seeing higher quality profiles, higher engagement, and higher conversion. So it... You know, I think there's just a real truth to when you do right by your customers, they will be happier. So that profile is a big part of what we're changing. A couple of other capabilities that we're looking at is enhancing that first experience. You may know Bumble, like everybody knows Bumble, as women making the first move.
If you ask women, especially younger women, we're pretty tired of having to make the first move all the time. So this release is going to be a next generation of women's empowerment. This is going to be about women decide if they wanna make the first move. So that's a pretty big change for Bumble and one that we're incredibly excited about. So this is a, you know, Bumble is here for you, all of our audience. And then the last thing is we're adding some additional, as I mentioned, insights, more, you know, differentiated experience for Premium Plus, and we're adding some more safety capabilities, especially as it relates to ID verification.
So I'm really, again, it's a full, you know, revamp of the product. I'm probably not doing justice. There's a lot more features that the team is working on, but I am thrilled. This is the, you know, us setting the next decade of women's experience in dating for Bumble, which I'm thrilled about.
Okay, great. Well, I also do wanna spend some time on the advancements in Gen AI and what that can mean for dating. So broadly, where do you see the biggest opportunity to leverage the tech throughout your products to improve the user experience over, you know, the kind of medium term?
Yeah, you know, there is, I love generative AI, so I'm an optimist about it. If you've seen me talk about this over the last year, I think the technology is incredibly exciting, and there's some, you know, really clear things to do, if you look at what it offers in terms of helping you tailor your messages or fine-tune your, you know, description of yourself. These things are things that are, you know, you know, fairly straightforward to focus on. But, you know, one of the things that I really believe in is that any AI capability that we add into our product is helping people be their best selves. It's helping us be more human, not to replace us.
I think especially when it comes to dating, which is a highly personal experience, we have to be incredibly thoughtful about what that means. So for us, that means focusing on the deep human, you know, experiential challenges that one has when starting a dating journey. So when, you know, when you start on a dating app, you're not starting there, the bulk of our users are not starting there with a lot of happiness. They're just feeling stressed, feeling anxious. They have to figure out what's that first step to start putting themselves out there. So we're really focused on users building that self-confidence at the start of their journey, which will help us better learn who they are and then enhance the match experience and the quality of matching you with the right people.
So, we really, again, wanna focus on deeply human, engaging experiences on the medium term. I think there's a tremendous amount of innovation that will come out from there. And the reason why we can do it so well is one of the things that I've been thrilled about coming into Bumble. We have 10 years of, you know, customer knowledge and insight. We have 10 years of a lot of AI and ML that has built for safety, and a lot of guardrails that allows us to use and train these models in a way that feels very Bumble, that still meets our own bar for experience and our own brand promise. So very, very excited about what we can do in this space, and we're, you know, we're actively working on it.
Okay, great. Well, I think one of the things, a little bit on the flip side of that, is online daters often point to authenticity, as you noted, as one of the key factors when using a dating app. And Gen AI clearly makes it easier to generate content, but there are worries that it may make it not as authentic, you know, if you don't know whether you're talking to a human or AI or between. And so I guess, how are you thinking about balancing the ability of Gen AI to really reduce the friction throughout the online dating process, while also ensuring people really still show up as their authentic selves?
Yeah, there's some principles that we have already been setting from the get-go. The first is that there's always gonna be transparency about who you're talking to. So I don't want any one of our members or customers to start the dating journey and wonder if they're talking to a bot or with a person. That's never gonna be the case for us. The second thing is, we really want users to be in control of the technology that they're using. So, really being able to know if they want to use an enhanced set of description improvements, etc.
So control and transparency are gonna be a key part of how we use the technology to help people be their best selves without replacing them with a bot, which I think is gonna be very, very important in terms of adoption and success in this category.
Okay, great. Now, one more on AI. You recently launched Deception Detector, which helped reduce, you know, member reports of spam, scam, and false accounts by 45%. So can you dig more into the impact that feature is having? And then more broadly, how are you thinking about utilizing new Gen AI capabilities to improve safety across the platform?
