Bumble: Whitney Wolfe (2017)

So there are no shortages of dating apps out there, ranging from free apps to members only to ones that are based on quiz shows and pet preferences. But today's show Is the story of two dating apps. Tinder and Bumble.

And the woman who helped start them both. We first ran this episode with Whitney Wolf in October of twenty seventeen. Enjoy. I quite frankly thought I was at the very bottom of my barrel. I mean there were days where I didn't want to live.

I mean the internet Define me. The article calling me the most ugly names in the world, the people on Twitter saying the ugliest things. But through all of this Pain and struggle.

I still had an itch to create. And so I kind of sat down and said, I can start something right now, and I can change what I hate. that I see in the world. From NPR, it's how I built this. A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements.

They don't. I'm Guy Roz, and on today's show, how Whitney Wolf's painful exit from Tinder. Inspired her to build Bumble. A kinder, gentler dating app. Where women

Make the first move. There was a time, believe it or not, when internet dating meant you were desperate or awkward or both. And it wasn't something you talked about openly. But today. It's the complete opposite.

Because the internet and dating apps have made it so much easier and more efficient to meet lots and lots of people. and it's more or less frictionless. There's no awkward phone calls, or courtship rituals, or face-to-face rejection. There's something almost transactional about the whole thing. And it's no exaggeration to say that even though they've only been around for like five years or so, Dating apps have pretty much transformed dating.

And if you love them. You can thank Whitney Wolf. Or you can blame her if you hate them because Whitney was part of the dating app revolution. She was one of the founders who helped create Tinder, which is now one of the biggest dating apps in the world. Whitney left Tinder under difficult circumstances, circumstances she can't legally discuss, but as you will hear, it was a time in her life where she came under intense online abuse. And that experience would inspire her to build Bumble.

Which is a different kind of dating app. And today Just three years since its launch. Bumble is one of the top dating apps in the US. But the story of how Whitney got into that world at all?

Well, like many of our stories, it starts with a little bit of luck. Right after she graduated from college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. I was just kind of going day by day, exploring and and being okay with that, right? So I think To my family, I almost

Was I I don't think they were super proud of like, oh my daughter went on to do X, right? I was in this w weird place So I kind of moved in with my mom in California and I went to LA one afternoon. uh to visit a girlfriend of mine And ended up at a dinner.

Where I met A couple people One of which Went on to be the CEO of Tinder.

Yes. And he had told me how he was um going to be the general manager of this incubator that would be launching all sorts of apps, all sorts of different apps. And they were looking at the time, they were focused on one app, which was a consumer loyalty app called Cardified. Kind of like a a digital punch card. for your favorite coffee shop, for your favorite whatever it is. And he just told you about this at at this dinner party? Yeah, we were just at a restaurant having dinner, just a few of us in um I said, Well, that sounds really interesting and when he asked what I was doing, I said, You know, I'm really looking for a job. I think I could probably help you market your app. And he said, Well, why don't you call me tomorrow and come in for an interview? So I called him at eight AM the next day. I think he was alarmed and surprised that I actually called him. And I ended up going in for an interview, it worked out. Started working from home right away and then I moved to LA.

For this incubator. Yes, for Cardify was the app. Um, there had been really no talk of Tinder yet, and my job was very much focused on Cardify. So I started working full time. And while we were getting Cartify off the ground, you know, I spent a lot of time going door to door to door in LA to different um restaurants and um boutiques and so on and so forth and trying to sign them up and

I struggled with it because there was too many moving parts, right? And so what what kind of moving parts? I mean you have to get the store on board. And then once the store is on board, you have to hope that the customer has the app, right? Yeah. W were the stores interested when you came in? Were they like or or I mean was it No. To be honest.

very few people were interested. I think it was really how you positioned it. And I learned a I learned a lot through through that experience because You know, one pitch would go one way and you'd say something a little different the next time it'd go a completely different way. And so I really realized that it's not so much about The what? It's the It's the how or the why you should do this, right? Like this is why you need this instead of what you what you need, right? And so it was really interesting, uh, crash course in In marketing and sales.

But you were not a tech person necessarily. You're just really interested in tech, right? Yeah, I I wasn't even interested in tech, I was just interested in the the the way it had reach, the way that tech could expand beyond the walls, right? I went through college with no Instagram and so Instagram really became huge right as I graduated and then you saw it sell for a billion dollars and I think everyone kinda went, Whoa. And this was kind of like a an eye opening moment for my My peers. And so

Did it I mean Did you was there like a sense of excitement that you guys were onto something big or did you know pretty soon after you joined that this thing was not gonna work? No, you know, I think everyone was really excited and very hopeful and it was a beautiful app. I think everyone really wanted it to happen and I remember we were all sitting around like we're gonna be the n you know next big thing and And then shortly thereafter, I think we started getting excited about this side project matchbox.

