Hey, listeners, it's Chris Gotier, producer and Masters of Scale. After an incredible tenure at Bumble, former Masters of Scale guest and Bumble CEO and founder Whitney Wolf Heard has stepped away from the company. So we thought there's no better time to celebrate her prolific time as CEO. So we're re-releasing her episode to shine a light on what helped make her so successful. We know you'll find her insights as valuable as ever. We hope you enjoy.

You have friends that are beginning to become young adults and they want to go out to the club and the only club in your area has one step in order to get into it and you're in a power wheelchair. That doesn't go Well, we're all out together. I found video games to be that outlet where I could take my Super Nintendo into my friend's garage and we could hang out for hours. We'd be playing our Street Fight or Streets of Rage and that fighting games with my pals that were super into beating each other's butts.

That butt beating virtual street fighter is Stephen Spahn, COO of the nonprofit AbleGamers.

I felt the deeper I delved into the world of gaming, the more I felt like I was just like everyone else. We're all the same. We're all just gamers.

Steve got in a competitive gaming, which requires quick reflexes and precision timing in order to win. But he was facing a far greater challenge.

So my disability is spinal muscular atrophy, which essentially means that over time, my muscles get weaker and weaker. What happens is I lose abilities as we go along.

At the same time that Steve's muscles were weakening, video game controls were getting more complex. But Steve was determined to game on.

My hands started to getting weaker and I had to find a way to continue to do what I was doing without being able to do the same physical movements. I am a technology guy, so I knew there had to be technology out there somewhere that could bridge this gap between my abilities and my desire.

During his research, Steve turned to AbleGamers. At the time, it was a blog aimed at helping disabled gamers continue to play.

There was an article that the founder, Mark Barley, had put up about you can't play World of Warcraft with only one arm. And I knew that that was baloney. So being the adolescent 20-year-old that I was, I was like, Ha-ha! Mark, you're wrong. This is why I'm right, and you suck. And instead of turning me away like the snot-nosed little kid that I was, he was like, Oh, yeah. You think you can write better? Better. I'm like, Oh, yeah, well, I will. I'm going to do better than you.

Despite that adversarial beginning, Steve and Mark soon hit it off.

Mark and I got to work and we created a guide for developers to be able to make their games as accessible as possible.

Many of these measures were simple tweaks that would have huge impacts for millions of disabled gamers. But the biggest stumbling block was the classic game controller. To capture it, small buttons clustered close together, teeny twin joysticks positioned to fit under each thumb. It's a design aimed at amplifying the smallest of movements into on-screen glory. But for disabled players, it can be a frustrating, alienating obstacle.

Not everyone's abilities include being able to grab a standard controller with both hands in order to play.

One day, a giant of the gaming world came calling Microsoft.

So AbleGamers got to work in secrecy with Xbox for over three and a half years. They basically said, You need to see the super cool thing that we're doing, and we think you have some amazing advice for us. We went, Oh, cool, this sounds awesome.

That super cool thing was called the Xbox adaptive controller. It was quite literally a game changer for disabled players. These kinds of.

Adaptive controllers allow you to capitalize on your abilities. Maybe you have only one arm or maybe you don't have the ability to rapid fire, push, or point your finger. Our assisted technologies can take those controllers and change where the buttons are. We can take technology, we can change them just a little bit, and we can make them better for everyone.

The.

Adaptive controller is just one example of how small but thoughtful tweaks can change everything. I believe the smallest feature can make or break your product. You got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out.

Can you.

Believe.

It? Such an idiot.

And then you go back to, This is totally.

Going to be amazing.

There are so many easy ways to do it. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops.

I'm working...

We have a three-bedroom apartment.

Stuff that just seems absolutely nutball.

10.

Years.

Later, we're.

Like, Well.

That's just how you.

Do it. We haven't made just.

How you do it.

This is Masters of Scale. We'll start the show in a moment, after a word from our premier brand partner, Capital One Business.

