Bumble's Founder Credits the App's Early Success to Micro-Influencers

Whitney Wolfe Herd shared her secret with Joanna Coles at Cannes

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CANNES, France—When setting out to create her female-friendly company, Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd didn’t know what to expect.

She knew she wanted to solve the problem of harassment and abuse on dating platforms (and more generally across the entire internet), and she knew she wanted to give women more of a voice online. But the exact “how” was a little fuzzy.

Even before the app launched, Wolfe Herd and her small team started going door-to-door and “bootstrapped it,” the networking app’s founder said, while on stage in conversation with Joanna Coles, chief content officer of Hearst Magazines, at the Cannes Lions Festival.

“We showed up where young, social people were,” said Wolfe Herd.

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