Which is what became Tinder, but at the time it was Matchbox. Wh which was supposed to be a dating app? Yeah, it was like a flirting app. It was like connecting people to flirt, right? And after we were really unable to get Cartify to gain significant traction, I think we all, you know, the first Maybe we need to shift gears, you know, and I was twenty two years old. I had just come out of college. I was thinking very much like a college student still. And I was like, hmm, this will work. And I think I was so excited about the fact that they're

With something that I and my friends would use versus Cardify, which was something I personally would have never used. And again, it was not a new idea. You have to think about what existed already. Dozens of dating apps, flirting apps, connecting apps. I mean there was already the Behemoth, which was match dot com, right? Yeah. And we sat on the same floor as match.com in LA. Wow. So so was was building Tinder like part of an idea to to build like more of these

Dating type. Products or or apps? So Tinder was not my idea. I've never said it was my idea ever. I became a co-founder of Tinder via my marketing contributions and my early, um involvement in getting it launched and getting it out there. So

I've heard about thirty conflicting stories of what their original idea was and who really cares at this point. I mean, it is what it is and it was to connect people around you. You know, if you see someone that you want to talk to across the room, how do you how do you talk to them without um you know feeling awkward. I think Where we went in a very unique direction was marketing it to millennials, and I just don't think that had ever been done in a successful way. And what was the actual product? What was the app? What did it look like at that point? It was very similar to what it looks like now. It's just a very early version of it. So you would just swipe left or right on people. And actually when I first saw it, there was no swiping. It was like a tapping, like a card game originally. And was it called Tinder by that point?

No. It was not we played with so many different names. I mean, it was maybe gonna be Flirt, and then it was maybe going to be I mean there were so many different things that it was going to be and um Tinder ended up sticking. So you're so you're thinking I this thing has legs and so what did you do? How did you test it? Yeah, I remember thinking to myself that it would work at SMU. And I remember I took the guys into a meeting

and I gave them my little sorority, fraternity roll out pitch and said, I'm gonna show up on Monday, I'm gonna go to all the chapter meetings, I'm gonna run from the sororities, the fraternities, I'm gonna get everybody on it, and then it's just gonna take off. At SMU. Yes, at SMU. And so I got the green light to go do this and we had very, very, very, very minimal marketing materials. I think I had three or four T shirts. That we took. um that had tender on it and then I had to get really crafty. So when I landed an SMU it's funny, I was talking to my girlfriend about this the other day. My good girlfriend who now does the weather in LA, she was a year younger than me, so she hadn't graduated yet. And I took a picture of her

And then I took a picture of one of my guy friends on campus and I I dropped them into the match screen, like the the tinder screens. And I wrote a big thing on top of it saying, Find out who likes you on campus. And I saved the file and I took it to the FedEx across the street from SMU and we printed I think a thousand copies. And I offered a bunch of people around campus twenty dollar bills to help me put them everywhere. I mean on people's windshields, under dorms, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. And then Monday night I rallied all of my friends that were still in school because again, I just graduated. I had a lot of friends that were younger and we'd made our rounds. We We went to the sorority houses and gave a pitch, got up on chairs and told all the girls You know, you have to download this app because college is all about meeting people and right now you only have access to the people that you hang out with every weekend and it's a really closed minded experience and you guys need to meet all these great people on campus and there's all these really cute guys waiting for you on the app. So we rushed and got all these women to download the app.

And then we ran as fast as we could to the fraternity row and went into the frat houses and said a different pitch and said, Hey guys, um, I bet you have no other way to access, you know, hundreds of sorority girls right now. Download the app because they're all waiting for you. They've all just downloaded this app and they're waiting for you to like them. And so Yeah, I know it's so ridiculous. It's embarrassing at this point, but But you had to pitch it. You had to get it. Listen, you have to do what you gotta do. You were hustling this thing. Yes. I think that would be an accurate um representation. And so the next day I remember You know, we looked at the download numbers and hundreds of people had downloaded overnight and hundreds was bigger than the downloads we had gotten on Cardify over months. And so you know, I'm looking at hundreds of downloads and I'm like, We made it. Like we're the we're the next Facebook, right? Just being

super um You know, a little disconnected from reality probably. Well, but not that distant as we would eventually discover. So you go back to LA Like what's the next step? I can't remember if I went straight back to LA or if I went straight to Utah because I went and did the same thing at University of Utah.