We'd had all these crazy moments. I would never lock my door in my fourth-floor, east-villageto walk up because I could never find my keys and it was just too much of a hassle.

That's Deepa Gandhi, COO and co-founder of Dagnidover, an accessory brand. She's sharing a story about one of the many handbag problems her and her co-founders experienced as busy women on the go.

The immediate problem that we were trying to solve was just a great work bag for women. Can I have a bag that looks good, that's structured, that's made out of a durable material that also has a place for my laptop, where my water bottle won't spill over and ruin everything in the bag.

Deepa and her fellow founders, CEO Melissa Marsh, and Chief Creative Officer, Jesse Dover, saw a need and started a company in order to fill it.

The first two products we launched were direct responses to challenges that we had personally experienced, and they were focused on the working woman. It was the perfect tote. It fit your laptop, water bottle, keys, pens, anything and everything, and this clutch wallet. That could actually work as a system.

Dagnedover's focus on the simplicity of a great product made their bags must-haves for working women. But their next best seller would expand their market in ways they'd never imagined. It's all part of the Refocused Playbook, a special series where Capital One Business highlights stories of business owners and leaders using one of Reed's theories of entrepreneurship. Today's Playbook Insight: Products that do too many things are hard to explain. Turn your focus to creating a simple product with a clear, simple story.

I'm Reed Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn, Partner at Graylock, and your host. I believe the smallest feature can make or break your product. The challenge is recognizing the impact of that feature and making sure it's actually positive. As a founder or a product manager, you should always be on the lookout for small changes that can have an outsized impact. While small changes typically lead to incremental improvements, every so often the impact is exponential. I wanted to talk to Whitney Wolf about this because both of the products she's launched are known for a single distinguishing feature that set them on the course for massive growth. She was a co-founder of the dating app Tinder, famous for letting users swipe right on potential matches. After leaving Tinder, she founded another dating app, Bumble, which has grown to 50 million users and 200 million dollars in revenue. Bumble's success also lies in the seemingly small tweak Whitney made to the established dating app format.

Like Tinder, users swipe through profiles of potential matches. If they like what they see, they swipe right. If not, they swipe left. If two users swipe right on each other's profiles, they can message each other. But here's the key difference. On Bumble, women have to make the first move. This tweak doesn't just change how dating apps work, it aims to change how dating works. Period. It rewrites our cultural assumptions about how people connect. Connecting with people, understanding what makes them tick, has always been Whitney's Drive.

I remember telling my father right before I went to college, I want to go into advertising. I want to go into marketing. I want to connect with people. I remember my dad saying, I don't know if that's advertising and marketing that you're saying that you're passionate about. I think you're passionate about something else.

As it turned out, her father was right.

I show up at university and I try to apply to the advertising department. Well, I flung to the exam, bombed it. I did not get accepted. It was shocking to me because every question on that exam lacked empathy and emotion. There was no human connectivity involved. It was all about eyeballs on the commercial that you played.

It was clear from the cold, hard numbers staring out from that exam paper that Whitney wasn't cut out for that type of marketing. She wanted something with more heart and soul.

I ended up going into humanities and studying global studies. The classes I took were globalization. What's the impact of putting a smiling Ronald McDonald versus a frowning Ronald McDonald in different countries? It changes the game. It's all about humans and emotions and connecting with the individual, wherever that individual is. It's hyperlocality, and that's marketing.

Whitney is remembering here a famous corporate case study. It turns out that certain cultures mistrusted the broad smile of Ronald McDonald. When Ronald offered a more subdued expression, customers poured in. This learning from McDonald's of all places, stuck with Whitney, and there's a lesson in it for all of us. If you recognize both the universals of human nature and the hyper local nature of human culture, you can literally turn a frown upside down from millions of potential customers. Whitney brought this ability to read a room and the market with her to Tinder. It was 2012, and Whitney was visiting college campuses to promote the app.