Yeah, you know, as I mentioned earlier, Bumble has had quite an amazing set of innovation and tech stack that is very focused on safety. Deception Detector is a great example of that. You know, a set of capabilities and models that looks for scams and fake accounts. So for our users, that means greater success. You know, so they shouldn't be seeing, you know, any additional interference from us. We're taking care of it for them. And that has really improved in terms of customer support, overall response, so a huge decline in concerns from our customers, which is exactly what we were looking for. When you look at these set of technologies related to, you know, verifying authenticity of users, verifying whether it's scam, it's a forever work, you know, especially as innovation is evolving.
So we are just, y ou know, if you heard about our reinvestment, we're reinvesting in data, AI, and safety because we want this to continue to be a differentiation for us. So we, you know, see from a generative AI perspective, deep fake is a huge concern, so we're going to be investing on getting ahead of the innovation. I think, as I mentioned, I'm an optimist, but only if we can control and manage the technology to meet our promise. So safety is going to be a huge investment because we really want to continue to be the brand that everybody trusts as a place to be safe in. In terms of additional safety capabilities, you know, there is just great guardrails that you can build with these models, and you can really define the set of principles.
So, Bumble has one of the highest bar community, community guidelines, and so we're codifying that into these models. And that really allows us to scale, you know, our experiences and still scale the, the brand promise as we add more users to our platform. So really excited about what we're, we're gonna do in this space.
Okay, great. Well, really exciting. And let's turn to a key part of your growth strategy in international expansion. And so Europe and LATAM, you know, really key areas of success throughout last year. How should we think about the roadmap for 2024? And then any additional color on a potential North Asia launch, especially given some of the macro challenges that have happened in that market?
Sure. So, like you said, international expansion continues to be a huge strategy for us. We've been very strong outside the U.S. in, other English-speaking markets like the U.K., Australia, New Zealand. More recently, in the la st 12, 24 months, we've really expanded into Western Europe. Markets like Germany have been very strong for us and continue to be growth areas as we look into 2024. We've also, beyond Western Europe, now started to expand into Southern Europe, so markets like Portugal, Spain, that area I think is going to be important for us. The Nordic region is also exciting for us.
Again, you know, regions that, you know, borrow a lot from the core Bumble ethos of trust and safety and women's empowerment continue to be very strong for us. We launched India a few years ago. India's always been a very strong market for us, and continues to grow from strength to strength. You'll see us continue to push into, into India.
Other markets in Asia, you know, a lot of them have just grown very well organically, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, those markets. Again, we've not done a lot from a push into those from a marketing perspective. But again, the beauty of a freemium app is anyone can download the app and just start using it. And often we find that, you know, someone, an influencer or someone on social media, just posts about Bumble, saying they had success on it, and before you know it, the app's gone viral and people have just downloaded the app. So you definitely hear lots of stories of that.
And when we see those pockets of organic growth, what we tend to do then is come in with our sort of marketing strategy, and then we'll either ramp up some on-the-ground marketing, or often sometimes we'll also spend money on growth marketing. So you'll see us continue to do that. In terms of Asia, obviously, Japan is a huge dating market, as we know, and you know has a large dating population. We do have a presence in Japan, so Bumble does have a you know organic presence in Japan. It's not a market that we've spent a lot of time and effort going into yet, partly because you know the market hasn't really fully come back post-COVID. It's a market we're watching pretty closely.
From a cultural perspective, it tends to be a nuanced market, so we want to make sure that we get the market right. We want to make sure that the app is customized for the local needs of the Japanese dating population, but definitely something that we are keeping an eye on in the coming future.
Okay, great. Well, shifting over to the expense side, you know, you guided for 300 basis points or more of EBITDA margin expansion next year.
Yeah.
You know, can you provide some more color on the areas in which you found cost savings and where you're reinvesting? And then with that pace of reinvestment in mind, I guess, how should we expect margin to trend over the course of the year?
