Kind of ruin the mood and go to the safe harbor right away. So 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 beliefs, assumptions, and information currently available to us. Descriptions of these risks and other factors that could cause actual results differ materially from those from these forward-looking statements are discussed in more detail in our periodic filings with the SEC. I think as I progress as a Sell-Side Analyst, I can say that faster and faster. Is that the way it works?
Yes. Sounded great.
Excellent. Excellent. Okay. Well, maybe we'll first start this way. Maybe one for both of you. You announced yesterday some management changes. Lidiane, the company announced several important leadership updates yesterday, namely that Anu and Bumble's CMO are departing the company, and you've hired a new Chief Business Officer. Can you walk us through the background on these changes? Then maybe for Anu, it's been great working with you for the last several years. What can you share with us about your decision to step down as CFO?
Well, thank you so much for having us, Ken. It's great to be here. And we did hear yesterday there's a few changes. But before I go into it, I do wanna acknowledge how grateful I am for Anu. This past year's been an incredible partner to me. But more than that, she has been a phenomenal CFO for Bumble for the last four-plus years. Her impact is gonna be certainly felt for all of us in the years ahead. And you know, as you saw from us yesterday in yesterday's announcement, we are reaffirming our guidance. Our strategy has not changed. We are going to have an incredibly you know, graceful transition. Anu has been incredibly transparent about her decision and timeline, and will stay with us through the end of this fiscal year, until the filing of the 10-K.
So I'll let Anu speak a little bit about her decision in a minute. But a lot of what we are doing, as you've heard from me, this year has been about transforming the company to help us achieve a set of product experiences and innovation that aligns with what customers are looking for. And this, you know, set of changes are just a continuum of what we've been hearing from certainly Anu and I these last couple of quarters. We at the core of what we're doing internally is also transforming how we work. And one of the key changes that we have been making over the last few quarters has been just the pace of innovation and the pace of product development for the company.
I'm excited that we're, you know, really making progress about how rapidly and how bigger and bolder our innovation's gonna be in the quarters ahead. Then, you know, a big secondary thing that you've heard from me a lot this year is just realigning the strategy of our revenue to customer success so that we are adding value across each stage of the customer experience. One of the announcements yesterday is the start of Neil Shah as our Chief Business Officer, who is gonna play a really big role in re-architecting our revenue model for our subscriptions, ensuring that we have a great rebalance of value, bringing in great commercial perspective to how we're innovating. Very excited about that. I do want to pass it to Anu. Again, Anu, thank you for the incredible impact these last few years.
Of course. Yeah. No, thank you again. You know, as she mentioned, I've been at Bumble now, almost four and a half years. And you know, when I joined, we were a small private company, and now we're public, and we've grown so much in the time that I've been here. And I feel so fortunate to have had the chance to see this growth and privilege to have been the CFO during this time. You know, as to my decision to resign, it's really driven by what my personal goals are in terms of what I wanna do next in my career. And I feel ready for the next challenge and for the next sort of adventure that I wanna go after, so I'm very excited about that.
You know, Bumble's been a huge part of my life for the last, you know, almost half a decade, and I'll miss it tremendously. I think the work that we are doing, to make relationships better for everyone is more important than it was when Bumble started 10 years ago. I have so much confidence in the work that we have done in the past year in terms of transforming Bumble and the, you know, in the transformation journey that we are on. I'll be Bumble's biggest fan and biggest supporter, you know, even after I leave. I'm really excited to see what the new management team does. I think from a timing perspective, as Lidiane mentioned, I'll be here through March, so almost another four months. I'll see you all back at earnings.
And the goal here is, you know, to have as smooth a transition as possible. We are all heads down doing, planning for 2025 now. So once we leave this conference, we'll be back to our day jobs. And, you know, it's sort of business as usual. So, it's an exciting time for Bumble, and, you know, I'm looking forward to sort of, like, what's my next steps.