Which seems weird. Tinder with the thing. I knew people there, you know? And it's funny, I called this a long time ago. I said to everyone on the team, I said, guys, watch BYU will be one of our biggest markets one day because In the BYU at the LDS College in in Provo, Utah. Mormon, right. Yes. And they're all expected to get married by by the end of college. Like that is the expectation. And so I said I promise I think BYU will be one of our biggest markets, and I think half of Utah will end up getting married because of Tinder. Wow. And Tinder became massive on Utah. On the BYU campus. Oh yeah, massive.

Wow. I mean i in that period two thousand thirteen, you know Wizer feeling like this is just So amazing. This is so exciting. Are you kidding? Yes. I mean

I I lived, breathed, dreamed. I I I was engulfed. I mean, my friends didn't want to talk to me anymore. They're like, Oh gosh, she's gonna call and talk about Tinder again. Ugh No, it was such an exciting time and um Again, it's worth noting, Tinder was group effort, right? It was not just me, it was not just one of the guys, it was not just one of the other guys. This was really

Teamwork. So Uh I I'm gonna do something, Whitney, that we don't often do on the show, which is I am going to skip over uh over a few years when Tinder was growing and and becoming this massive dating app uh with millions and millions of users. Okay. Uh because There are legal reasons.

Why you can't talk about certain things. And I'm just gonna say I am going to explain this briefly. uh, Whitney, which is that you left Tinder in twenty fourteen um under pretty difficult circumstances, um you had been in a relationship with one of the the other co founders that broke down and so you left

uh and there was a sexual harassment lawsuit and that was settled and you can't talk about that. But all of a sudden you were you were all over the tech press because people people caught wind of this lawsuit. Um and there were text messages that were sent to you that were abusive and they were published in blogs and and all of a sudden you were in the public eye and and you were I guess like twenty four, what, twenty four, twenty five at the time? It was twenty four, I turned twenty five just a few days later. And and you were the m the main target of of a lot of the attention

So real quick, I'm gonna jump in and just say I have absolutely no comment on anything from the lawsuit. Um, and I have no comment on um, you know, any of the allegations or anything. But The way the people online

Spoke about me. The way Both. reporters and complete strangers, you know, Internet.

Twitter and the comment section Um it was It it jolted me. In such a way it it completely robbed me of every last ounce of confidence that I may have ever had.

Listen, I was n I was not a famous person in my life. I come from Salt Lake City. I don't have famous parents. I'm quite frankly, just a normal professional, right? Like that's just who I was Um and to have The New York Times calling extended relatives and to have The Daily Mail knocking on the back window at your apartment when you're not even there.

And to have your Personal Emotions. being turned into caricatures on

Tech blogs and mainstream media, T V T M Z I mean It was Really truly. Traumatic. How did you just like get through the day?

I I quite frankly Thought I was that. the very bottom of my barrel. I mean there were days where I didn't want to live. I didn't want to get out of bed. Yeah. I felt like it was stamped across my forehead and

When I say it was stamped across my forehead, that was fifty different things. That was the article calling me the most ugly names in the world. That was the people on Twitter Yeah. I mean, the internet defined me. for a moment in time and I I wanted to die.

Mm. Yet I had to make this bigger than myself, right? Like this was bigger than me. Meaning I have people in my life that I have to be there for. I have parents. I have friends. I need to continue my career. I'm twenty four, about to be twenty five. I am not going to just

call it a day at twenty five. I mean, am I? You know, like there was a lot of that. And After I was able to pick myself off The bath mat crying. I I was able to through the fog

see the real problem. And the problem was not me or the media or the story or what happened. The problem was the lack of online accountability that human beings are exposed to every single day. And what it made me realize was

You know, whatever I felt was going on online This is what goes on on a thirteen year old's phone all day, every day. Yeah. And it scared me. Was it impossible to ignore that stuff and could you have just shut that out?

No. It was impossible. It just became this obsession and It really messed up. with my psyche. I mean it it made me really

not right for a while. I mean I didn't really socialize. I I kind of became a hermit for two years and what I did during those two years was I worked my tail off. I mean I worked so hard. And what I

had realized was you can't kill ambition. You can kill confidence, but you can't kill drive. Through all of this. Yeah. I still had an itch. inside of me to create.

And I missed the feeling of creating all day and building and seeing something grow and engineering it to grow, right? You know, marketing it. And so I kind of sat down and said

I can start something right now. And I can have an impact. And I can change what I hate. that I see in the world. When we come back.