Yeah. So, you know, we've said this before, we continue to be very committed to expanding our margins. You've seen us, you know, make progress towards that over the course of the last few years. This year, we ended 2023 with 26.2% margin. For 2024, we are committing to expanding that by 300 basis points at least, which puts you north of 29%. You know, a big part of where the savings for 2024 and beyond are coming from is, we announced last week that we are announcing a workforce transformation. Lidiane briefly alluded to that. It's, you know, resulting from the work that we are doing to make Bumble a faster, leaner, more agile company.
The savings are also coming from us changing our operating model from the GM structure back to a functional model. We're also taking a look at, you know, rationalizing the number of locations we have, and ensuring that we bring our product and tech teams closer together, again, with the goal of becoming faster, more efficient, and also removing layers in the company, right? I mean, we've all gone through the last two years of efficient, faster is better, and so removing layers, collapsing structures, is something that we are excited about. We've announced that coming out of that, we expect to see gross savings of about $55 million, of which we are going to be reinvesting $15 million back into the areas that we talked about, product, technology, data, AI, safety, etc.
But you have $40 million of net savings, which will be a sustained saving starting 2025 on an annualized basis. We don't expect the workforce reductions to happen until Q2 this year, which is why you only see about seven months of impact in 2023. But, you know, getting into 2024, if you look at the annualized impact of the $40 million, you're talking about, you know, north of 30% of margins on a sustained basis. And as we've been very efficient in the past, you know, we will continue to find leverage in areas of marketing. We will continue to find leverage in areas of G&A, and continue to just be efficient in our spend. Our commitment to expanding margins is very firm, and as we've always said, there's no reason why we cannot get the margins that, you know, our competitors have, as we continue to scale.
You know, if I may also, like, we are at a size and scale that we can afford to be this disciplined. To Anu's point, we are driving towards this next phase of growth for the company, and we have the right size team and the right size scale as we start now. So I feel very confident that we can achieve our goals with this model and, you know, to Anu's point, drive continued sustained growth of our margins as we grow the business.
Okay, great. Well, one expense plan I want to focus a little bit more on in marketing. This has been pretty topical, given some additional investment from other players. You know, that was a key source of leverage through last year. It was about 190 basis points of leverage. How should we think about that in 2024? But maybe more importantly, where you think marketing should share over the kind of medium to long term.
Sure. So, you know, we've always said marketing has been historically an area of investment for us, right? And a lot of the money that we spend on marketing is really on organic marketing, which is about getting Bumble's brand out there in the world, and our brand is our biggest moat. And ultimately, you know, we are a word-of-mouth business, right? And as people get to know the app, people get to know the brand. They find their special someone on Bumble, they go tell five other people, and then they go tell five other people, and then the brand sort of does its work for itself. So that's historically why we've heavily invested in our brand. We have also, in the recent past, committed to finding leverage in our brand.
As you alluded to, we found almost, you know, 200 basis points of leverage just in this past year. In 2024, you should expect to see more leverage on marketing as a percentage of revenue. And the areas of leverage and efficiency that we're looking at are on an ROI on our spend tends to be a big focus for us. On the growth side, we have strict thresholds that we've given our teams in terms of targets for investment, whether it's on ROAS basis, whether it's on targets in terms of CPI, CPRs, all of those. So, the teams continue to be very focused on making sure we get the right type of people as we are acquiring on our platform at, you know, the right levels of ROI thresholds.
To Lidiane's earlier point, you know, we are focused on people that have long retentions, are focused on the right kind of people coming to our platform. That is an area that will continue to give us leverage. Also, you know, as we become larger as a company, the organic and brand side will also continue to give us leverage. We're also looking at our marketing technology spend, ensuring that we are finding efficiencies in all the kind of monies that we're spending across marketing.
Okay, great. Now, I also want to touch a bit on capital allocation. So Bumble generates really strong free cash flow. It was about $170 million last year, and has also built up a pretty substantial cash balance of about $355 million. I guess, how should we think about your capital allocation strategy? And then can you speak to the cadence of share buybacks over the next year, especially given the 10-K this quarter?