Excellent. Thank you so much. Maybe for those who may be a bit more new to the story and need a little bit of an update, Lidiane, you came into the role at the beginning of 2024 and decided, maybe I would just say, I'd hit the reset button a bit on the business, right, on the product experience, on the business, and make some meaningful changes to the way Bumble markets the customer experience and rework some of the upsell products. That couldn't have been an easy decision, right? Relatively jarring, made some big changes to the organization from a cost structure standpoint. Could you first maybe take us into what you saw from a metric standpoint as you came into the business, that led you to believe that so much change was needed?
'Cause kind of from the outside, maybe this is our fault, but, like, it looked, I mean, it was share-gaining, you know, competitor, you know, in the online dating industry, and it didn't feel like it needed the reset. But talk to us through the rationale, and then we'll get into more of the specifics.
Yeah. Ken, as you mentioned earlier, this year we started a transformation of Bumble with a goal really to transform the category, because we believe that there's a tremendous opportunity, as Anu just mentioned, the need for connection and true human authentic relationships are greater now than ever before. And what we're doing this year is really setting ourselves up for a long-term growth and long-term success that aligns to what our customers' needs are. And we started this transformation with a very clear set of intentful you know invests. The first one really being about the best possible customer experience. You've heard me say this in the last you know certainly this past earnings, which for us means greater innovation that is more up to what our consumers and customers are looking for today. That also means you know end-to-end great customer experience.
You've probably heard me talk a lot about safety, customer support, so we're really taking a broad look at what customer experience means in today's world and what it is that we want for the next 10 years. The second thing is really being, you know, intentional on how we acquire our customers and how we manage the ecosystem of users that are part of our community 'cause that has a huge impact in customer success. It has a huge impact to the word-of-mouth engine that is so important to a business like ours. And then the last one is, you know, which I just mentioned now, is the revenue strategy, is ensuring that we're creating the right, revenue streams, but also very aligned to value for customers that are longer journey.
And so, it has meant a lot of change for the company this year, but I couldn't be more excited about the progress that we've made. I think it, you know, looking back at just three quarters, the pace of innovation of the engineering product, the progress that we've made on the marketing side, the progress that we're seeing in terms of customer success metrics, have all been really positive, you know, indicators that we're in the right direction. Definitely not easy, Ken, not an easy decision to make, but we're really looking at the long-term, you know, growth and success of the company.
Maybe take it a little deeper into that. What about, 'cause there was initial discussion, and then you talked about some things maybe not still being where you want them, right, on subsequent earnings calls. Can you talk about some of the, maybe the learnings since you've been in the company, what things have worked, maybe what things still you need to make some real progress on?
Yeah. As I mentioned in the last earnings, we are in the early innings of this transformation. It is a multi-quarter process to get it to where we want it to be. And some of the areas that I mentioned in the last earnings was, particularly around how do we scale our marketing efforts and balance our marketing efforts to ensure that we are acquiring the right set of users, the right retention of these users depending on the maturity of the market that we're in. So bringing more sophistication to the strategies that we're applying for mature markets like the U.S. and Canada, compared to emerging markets where we see a lot more growth potential, certainly in the next year and beyond. So that's one example that we are making great progress, but we certainly believe there's more to do.
The other one, you know, that I've mentioned is on the product space and product innovation. We've released a product from earlier this year in the spring. Now in the fall, we have another release coming in the winter where we are really taking bigger and bolder steps. In these first couple of releases, it was very much focused on delivering capabilities that our customers have really been asking for a long time and focused on engagement and retention of these users. Engagement for us means customers are interacting with one another. They're finding matches. They're having great conversation. So we really track that incredibly carefully, and as we take bigger steps into the innovation and the releases ahead, we're not only looking at that. We're looking also at top-of-funnel strengths. So there's more work to do in all of these.
What I'm feeling great about is that the bets seem very clear. The vision for our product is very clear. We certainly believe that for us, it's about redefining the real-world to online and online-to-real-world connection that will help people find the connections, the relationships that they're looking for. And that will mean success for us. And so we are really just moving as quickly as we can and executing on that. It's been very energizing for the company also to have a longer-term view of where we're headed, and, you know, building a roadmap that aligns to that.