How Whitney took that idea? and turned it into bumble. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This. From NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz.

So by the time she was twenty four years old. Whitney Wolf had already helped launch one of the world's biggest dating apps, Tinder. But after she left the company and everything that went with it, the online bullying and the severe depression Whitney wanted to get away from all that. She wanted to get away from dating apps and build something new, something A little more kind.

So I started working on this concept called mercy. What it was going to be was a female only social network where Women could only use compliments. they would no longer be able to um you know, comment on appearance or hurt their hurt each other's feelings or use social media to bully, right?

So it was the antidote to what I felt I experienced online. And I started working on this and um had, you know, my marketing plan mapped out and I

I was thinking about doing that and I was approached by my now business partner, Andre Andrieev. And he is in Incredible um talented entrepreneur based out of London.

He has built s a lot of very successful companies and His current very successful company is called Badoo and it is the world's largest dating platform. It is massive overseas. I mean, we're talking I think they have something like three hundred and twenty million registrations or something. Like they're part of that club of only LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram, like those big, big, big crazy numbers. Um and he said

Sorry to connect. you know, this summer, I know that probably not the best time for you, but I'd really love to hear what you're up to next. And so His initial intent was to hire me as their CMO, their chief marketing officer at Badoo. Oh. And I said, you know, I'm flattered, that's great. However, I'm, you know, essentially not for hire. I'm st I'm going to start my own business and I want it to be mission driven and I don't want to work in dating. Like that's just not

going to be my future. And He said, Okay, so tell me about this vision of yours and what are you gonna do and how are you gonna build this into a huge social platform? And I told him my vision and for for this new app Mercy. Yes. And he could hear and feel my passion for this platform and he said, You know what? You need to build this, but you need to do it in dating.

And I I said she said, I'm not doing dating. Yeah, and I said, I don't think you understood me. I'm I'm not going back into dating. Like that's not happening. Um, and he said, No, no, no, this This has to happen. What you're trying to do. needs to be done in dating. And I thought to myself, you know what, maybe maybe he's got a point. Maybe dating is broken, right? Like maybe maybe connecting is broken beyond just being a young woman talking to a young woman in junior high. Maybe this is something that affects us at all ages.

And so we kind of did a handshake deal and said, Okay, we're gonna build a company. And We formed an incredible partnership where I was founder and CEO. I could build my own team, my own vision, my own brand, but we would have access to his resources beyond just money. And that was something that was never gonna happen twice. And you didn't know at this point you didn't know what that was going to be.

No. And so it really wasn't until a couple of weeks later when we brought on, you know, um I called um Chris Golzinski and Sarah Mick, who had worked with at Tinder, they're really f really talented designers. And you know, in order to build a great brand and and uh product, you have to have a great um team of designers. And so I brought them on board and they had their own app at the time, so they wanted to come on as consultants. And so Once we were all kind of together, I think there was like ten of us in the room or something, we were sitting outside and Andre said, Okay, so what is this product going to be? And I said

I think I have it. And I said I always wanted to Text the guy first. I always wanted to go after what I wanted to

in terms of if I saw a cute guy in class, I always wanted to talk to a guy, but I was never allowed to because society and my friends said no. So I said we're going to r reverse engineer this, and this is how the product's gonna work. You're going to mutually match with each other, but Women have to send the first message. They have twenty four hours to do it. Because it will give them a, you know

kind of incentive, and if they don't, the match disappears forever. And This will change the dynamics of how we connect. This will put the the ball in her court.

For any same sex matches. You follow the same rules minus women making the first move, right? So if two women match, either woman can reach out. If two men match, either man can reach out. However, they do still have to follow the you go first in twenty four hours and then you follow with them for twenty four hours. So so this was like completely different from from anything else that was w was out there at the time? Completely different. I think I imagine

Are most mostly guys are are signing up for for dating apps, right? Well My theory at that time was They hadn't built been built for women yet. Лес лукатис фромс. Мен ар.

From very early age. to be the go getter in a in a heterosexual relationship. Go get her. Go go make the move, right? And women, on the flip side, are trained to Play hard to get. So here you're telling men to be overtly aggressive, and here you're telling women to be the inverse of that. And so now you're you're training two human beings to act in

opposite directions of each other. And so what you do when you do that is you set both up for failure. You set the men up to be constantly rejected and you set the women up to be at risk of of aggression and abuse, right? And so here we have this world that behaves this way now at another element which is a profile, right? A digital um shield where you can hide behind a username or profile photo and you don't have to be accountable. And so um when you when you put women in control you completely reverse the role. So she now has the confidence to go after what she's interested in. And the man on the other end doesn't feel rejected, he feels flattered. And then all of a sudden you've balanced the behavior. So so so where where did the name Bumble come from?