I'll start. Yeah. Sure. So you know, we've historically said there are three things that we are heavily focused on in terms of how we think about capital allocation. Obviously, the first one is continuing to grow our business organically within the margin goals that we have set for ourselves. So that obviously is number one priority. Our second priority is inorganic growth. We have done a couple of M&As, as you know, in the past two years. We will continue to be opportunistic in terms of how we think about M&A. The bar for M&A is high.
We want to make sure that any acquisition helps further our goal of where we want to be in terms of either helping us gain time or helping us gain technology that, you know, we need to build, right? So again, we'll be very disciplined in how we think about M&A, but that's definitely an area of capital allocation that we are looking at. The third thing, as we've said before, is returning capital to our shareholders. We do have a buyback program in place. This morning we announced, you know, for the 8-K that you alluded to, that we've repurchased $50 million worth of shares directly from Blackstone. We've utilized our existing share buyback program to effectively do that.
You know, we'll continue to be opportunistic about share buyback. We've been buyers, in the open market, in the past, and we've also opportunistically bought directly from Blackstone. So you'll see us take advantage of all the tools that we have to continue to return cash to our shareholders.
Okay, great. Now, I also want to touch on the non-dating space, and you've made a lot of progress there over the past years with the Bumble for Friends standalone app launch, along with the acquisition of Official. So how are you thinking about the long-term opportunity and strategy in that market? And then what level of investment is needed, at least in the short run, to advance towards that vision?
Sure. I believe Bumble has a brand that stands for more than dating. And you've heard the team talk about this for the last couple of years. We've seen some great engagement for the users that we have on Bumble for Friends, BFF. They're a small but very, very, very passionate group, and so we've been able to learn from it. You know, people want to be able to meet in person for events, so we launched an events planning capability. But one of the biggest hurdles from a growth perspective has been the paradigm of using a dating user experience for friend finding. So users want community, they wanna see other people, and so we're gonna just lean in very aggressively towards that.
Official has been a great test bed for us because we're seeing couples, once they do meet on Bumble, that they wanna meet other couples. And again, it emphasizes this point that people are looking to find more people in their community to engage in. So we are going to aggressively go seize this opportunity of expanding our overall TAM. And we're gonna do it in a way that allows us to know who you are as our users. So once you are part of the Bumble ecosystem, once you've created an account, that we know you and we'll recommend other products for you. This is where we gain real leverage in terms of the brand and the platform, and we haven't done that up to this point. That's a pretty meaningful shift.
And, you know, to Anu's earlier point, we have, we have the flexibility in our, you know, balance sheet to go explore, strategic M&As that will accelerate our innovation strategy. But it has to be, you know, going back to what I said earlier, one that meets our customer experience bar. We're going to be relentless about customer experience. When you come to Bumble, you're gonna feel great, regardless of what you come for, friendship, for couples, for dating.
So, I'm really excited. I think one of the key things that I mentioned at earnings, that I'll say again, we are laser focused on getting this company back to strong growth, and we're going to move aggressively in making the right, decisions and changes, as well as investments to help us achieve that. We plan to share a more strategic rollout roadmap with our investors in the coming months, because we want you to have confidence in what we are delivering for the rest of the year.
Okay, great. Now, we've got about 90 seconds left, so I wanna sneak one last one in here. What are the one or two things you think investors most underappreciate or, or misunderstand about the Bumble story?
I think looking at the stock, I think there's a lot of underappreciation going on. Because when I look at the entire following of customers, we have impacted hundreds of millions of customers. The insane loyalty of these customers that I have experienced, I underestimated the passion that customers have, and I've been really hit by a tsunami of customer love since I joined the company. That, you can't buy that kind of brand loyalty. And so I am really, really excited to bring everybody that loves Bumble back into the Bumble platform.
I think this is one of the things that's going to be the biggest, you know, opportunity levers for us in the, you know, years to come, which I'm really excited about. I think that, the power of the brand is one that I really hope our investors, you know, really think about. It is definitely what we're gonna lean on.
Okay, great. Well-
Thank you so much. You did a great job.
Well, I appreciate you being here, Lidiane and Anu. Hope everybody has a good one.
Okay. Thank you, everyone.