Maybe just staying on the pace of innovation, you alluded to the winter release. You talked about ID verification as one of the parts of that, but you said that the winter release will be a significant one, right? And I think you alluded to the future releases. You're gonna pick up the pace of innovation and potentially change. Could you talk anything else you're willing to talk about, about the winter release now? How should we think about the ID verification? Is that a, you know, is it a prioritization? Is it preferences? How will that be implemented, to the extent that you can share that now? And then I have a follow-up after that.
Yeah. One of the most exciting things, if you love building products, and that is my, like, passion, so I can talk to you about that any for hours at a time, is that what we have done is we are working on things that take longer now, you know? So you don't see it yet, but we are. That's why it means each release will be bigger. It's because the things that we are developing now will come next year, and we have a greater view of our future product investments. So that's a really exciting thing 'cause it gives us time to take bolder bets. For the winter release, there's a few things that, you know, you mentioned.
ID verification, you know, not, not only ID verification, but we are taking a lot of steps towards safety, ensuring that our customers feel safe, that they have the tools to be safe when they are out on a date or when they are engaging with someone on our platform. Bumble has always been a company that deeply cares about that. We're just going to continue to invest heavily on that. And so what we're coming in for, for our winter release, it's going to be ID verification, which is, you know, we're gonna start with that as optional for our customers. So we're gonna encourage users to do that. We're going to give a lot of incentives for users that are going to get more success if they do use it, because we know there's a greater preference if you know it's a real person on the other side.
So we want to really encourage you. We're not going to mandate you, not, you know, not initially. But there are other capabilities there. Another one that I mentioned at earnings is sharing my date. We know that, especially for women, being able to say, "Where am I gonna be and who am I gonna be with?" and having a very seamless experience for being able to do that really matters. So we are also launching that in the winter. We're introducing some capabilities that will make profiles more beautiful, easier to create. We know also that, you know, being able to find the right people, also means that you're getting to see the real themselves. And there's, you know, a lot of users that have just a harder time building profiles, picking the right photos, getting the right information.
And so we want to take a look at every piece of these journeys that our customers are going through and ease that experience but deliver the highest possible quality of the output. So we are in, you know, bringing in some additional experiences there. And then we were saving a few others for surprise.
Appreciate it. Appreciate it. And over what? How should we think about the timing of the impact of these changes? How quickly can you see internally whether they're having the desired effect, and then how should we, over what time period, evaluate them externally?
Yeah. It's a great question. It varies per capability. You know, some features, when we look at it from a top-of-funnel, you know, feature is eye-catching and new and fresh, and certainly for consumers, that drives a certain set of users to wanna check it out. Then there's a set of capabilities that are about strengthening the customer success. So once you get here that you find great matches or matching algorithm is a big investment for us 'cause we really believe in that. Then retention, that you're actually having a great experience, that you're going to engage with users. You're gonna have great conversations. So we measure all of those, and they're important. It's important for us to stay healthy on engagement, retention, just as much as top-of-funnel.
So we certainly are thinking a lot about how we want to provide more data over time for investors to see how we're measuring and how you should be looking at it as well. For me, it's, you know, sustainable growth means there's really great balance across the board because it, you know, knows that we're bringing in new customers, but we're making sure that the ones that are there are being successful, that they're spreading the word, which has been such a positive, you know, flywheel for Bumble in the last 10 years.
Got it. So, you know, I wanna talk a little bit about tiering and Premium+ because if I go and I was looking back through the earnings calls, and when you initially started, the intention, I think, was to stick with the tiering plan, and then you decided to pause and reevaluate, right? Could you talk about the opportunity? Is it that you don't see the same about think about segmenting the market in that way, or is it that you didn't have the right value to add for those tiers, to implement that? So how should we think about that?
Yeah. Get started?
