<aside>
⚜️
Price Targets and Investment Decisions
InvestmentWiki - Hold
Decisions
2025-11-06: Decided against - Reduce Bumble after Q3 2025 Earnings by around 50% due to weak results
2025-12-10: Decided for - Increasing Bumble by 100% post good findings on leadership + Hinge CEO leaves Match Group
</aside>
<aside>
💪
Key Strengths
- Digital product with natively very high margins
- Potential to cut cost drastically further to protect profitability if needed (?) ← No large cost base needed to run it.
- Continued pricing power to drive Arpu increases (Paying users might not care too much about the difference?)
- Founder led by great founder (based on initial assessment) who was able to build the product and drive the mission and culture and attract talent.
- Dating is a multi app category. This means users use multiple apps at once. This reduces the risk of hinge somewhat.
- Initial signs of good execution e.g. their new marketing campaign on Instagram looks good, based on Moritz experience a lot of matches in Malta ← Works well at least in Malta
- Clear strategic focus on woman & high quality. CEO which executed a similar roadmap and focus before.
- Founder is very honest. I don’t think they would bs investors and pretend something is better than it is
- Founder feels very genuine about her mission and can communicate it well. That helps to inspire team and attract the right people.
</aside>
<aside>
⚠️
Key Weaknesses
- Almost all executives at the company are new, creating execution risks since it will take them a while to understand the company and its culture: Bumble Management, Strategy and Execution
- Bumble is behind on tech and how appealing it is. This could lead to situation in which more and more people (esp. woman) migrate to Hinge and Bumble looses users Bumble User and Engagement Trends
- Bumble runs on an old tech stack which needs to be improved in order to be able to ship products faster. Building a whole new tech stack (AI first + cloud) is a technical challenge. They aim to release it in Mid 2026 but it remains an execution risk (we cannot know for sure if they will get it right) ← Pushed back from earlier plans (Spring 2026): Wolfe said for Bumble date, they are building a fully modern AI-first cloud-native tech stack from the ground up, which is set to be completed in Spring. “AI-first cloud-native tech stack from the ground up with a new infrastructure set to be completed by next spring. In parallel, we'll continue optimizing the current stack to support ongoing performance and stability.”
- Trends of declining users. Safety and pause of performance marketing contributed 80% y/y to the decline (Overall decline in Q3 2025 = 16%). They say trends might improve in Q1 2026 but this is far from certain.
- No strong signs of improving metrics yet as of Q3 2025. ← Decline is even accelerating.
- Risk of over-ambition. Work on a lot of areas at once e.g. core app, BFF with new functionality, standalone app ← Risk they might not deliver well on all fronts. Potentially too little focus on problems before them and too longterm focused.
- Drastic revenue decline projection for Q4 2025 (-17% y/y)
- It’s harder to understand dating apps compared to other consumer products like Instagram, Spotify simply by using them as all locations and „dating markets“ might be quite different and in one region an app might do well but failing in another one.
- TRA settlement stripped the company of vital cash and is vote of no confidence from major shareholders (Blackstone and Whitney Wolfe Herd) Bumble TRA - Tax liability due to key stakeholders due to IPO process, this comes on top of major shareholders reducing their position before ← But this leads to control of founder. Probably no bad move
- CEO trust own intuition, worked in the past but could backfire: Whitney Wolfe Herd-Bumble CEO
</aside>
<aside>
🚀
Main opportunities
- Ability to sell subscriptions outside of Apple and save costs?
- Large opportunity due to AI (Ai matchmaking) which has very high monetization opportunity (charge per match)
- Currently the stock is hating a lot and very cheap. I think it could do 5X or more if they turn things around. (3X multiple change easily to get back to a more normal valuation and another 2X if investors get fantasy due to AI). → Asymetric risk-reward opportunity. If it goes wrong i don’t think it can loose more money than half (Low risk of becoming bankrupt) but if it goes right it has 5X+ upside.
- Strategy of quality over quantity can lead to sustained user growth in the future + word of mouths. (They ruined it before because they have been too greedy with performance ads)
- New Bumble hires feel promising e.g. new CTO might be good.
</aside>
<aside>
⚔️
Main Threats
- Declining User Trends & dating fatique esp. in new generation Z
- Execution risk. Management team is new and there is a risk that they cannot execute.
- If declines in revenue persist (current -10% a year) this will cut into profitability and fcf very fast if they keep the same team size. Example cost basis of around $750m per year. If revenue goes down to $200m per quarter or $800m a year and keeps going down that could become problematic.
- Bumble has a $600m loan due in early 2027. In case they fail to refinance it, the company could be in serious trouble.
- Founder left before because she felt burned out. Might feel burned out again or run out of energy in the middle of the transformation
- It might lose more users to rivals (Tinder and Hinge) as it aggressively raise prices. Tinder only raised prices by 5% in Q3 while Hinge raised prices by 8.6%. Bumble app on the other hand raised prices by 10.5%. Also, Bumble app’s ARPU is approaching that of Hinge ($28.3 versus $32.9), which has better user perception. As a result, raising prices may not be sustainable in the near-term as risk of losing users to rivals is high.
- Match Group is executing well. For example Tinder has some new small product improvements e.g. see Users closeby which helps showcase attractive users and is slightly better than Bumbles similar feature. (Discover Area in Bumble is getting worse) ← But they now lost founder of Hinge.
</aside>
<aside>
🚅
Price Catalyst
- Q4 2025 could a strong catalyst for bumble stock price. If numbers beat there could be a massive rally if they are behind expectation the stock could fall further.
- A new round of job custs could be an upside catalyst for the stock price
- Blackstone who might want to reduce their exposure or exit the business could lead to short-term price pressure.
</aside>
Bumble High Level Overview
Bumble Drivers and Risks
Intital Bumble Research ← To be moved to correct sections