Online dating in India — Bumble strategy example with a case/guesstimate

This is my attempt to make the guesstimate more product/company-centric. (On the request by Shubham Kumar)

Bumble reached 2M+ users in India in Dec 2019. But just within the next 6 months, it doubled to 4M+ users in India. Let us try to understand Bumble’s penetration in the online dating market.

But first, let me give some information on the online dating industry in India.

Several mobile dating apps have taken off in this segment in the past few years, but very few are actually making any significant revenues. Freemium is the most common business model, with some basic services offered for free along with an upsell to more advanced, paid subscriptions.

~75% of the current users are in the 18 to 34 age group. More than 80% of the users are males (now probably you can stop wondering why you are getting no matches :P). Online dating is very low (~2%) penetrated in India. The countries with high penetration are the USA, UK, Netherlands, etc.

Penetration of paid users has been increasing and is expected to increase in the near future.

Bumble’s most active users are those in the age group 20 to 25 and situated in urban areas. ~60% of the users fall into this category.

What is the penetration of Bumble in this customer segment?

~50% of the population (650M of 1.3B) in India is 25 or below. Assuming an equal distribution of population in age groups, we get ~130M in the age group 20 to 25.

Only 35% of India’s population is residing in urban areas.

So we get the total 20 to 25 youth in urban areas = ~45M

60% of Bumble’s users are in this category = 2.4M users

Bumble penetration among urban youth = ~5%

Let us try to understand the population split here: Using industry male and female users as a proxy for bumble, we get ~1.9M users of Bumble in our focus category are males and 0.5M are females.

Assuming equal male and female populations in cities, we get ~8.5% penetration among male urban youth and just ~2.2% among female urban youth.

So based on the above calculations, for Bumble to capture more market share among its target market of urban youth, its strategy should be to try and acquire more female users as the penetration is very low. More penetration among just male users would make the service more male-centric (which should not be the case for dating apps).

How can Bumble do that?

• Social media marketing through pages/channels which are focused on women
• Making more policies on making platforms safe for women
• Publicizing more at women’s colleges
• Sharing stories on how online dating worked very well for other women, etc.

Hope this made some sense. Follow for more content on the Indian market and cases/interview prep. Do share this with someone who might find this helpful.

Respond with any alternate methods/questions you might have/feedback. Will help me improve the content I post.