Yeah. Sure. So I think, you know, before we talk about Premium+, I think we should talk about sort of monetization overall. Sure. I think the focus that we and revenue re-architecture is a big pillar of the transformation work that we're doing. And, you know, the way we are approaching it is really about from the time you come on the app till you find someone, what does value proposition look like irrespective of whether you're a free customer or a paid customer?
And we wanna make sure that the minute someone comes on the app, even as a free user, they find value in it, and then we incentivize them to start paying so that they can find greater value. And within that paid journey, we are focused on different sort of tiering options that increasingly over time provide more and more value, right? So it's not about we wanna move every feature to Premium+ and maximize it. It is about making sure that every user at every step of the journey sees value. And, you know, as a freemium app, that's extremely important because at the end of the day, we are an ecosystem business, and so we need the right mix of free and paid customers to be in, you know, every sort of geographic area because that's what ultimately drives matches.
It drives engagement, and it drives, you know, sort of word of mouth. So that's a holistic way of how we are thinking about it. Premium+ is still, you know, live on the app. People are very much using it and adopting it. And, you know, we've been definitely launching it in multiple countries. I think what we have said is, we still believe that we are not satisfied with the value proposition that exists within Premium+. And so part of the work that we'll be doing, planning for 2025 is on better establishing features that add to that value. So by no means are we, you know, not looking at it.
It's just more a function of we believe that it can add much more value. A lot of the product work that Lidiane just talked about will feed into that because, you know, they're not sort of disconnected from each other. I think it's about saying, "Okay, which product needs to sit within what tier?" is the work that's happening right now, and you know, with Neil joining us, that's a big part of what he's going to be responsible for as well because he has a lot of experience in having looked at different revenue business models, and so, having his expertise in helping the company think through that, I think, is gonna be very valuable.
Yeah. I'll add, you know, a big part of creating a Chief Business O fficer role and bringing Neil's expertise for us is ensuring that the subscription tiering, as Anu mentioned, is well-balanced with a product-led growth in mind. So we certainly want the product experience to entice users to pay in the right way, so that they're feeling good about paying but also upgrading. At a fundamental level, the number of tiers that we have, even with Premium+, is not excessive. So what we are really trying to think about is ensuring that from the free user to the paid user, there's great value. And as Anu just mentioned, the product roadmap is going to give us more optionality in terms of value creation and value extraction.
We're giving the right value, and then users pay for that value, and they understand it if you're good about that. It's a really close set of efforts happening right now. One great thing for us has been that Neil has been advising us for the last two months. So he's been in the weeds with us and understands the product. So he's, you know, announcing now is officially Chief Business Officer but is already working closely with the rest of the team. So we're well-suited to have a strong plan for next year.
And maybe just one follow-up on that is, would it be fair to say that a successful tiering strategy expands the addressable market for paying users, right? It's not just about maximizing the revenue per, you know, or optimizing for revenue per, you know, user consumer utility, but also increasing the addressable market?
That is one of our goals, is to expand the number of users that are gonna feel compelled to join the you know online dating, that they will get value. That's why getting a free, great free experience really matters because we can start expanding that top-of-funnel in a more meaningful way. And then to your point, then paid and higher paid tiers feel really clear for users. So we're not just tracking our people because if we you know are just tracking our people at you know at the cost of weakening our top-of-funnel, that's not a great long-term you know proposition. So it's both for sure.
Great. I'm gonna zoom out a little bit here and talk about the overall structure of the dating industry and the swipe model in particular. There's an investor perception some have a perception that the swipe model may need to be fundamentally changed. Maybe there's some other modality or form factor that, beyond a swipe left or right, right, that would go back to the original matches and stuff of that world that was not a thing.
Y our perspective, and I don't wanna put words into your mouth, but seems that improvements in user quality on facilitating healthier conversation, that the core matching mechanism of a swipe can still remain intact. Could you talk about what gives you that confidence? This is, you know, not an easy question, but as you think about the future of Bumble and the future of the online dating industry, what gives you the confidence that that core kind of swipe mechanism is the right way to go?