Strangers connecting was not something that that group of people, millennials, if you will, wanted to touch. I was really taking it and convincing my peers that it was great to connect with people you didn't have access to.

Whitney visited dorm rooms and student unions, convincing people to give the app a try. Her persistence and persuasion pulled them in. But what kept them using it was Tinder's secret weapon, the swipe.

It's fascinating to see that you can take a virtually similar product because let's be real with each other. Tinder was not the invention of dating apps. They've been on the market for a very long time, and not just one or two. I mean, there's a full app store of them.

Okay, the famous Tinder swipe, that wasn't actually in the very first versions of Tinder, but the novel mechanism that required users to both like each other was there. People tapped a green heart for yes and a red X for no. It was this tweak to the dating experience that set Tinder apart from the other dating apps that filled the App Store. This small tweak soon had people swooning for it. Nowadays, you can swipe for just about anything: shoes, apartments, tweets, dinner options, baby names, when you want to adopt a pet or even a child. The swipe has become as much a part of our shared user interface as the DoubleClick or the desktop trash can. The swipe made Tinder hugely popular. Within two years of launching, it was processing a billion swipes per day. But the swipe also contributed to a darker side of the Tinder experience. It was a side Whitney and her Tinder co-founders had not foreseen.

We had this product and we were getting all of these people to basically get on it and then go free, match with each other, talk to one another. You're on it now, do as you want. But no one had really been able to imagine just what could come. I don't think at that time we were thinking, Well, people are going to get married and have babies, or This is going to end in a really dangerous state.

Small changes to a service can amplify behavior for good or bad, and it's hard to rein in once this change has caught imaginations and become part of what your users love about your product. Although these small tweaks can be the key to hitting massive scale, they can also have unintended consequences. People loved the new approach to finding matches like a palpous monarch. A simple flick of your finger could decide the fate of a person. You could select someone as a potential suitor or banish them from your life forever. Many of those matches were based on nothing more than a profile picture and a brief self-introduction. There were worries that the casual flicking through hundreds of profiles was desensitizing. It encouraged people to dismiss other human beings in milliseconds. At worst, it encouraged people to be shallow and insensitive, predatory, and vain. This affected how people viewed each other and how they interacted. Tinder soon became a byword for meaningless hookups. The platform was also rife with reports of misogyny and harassment.

No one was thinking of the consequences. I think what I learned from my time at Tinder was the minute you encourage someone to use a piece of technology, you are inherently responsible. I think that always lingered with me as I was there and then as I left, what are the consequences of this technology? I think what we've seen with this explosion of tech dating or tech meetups is there is a dark side to it.

Whitney got first hand experience of this dark side when she left Tinder following an acrimonious departure. After leaving, she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the company. As part of the settlement, Whitney is very restricted in what she can say about that time, but she can talk about the aftermath and the very public attacks she was subjected to.

I became under attack by strangers. I was on the other end of what it might feel like to be exposed on the internet to people.

When I was being bullied online, I just couldn't understand why this was the place that young girls and women were meant to be all day long.

I think that was really what started to shape the next thing for me. It was.

A dark time for Whitney, but it also helped shape her resolve to try to make a change to how people talk to each other online.

I really started thinking, how can I approach this from a unique perspective and take my experience that I've had in building a brand, building a user base, and then my understanding of data and technology at this point, how can I really rethink social media in the context of kindness? And I understood that just like bad behavior can become addictive and viral, good behavior can also be contagious and kindness can also be contagious. This is proven psychological theory.

