Meet Bumble BFF, Your New Best Friend

In today’s fast-paced world, women are earning graduate degrees, pursuing busy careers, and exploring the world. These exciting lifestyle choices give women the freedom to experience countless opportunities in new cities, but many people are noticing that their mobility results in much loneliness. Despite meeting hundreds of people by moving from city to city, many women find that it is difficult to find a friendly companion to treat to hot coffee and warm conversation.

Whitney Wolfe, the 28-year-old founder of the dating app Bumble, recognized that the demands of the modern world left her overwhelmingly lonely in her city. After focusing on her academic and financial goals for several years, Wolfe realized that she could not find friends with similar interests. After researching some social trends associated with Millennials, Wolfe discovered that she was not alone in her lack of companionship.

After completing college, many young people move to new cities in search of employment and new experiences. While potential friendships are everywhere, offices, clubs, and fitness studios simply are not ideal places to make best friends. To make matters more complicated, Wolfe realized that these same lonely individuals regularly converse with people on the Internet. To Whitney Wolfe, building an online resource that would bridge the gap between the real world and online communities was the obvious choice.

In 2016, Wolfe updated the Bumble dating app with the BFF setting. Bumble BFF is similar to Tinder and popular dating applications, but it matches users with other users of the same gender. This app does not search for romantic interests. Instead, Bumble BFF pairs women with other women who simply want to find a friend in a new city. This allows women to find friendly companionship immediately after moving to a new place.

How Does Bumble BFF Work?

Bumble BFF is a free app that is available in the App Store and Google Play Store. Users simply need to download the app, login via Facebook, and get started. To find friends instead of romantic interests, users should go to the ‘settings’ tab to select ‘BFF’ mode.

The app extracts information from users’ Facebook profiles to build summaries. When users view potential friends within the app, they will see a photograph and some personal information. Some bits of information included in each summary are:

• Name
• Age
• Job
• Education
• Hobbies

If a user is interested in the person described in the summary, she can swipe right. If the other person also swipes right, the Bumble app can be used to start a conversation. Users can talk online, make lunch reservations, or plan to take on Swiss Alps. The possibilities for friendship are endless.

An App for Women

Bumble was launched by Whitney Wolfe after she witnessed the sexist treatment of women on Tinder and other apps. Wolfe made it her personal goal to create an app that is backed by a company culture of respect for women. Bumble’s team is headed by a team of five women and one man, and all members respect the autonomy of females across the globe. Bumble’s recent success suggests that this message resonates with many young people.

Bumble currently has over 12.5 million users, and many new users are downloading the app exclusively for the BFF update. The app continues to be a huge hit in the United States, so do not expect Whitney Wolfe and the Bumble team to slow down any time soon.