Yeah. Great question, Ken. You know, just to be very clear, we're not necessarily 100% attached to the swiping model forever. So it's not our point of view that it has to be swiping or it does not have to be swiping. And with any product-led experience, it is all about evolving the experience to align to our customer's success. So we certainly are testing and experimenting with a variety of different ways for people to match and find each other. And our future and the future of the experiences that we deliver for Bumble will be very guided by our customers' feedback. And the way that we certainly talk about it internally in our product development is a customer-led growth, which means that we are really looking at what's gonna drive the most amount of customer success and happiness overall.
So I think it is pretty amazing, you know, that a category as long as this one has maintained one model alone. I think it's a, you know, really positive thing, but also at some point, customers want novelty. They want different experiences. So we are very much open, and we are developing a number of different ways for users to find each other in our experience. And it's gonna be, you know, what our app product launches come up, certainly will be dependent on how well they test with our customers.
Excellent.
Yeah. And just to maybe add to that, you know, the work that we are talking about from a transformation perspective, whether it's the ecosystem or product experience, all of that is independent of what ultimately that sort of model looks like, right? That is very fundamental to the core dating experience. So the work that we're doing is going to be very valuable irrespective of what ultimately that sort of form factor looks like.
Maybe, speaking on the marketing side, in our view, one of the key themes from the 3Q earnings call was a discussion of seeking the right type of users with higher quality marketing channels. Could you provide a bit more context here? Where were you marketing before? What are the new channels that are helping you to attract that right type of user? And is it really the message, or is it the medium that allows you to attract that right type of users?
Yeah. I can get started, and feel free to jump in. You know, I think marketing has always been one of Bumble's biggest strengths, and from the time Whitney started the company, we've always had a very sort of strong point of view in terms of what the Bumble brand stands for, and that is not changing at all for us. Our brand continues to be one of our biggest assets. You know, when we think about how we are thinking about marketing is we are still very much focused on staying true to our roots of continuing to be strong in organic marketing, and in you know new markets, that's very much about how do you continue to build brand awareness, how do you do the things to seed the ecosystem, things like that.
In established markets like the U.S., it's really about how do you strengthen that organic word of mouth. A lot of the work that we've done in Q3, for example, in places like New York City has been about, you know, around the theme of women's sports as an example, right? So between sponsoring the WNBA, between the work we did at the US Open, all of this was about how do you build Bumble's brand among especially our core demographic of women and do it in a way that feels very authentic to us. And again, this has always been historically Bumble's very strong strength, and now we are sort of like going back to our roots. So that's a big part of how we are thinking about marketing.
You know, we've seen the data in social sentiment, things like that, where people have been, you know, extremely sort of proud of being part of that experience. So that's been a change. We are testing a bunch of other things like that in a lot of other cities as well in terms of very specific organic marketing that is tied to that city. On the sort of performance side, you know, our focus has always been about not just acquiring a user for the sake of acquiring a user, and it's about making sure that we get the right user into the ecosystem. And so, we talked at earnings about some tests that we are running, you know, in some international markets about changing the funnels that we are using, targeting different types of people.
And it's been really healthy to see improvements in things like engagement as we've sort of shifted our strategy a little bit in terms of thinking about user acquisition. And, you know, we wanna take a long-term view of how we think about a user and focusing not just on getting users into the ecosystem but really thinking about what is the lifetime value of you know user A versus user B. So there's a lot of work that the growth marketing teams are doing in terms of sort of modeling that is going to make us better and better at that. So I think you know those are the things that we are doing from a marketing perspective. Obviously, it's, you know, it continues to be one of our biggest areas of investment, and so we wanna make sure that we continue to sort of maximize, you know, the returns from that.
Okay. Thank you. Turning to kind of growth and margins, you reiterated your 4Q guidance and the full year outlook. You haven't discussed 2025 in any detail yet, but I guess, how should the market look at the milestones and the kind of the revenue recovery trajectory as you look into 2025? Is there anything early that you could talk about just from milestones how we should evaluate your progress if your product initiatives go according to plan?