Note how Whitney wasn't simply throwing up her hands and saying the technology itself was a problem. Rather, the optimistic product creator and her believed there were good aspects to social networking. We just needed to tweak the technology in such a way it amplified the good while mitigating the toxic. But you could claim that altering the entire way of discourse on social media was conducted was a lofty, and perhaps foolish, goal, even if well-intentioned. However, lofty goals do not necessarily fail because they are too ambitious. Rather, they can sometimes fall apart because the methods to make them happen are too forceful. Imagine the options for saving the Earth from an imminent asteroid impact. The most forceful and spectacular will be to launch a barrage of nuclear warheads and blow it out of the sky. However, while that might solve the problem, the resulting debris cloud could create a whole bunch of new things to worry about. Goodbye, satellite network, telecoms, and GPS systems. Hello, radioactive rocks raining down upon us. A safer approach would be to detonate a carefully calculated amount of explosive. Do this close enough to the asteroid and we could tweak its orbital path, nudging it off its collision course with our planet and avoid blowing that asteroid to smithereens.

Similarly, Whitney didn't want to explode the norms of online behavior. She wanted to nudge them in the right direction. Her idea was a social network named Marcy that had one small but impactful difference to all the other social networks that had gone before.

The caveat was you couldn't just leave a random comment. No comments, only compliments. This was in an effort to engineer and to create contagious digital behavior.

Note how Whitney Pictures, that cascade effect that this small tweak could have.

Instead of just a simple like, it would be a like attached to a compliment. Those compliments were going to be very much focused on non-physical compliments. So instead of saying, Somebody looks thin or somebody looks beautiful, it's going to be, You light up my day, or, When you walk into a room, people feel happy. It was going to be compliments that were very much focused on the antithesis of what society has really focused on, which is beauty and weight and a lot of these more superficial accolades, which I was trying to get away from.

Whitney was caught up in this idea. She was certain that making the right tweaks to the standard blueprint for social media could change things for the better. She was also certain of one other thing.

I never wanted to hear the word dating again. When something out of the blue happened and the dating world came knocking on my door, it was my now business partner who has been instrumental and Bumble. He is a pioneer of the dating space, just not so much domestically, very much overseas.

That partner is Andre Andraev, founder of the dating network, Badou. He was excited at the prospect of applying the Mercy model to online dating. But at first, Whitney wasn't interested.

I said, No, Andre, I don't think you understand. It's not going to happen. We basically spent days and days negotiating over how could I change the internet for women and girls? And how could he be happy by working with me?

Andre and I got fortunate to run into each other because had I sat in a room with any other entrepreneur, particularly any other male entrepreneur, I just don't know if they would have seen what I was trying to say. And he understood so clearly because he'd been dealing with data and insights of user behavior for a decade. And he knew firsthand that if you can't get women, you really have a lopsided experience. And so as he heard me really speaking passionately about this concept of making a safe digital ecosystem for girls and women, I think he had his own aha moment, which was, Wait a second. This doesn't mean we need to go our own ways and we can't work together. If I can convince her to do a dating app, maybe she can find a way to build this mission into dating.

Whitney found herself back in the dating app game. It was the last place she had or wanted to be after Tinder. She just had to hit on the feature that would set Bumble apart. Discovering this small tweak would reignite Whitney's passion for an industry that had burnt her out, and it just might change the entire way online dating worked. We'll hear all about Whitney's journey back into the dating app world right after the break. We'll be back in a moment after work from our premier brand partner, Capital One Business. I ended.

Up having my first child. The September that we launched the diaper backpack.

We're back with Deepa Gandhi of Dagnidover. She's been telling us how they founded their business around a simple, straightforward idea: build a better bag for working women. But the founder's lives and their needs were changing.

We had parents on the team. We had friends that were having kids. We knew we needed to make a better diaper bag. One that was gender neutral because products should be designed for both parents.

Dagnidover's neoprene diaper backpack was an immediate hit. But then something unexpected happened.

We saw people carrying it that were clearly not parents. If you remove the changing pad, you can use it for anything. And where we originally intended to put wipes in a post-COVID world, everybody's carrying wipes. One of our team's strengths is just being able to say, well, if there's opportunity, let's run after it.

Dagnidover was rapidly expanding, but they were able to meet the challenge because they had a clear simple focus, says Lauren Tresco of Capital One Business.

Expansion is such an exciting time for business owners, but it can often create chaos or misdirection. Savvy entrepreneurs know how important it is to scale with intention and keep the simple story of their product top of mind.

Where would this expansion take Dagnedover? We'll find out later in the show. It's all part of Capital One business's Spotlight on Entrepreneurs, following Reed's Refocused Playbook at all levels of scale.

Before the break, Whitney took the unexpected leap back into the world of online dating apps with her new business partner, Andre Andreiv. They were determined to find a way to break from the rampant toxicity that was becoming the norm.

We were sitting around and banging our heads against the wall and saying, Okay, what's this going to do? What's this going to do? I was sitting there and I said, All right, I need to understand dating. What's broken in dating? What's broken in dating? All of a sudden, I just had this somewhat hurricane moment in my mind, and I said to him, Okay, I think I've got it. What if we take the standard dating platform, but there is a catch. Once the match takes place, only the woman can initiate conversation.

So this is basically like a woman and a man locking eyes at a bar, but he has no way to contact her. And she understands that he's interested because that match or that lock eye has taken place, but it's on her. The only way to have contact is that she has to unlock it. So I said women must make the first move. This is going to reduce harassment. This is going to reduce bad behavior. Women are not going to be spammed, and women will be empowered and encouraged to actually be in the driver's seat.

The more Whitney thought about it, the more she saw the potential to rewrite the rules of not just dating, but social interaction. It was another small tweak that could have a massive effect.

We essentially made very subtle design changes in the sense that the user flow was very familiar, right? We weren't trying to reinvent the wheel, we were just trying to reverse it. So everyone was familiar and comfortable with the experience, yet there was that caveat of once that match was made, the woman had to speak first, which was so contradictory to what the expectation had been the past hundreds of years of dating, and then, of course, the past few years of digital dating. And so it truly was such a small product change, but with such an interesting social impact.

But even such a simple concept explained in such a simple way was hard for people to grasp.

We have to really reshape behavior because women are taught not to make the first move. Women are taught not to speak first. They're taught never to send that first message, never to initiate. And men are taught to be very aggressive and really beat down that wall until she says, Yes.

That's.

Disney. That's everything. Beauty and the Beast. Exactly. Cindy, the carriage you know is going to turn into a pumpkin at midnight. I said those words. I said, You have 24 hours to make the first move. Otherwise, your carriage turns into a pumpkin. We have to take such a simplified notion of these gender dynamics quite literally down to Cindy.

Trying to convince people to do things your way is a problem familiar to anyone introducing a new product or a new way of doing things, especially as people might not even consciously know what it is they want. This is something Marisa Meyer came up against in the early days of working on Google search.

We did a test where we did 10, 20, 25, and 30 because at the time, Yahoo was serving 20 results per page, and some people were serving as many as 30 results per page, and we wanted to see what the optimal number of results per page was.

When Marisa and her team asked users how many results they wanted per page, there was a clear preference.

I'd ask people in some of our early user studies, How many results would you want? They'd be like, great. Twenty-five, even better. Thirty, best of all.

However, when Google tried serving different numbers of results per page, they found quite a different answer.

The answer was 10. It was fascinating, actually, because one of the key measurements was how many searches per user would be done. How many pages deep would they go, how many times they have to revise, things like that. We looked at first page search results requested per user, and basically it fell off dramatically between 10 and 20. Twenty-five was even worse. Thirty was worse of all. The results were really dramatic.

It turned out that the perceived benefit of having more results per page was offset by a different factor. There. One that was barely perceptible yet extremely important to users, even if they didn't realize it consciously.

The thing that popped was it actually took Google longer to prepare more results. One of the things I've always talked about is that latency and time matters a lot more to people than they can usually articulate. A part of it was that people just didn't want to wait that extra split second. One of the big advantages of Google is it just was that fast, but waiting longer for more results was just something people generally didn't want to do, especially given that the first 10 results were generally good enough.