Sure. So, you know, it's too early to be talking about specifics for 2025. So, you know, I think maybe I'll steer everyone back to what Lidiane started with, right, which is, you know, we are evaluating internally ourselves based on the sort of three big pillars of growth that we've talked about, which is, you know, how do you think about the ecosystem, how do you think about the customer experience, and then how do you think about re-architecting, you know, what revenue looks like, and you know, as we think about growth in 2025, each of those pillars have, you know, KPIs that are associated with that, and some of them may be very clearly obvious in terms of, you know, this drives top of the funnel.
Some of them are much more about engagement, and some of them are very clearly about driving people into a paid funnel, and some of them may be, you know, our people-driving initiatives, so each of them are different in terms of what the goals are, but like we said earlier, our goal is to be balanced across the three. If you go too heavy on one, you know, to the detriment of another, that again does not lead to balanced growth, so that's how we are thinking about 2025, and so, you know, more to come on, you know, the specifics around that. I think it's a little bit too early to be talking about it. That's the work that's going on, but we are very focused on, you know, top of the funnel growth. We are very focused on revenue growth.
You know, we are saying that this is going to, you know, take a minute. This is a multi-quarter journey, as we've said. So, you know, that's how we are also thinking about it. So more to come is how I would say it.
Yeah. I'll add to what Anu said, you know, what has which we also shared in last earnings. The early signs that we're seeing from these pillars are very encouraging. It does, you know, still mean we have quarters ahead of work. So, going through this low growth process is part of the transformation journey, and we knew this was gonna be the case, but certainly gives us internally as a company a lot of drive and confidence that we're absolutely on the right track. This week is actually Bumble's 10th year anniversary.
So, we're, you know, celebrating. And one of the greatest gifts of being the CEO of this company is that every week, almost every day, I receive a letter, a video, a story of how Bumble changed people's lives. And that's what we're embarking into. We believe people need more connection now than they did 10 years ago. And we are going to stay laser-focused on doing that at a larger scale than before.
That's great. It's never too early for us to ask about 2025, but I understand.
You want to do your job.
Yeah. That's right. Maybe last one. Since no proper TMT conference, fireside can be complete without an AI question. I think it's probably a long overdue. Could you talk about the opportunities with AI? What, maybe segment into maybe shorter-term opportunities, shorter-term win opportunities, and then maybe medium-term, how could it impact the overall product experience?
I am very enthusiastic about the AI transformation that's happening in the market. For a company like ours, AI is such a core of what we already do today. You know, the matching algorithm is an AI, you know, algorithm already. It has always been. But what we can do with not only the capabilities that we already have, the data, the knowledge that we already have with generative AI on top of it is quite meaningful. And what we're doing in the short- term is transforming our customer service experience. I mentioned, I believe, in the last earnings, we have a Bumble service agent now that is already expanding in pilot to more and more markets where we're seeing a much faster, you know, response rate, but also greater customer satisfaction that their issues are very quickly resolved.
That gives us a really great test bed at, you know, interaction model, a resolution model, and will continue to be a big part of how we build the knowledge graph to innovate. In addition to that, you know, some of the features that you're gonna see in winter and then, you know, into next year will be about leveraging AI to facilitate connection, to continue to increase the, you know, strength of our matching algorithm. Our matching algorithm has a lot of really great strengths as of right now, but arguably that's the biggest job that we have is helping people find the right matches. So we are really investing heavily as we build new features.
It's about getting the right knowledge from users, not only the surface knowledge, but also based on their interactions, really what they're looking for, really what, you know, makes them excited, and then enhancing their own awareness of that through their journey. So we're all extremely excited about our investments in our tech stack, but also with, new generative AI capabilities that's going to transform user experience, for us in the quarters ahead.
With that, thank you so much, Lidiane. Anu.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thanks so much.