Google didn't need to convince their users that fewer results were better. They could just serve up the optimum number, 10, safe in the knowledge that this is what people preferred. They tend to think of it despite what they might say. However, Whitney faced the challenge of trying to change the way people interact. This is especially difficult when it's something as personal as dating.

A lot of women that first heard the idea, Why am I going to text first? What do you mean? Why would you ever do that? That doesn't make sense.

Building the new system was the trivial part. The really important thing was working out how to make these new and unfamiliar ways of behaving become second nature and make the users delight in the new approach. So how did you start building that new norm?

Well, that was really hard. Yes, I think. That was really tricky, especially you have to understand where I was at that time.

Whitney was still dealing with a radioactive fallout surrounding her Tinder departure. Getting people to follow you down an unfamiliar path is tough, even when you're not a pariah.

I had a scarlet letter on me. No one wanted to talk to me. Nobody wanted to work with me and nobody wanted to download anything I was telling them to download. It was a trying time, and there was not a lot of supporters. And that's why that early team that I gathered, they're still with us today. And we had to push really, really hard.

So what was the... Was it persistence? Was it techniques to surprise and delight? Was it addictive kindness? What were the set of things to start moving that norm?

So back to the smiling Ronald McDonald or the frowning Ronald McDonald, it was all about the way you position this. So you could say to a group of guys, Hey, download this platform. You have to behave. If you are disrespectful, you're going to have consequences, and women are the bosses, they're in control, and you have no power. They might run for the hills in 2014. Or you could say, Hey, guys, aren't you tired of constantly being the one that has to reach out and just getting rejected time and time again? I mean, that has to be hard for you, right? That must be tiring to constantly have to put yourself out there and get turned down nine out of 10 times. Well, there's this new product where when you mutually like somebody, they come to you.

By reframing the Bumble approach as being positive for everyone, Whitney hoped everyone would embrace it.

It is refreshing because it alleviates the rejection from men, but it does something really special on the other side. The whole notion of Bumble is really to recalibrate these norms, right? You think about pre-Bumble connecting online or even connecting in general. The man starts with the power. The woman is meant to be damsel in distress, and so that creates this imbalance. It sets up a very dangerous, toxic framework. The whole effort is to take some of that pressure and that aggressive nature away from the man and to infuse confidence, respect, empowerment, equality, accountability, and this lifts the woman up and it really balances it out.

The internet can be seen as a distorting mirror that emphasizes and compounds the uglier aspects of human interaction. However, it can also be a prism that refracts new ways of relating to each other back out into society.

So where you think about whether it's catcalling on the street or on a digital platform, men constantly trying to get someone's attention and being rejected at all times. This feels aggression. This feels abusive behavior. This creates toxic behavior. And I'm not saying bad behavior cannot happen on Bumble. Trust me. You know, we all know everyone that has scaled a business to any extent, even to a thousand users. You can never control humans. But what you can do is try to point them in the right direction.

Unfortunately, we can't make a Bumble-like rule for interaction in real life. Putting an end to the cycle of abusive behavior will take more than a few nudges, a few tweaks, a few new features, and it will need years to take effect. This is part of the huge power of technology. We can build interaction on the terms we choose. We can also experiment with the rules of engagement. And in doing so, maybe the norms we adopt will eventually filter out into wider society. But there is always the danger of unexpected consequences, even in the controlled interactions like those on Bumble. Initially, Bumble gave women 24 hours to send the initial message to men they had matched with. If they didn't, then the chance was gone. However, however, men could take as long as they wanted to respond. They might take a day, they might take a week.

Here we launched this product, and we have the best intentions in mind genuinely. We really have a northern star of how do we end misogynistic behavior in relationships. Okay, well, let's start by empowering women, but not in an effort to destabilize men, but to invite them in. Well, what we realized was by giving women this time restraint, but letting men respond at their own free will. This was actually going backwards and this was not doing anyone any favors. We needed to hold both parties accountable.

Bumble added in a requirement for men to respond within 24 hours or lose the chance. It was another example of how even a small tweak made with the best intentions can have an unforeseen negative impact. How do you avoid making these mistakes or when you make them, how do you course-correct as rapidly as possible? For Whitney, the answer is through keen observation and a deep understanding of your users.

The users are what give us every move we make, except for the very first move. It started somewhere, but then they took it and they drove it. And so women came to us and they're like, Hey, listen, we get why you're giving us a 24-hour time restraint. We like it because makes us move. But I don't think it's fair that he doesn't have to respond to me. We heard it once, totally recognized it, heard it twice, it was in development. We moved fast. And we personally apologize and thank them. Thanks for helping us.

Tweak this.

This is an approach the Bumble team has brought to Chappee. It's dating product for gay men, which launched in 2016.

When you think about gay dating apps, they've actually been incredibly non-inclusive to gay men. It's been very much engineered towards anonymity and very hypersexualized behavior. But there's never really been a product that actually facilitates dating, love, true relationships. Why would we offer that to the straight community? And why are gay men alienated from that? Makes no sense. And so the true goal of Chappie is to be an inclusive platform that allows men to be more than just a casual fling.

How does Chappie aim to achieve this? Another ingenious tweak, of course.

The beauty of the new Chappie is that we have this sliding mode that allows men to really get what they're looking for, whether that's something casual with no commitment or if that's something more serious in the romantic perspective, or in fact, they might be looking for friendship in which we give you a dedicated mode for that. So it's really the first app geared towards the gay community that allows gay men to really go after whatever connection they're seeking, not one that they feel has been imposed on them by the product.

Chappie features a subtle yet highly impactful change that users loved in the same way that an original tweak set Bumble apart from the dating app pack, transforming the norms of online dating for the better. And for Whitney, dating is just the start. She's expanding the Bumble effect into other unexpected realms. The Bumble rule of interaction that only women could initiate contact, appealed not just in finding dates, but in finding friends.

Our users started behaving differently. I started noticing, and our team started noticing young women and men alike saying, Not here for dating, husband just got a job.

Somewhere or.

Looking for this new life thing. But it had nothing to do with dating.

Whitney and her team were smart enough to follow where their users went.

Our users were basically hijacking our product to use it in a.

Different way. We were hearing.

Success stories. We would meet people and they'd say, I just found my roommate on Bumble. You found your roommate on Bumble. And so we built Bumble BFF, and that was Platonic friendships.

But dating and friendship aren't the only areas Bumble users have become interested in, including one that's particularly close to home for me. In our discussion, this is particularly entertaining because I recall seeing a headline that goes, Bumble's CEO takes aim at LinkedIn.

Well, this is awkward.

In the.

Linkedin office. Yes, exactly. And so what was the decision to expand beyond? And what was the theory of it?

Okay, well.

For the.

Record, never wanted to take aim. Don't think we could, love LinkedIn, big fan.

Just for the record, I feel exactly the same about Bumble, though my dating days are long behind me.

Interestingly enough, lo and behold, inside BFF, they start networking with each other. They don't want roommates. They don't want friends. They don't want to go to yoga. They want to build a business. They want to meet someone that works in HR recruiting or whatever it was. We went, A-ha, okay, Platonic Friendships is not necessarily the appropriate place for business. Let's expand beyond this. It was really just letting the users operate as they wanted and going with them.

Note how Bumble's users latched on to that original small tweak and began using it in ways Whitney and her team hadn't imagined. This is a gift that every smart leader knows they should make the most of. Whitney has become a master of understanding what her users want and then making the small changes to Bumble that help them achieve their goals. And as Bumble expands internationally, she is already on the lookout for the tweaks that will allow Bumble to scale in different cultures.

Bumble is not some crazy new idea that shows up and changes everything. It's just giving people something that they've already been within them. And so going into India, a place where women now are more empowered than they've ever been, their voices are finally being heard. They've always had their voice. Priyankha says that.

The best, Priyankha.

Chhubro, is our partner in going to India. But now it's a moment where India is really listening to women. And it's been fascinating to see women gravitate to this product. We've only been live there for a couple of short months, and I think in the first few weeks we had a million first moves. A woman making a first move in India is so culturally unheard of that this is really an interesting moment, not just for us, but to see how this can really shape out. It'll be interesting to see how it works.

Well, the degree to which you can become a force by using these communities of communication, of belonging, of participation, of coordination, the dance, as you were, if you can improve gender relations in multiple cultures, that will be simply awesome.

It will be. Let's hope we can have some small role in that.

I think it's absolutely the case that small, simple things can change the entire dynamic of how interaction works, how we see ourselves as at our place in society and the importance of mutual appreciation. We just need to open our eyes to find these tweaks and open our minds to where they might take us. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening. Now, a final word from our premier brand partner, Capital One Business.

If you told us when we launched the brand that men would make up currently 30 % of our customer base, I would actually say that feels right because I think our thesis always was like, you can do Dageny for everything.

We're back one more time with Deepa Gandhi of Dagenie Dover. She was telling us how their gender neutral, neoprene typer bag became a surprising hit with people who weren't parents. And that got them thinking about further expansion.

Men were like, Can you make a Dagni for me? They love the material, right? It's super athletic. It's technical, and so men really like that.

But Dagni Dover didn't launch a line for men. Instead, they rethought their entire brand identity. Any bag could be carried by anyone. With that, they stayed true to telling a simple, clear story, says Lauren Tresco of Capital One Business.

Deepa and her co-founders did something really smart. They didn't stray from their core mission by doing too many things or chasing trends. Instead, they doubled down on the simple product that their story was built on.

Dagnetover is scaled rapidly by broadening their customer base without overcomplicating their products or their story.

The one thing that has never really shifted, our TrueNorth was building this great brand and have a great high-quality product and a loyal customer base.

Capital One Business is proud to support entrepreneurs and leaders working to scale their impact from Fortune 500 to first-time business owners. For more resources to help drive your business forward, visit capitalone. Com/business-hub. Again, that's capitalone. Com/business-hub. As with every ad on Masters of Scale, the entrepreneurs you just heard from were real and unscripted. Because Capital One is a financial institution, it's important to them to be transparent about the relationship with the entrepreneurs we interview. Some of these entrepreneurs are Capital One customers, and some aren't. Capital One did compensate all of them for participating in this campaign.

Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. The show is recorded on site in California and produced at the studio inside Sy Partners in New York. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our producers are Chris McLeod, Adam Skuz, Jenny Cataldo, Jordan McLeod, and Ben Manila. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Original music by Allison Leighton Brown sound design, mixing and mastering by Bryan Pugh. Special thanks to Chris Yee, Elisa Schreiber, David Sandford, Saeeda Sepieva, Christina Gonzales, and Sarah Sandman. Visit mastersofscale. Com to find the transcript forthis episode, and be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter.

Chatgpt, I produce a podcast called Masters of Scale, and I'm looking for a way to get listeners to leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Do you have any suggestions?

Absolutely. One effective.

Way is.

To engage.

With your listeners directly during.

Your episodes.

Remind them how much a five-star review can support your show. What about to try to convince listeners to share one of their favorite episodes with somebody in their life. Do you have any suggestions for that? Certainly.

People love to share.

Content that has made an impact on them. So remind your listeners how sharing an episode can start meaningful conversations with friends or help others discover insights they've benefited from. Would it be okay if I use maybe our conversation as a segment on the show? That sounds like a creative approach. Using a meta conversation about engaging your audience as a segment could be quite engaging. This is executive producer Chris McCloud, and I urge you to take ChatGPT's advice and leave us a review on Apple podcasts and share an episode with a friend. It really, really helps.