The name Bumble is actually really funny. So a woman who was um a really actually a great um mentor to me for the first couple of years of Bumble, her name is Michelle Kennedy, she named it on a whim one day because it was such a struggle. I wanted Bumble to be Moxie, M-O-X-I-E, like you've got moxie, like you've got courage, right? Because you'd have Moxie, you made the first move. Moxie. And unfortunately, there's a really um powerful company that exists somewhere in America that has trademarked every format of the word. So we couldn't get that and then we were sitting there for weeks. Oh my gosh, it was a disaster. We had probably a thousand words in the running.

And then one morning she said, You know I think she could Funny enough, I think she had called her husband a bumbling idiot. She's got this really adorable British accent. She said, What about bumble? And I said, Uh no way. Like that's like fumble. That's like bumble and bumble the hair product. I hate it.

And then Andre was like Bumble Bumble I love Bumble and he checked the domain and we could get the domain. w it was a miracle. Like in what world could we get Bumble, but we couldn't get Moxie, we couldn't get all these other words. And so After that, I was um talking to who she ended up becoming one of my she was my like third hire her her and her family are really close friends of mine and I was talking to her mom in the kitchen I was like hey what do you think about Bumble for an app? And she was like, oh, like be the queen bee of bumble. Find your honey on Bumble and she started throwing out all these really cute slogans and I was like done. I was like done. Perfect branding opportunity. Hives and bees and building your your hive and queen bee, the women make the first move. It was perfect, actually. So you so Andre contacts you in July of twenty fourteen. If I'm if my timing is right, you launched

Bumble by the end of that year. Correct. We worked really, really hard. When you when you first launched it, were most of the people signing up men? Initially. No even even split. How did you how did you get people to sign up? How did you get the word out about it?'Cause there's lots of competition in this space. There's tons and tons of dating apps. How did you how were you able to tell people about it and get them to know what to do? Well, I kinda had a little bit of a playbook. I had maybe done it once before, so

I went right back to SMU. This time decked out in yellow and uh I went back into all those sororities and I I spoke from the heart. Listen, I I have lived through The pain points of Male dominated relationships.

I have felt it. I know what it feels like. And guess what? Every other woman in that sorority house, chances are she's felt it too. So, you know, I'm speaking from the heart and I'm speaking to them about how they can be empowered and they make the first move and they go after what they want. And me and my early team members, I mean, there's the girls are at my office right now, they're still with us. We went in there and we took pizza boxes with stickers on it and offered a piece of pizza to the fraternity boys that would get on it. We wrapped cookies in bumble stickers, we took all sorts of goodies and we kind of growth hacked our way to Uh success. So uh let me just jump out of the story for a sec.

I wanna ask you about this idea that That dating apps, even even Bumble with you know, mission or a purpose to empower women. Even an app like Bumble.

Uh you know, does it contribute to to to just kind of like a a culture of hookups? Well So here's what's interesting. If the hookup is taking place and the woman is empower and feels comfortable and confident in that

Then I say more power to that. You know, I don't care what you do on Bumble, if you want to you know spend the rest of your life with someone you meet on Bumble, phenomenal. If you wanna hang out with them for only a night, but you're going to wake up the next day and you're not going to feel terrible about yourself. That's what this is all about. It's about reverse engineering the dynamics of how men and women feel. And Bumble is not just a hookup app, I mean

I can't tell you how many emails I get a day about Bumble weddings, Bumble Babies, Bumble engagements. Now we're launching Bumble Biz. We have um hundreds and hundreds of thousands, if not in the millions at this point, of active BFF users, which are, you know, young women matching with other young women, kind of in that Mar C capacity I spoke about earlier. They're finding roommates, they're going on trips together, they're building social circles in new cities. It's really not a dating app anymore. I I read that that that you guys have zero there's zero tolerance for sexism on Bumble, but if two people are communicating on Bumble, how do you police that? How do you enforce that? So that's a great question, and it's actually a very tricky one. Um, so We have zero tolerance for bad behavior, um but

it requires a little bit of work from our users because we also want to respect your privacy, right? Um however, if somebody is in a conversation and someone says something inappropriate, we have very easy reporting tools. And once something is reported, we do review it. And if there was bad behavior, that user is banned for life. There are no second chances. Um, we really take it seriously. If you need us, like we're one click away. Do you ever run into any backlash from from, you know, people who who say you know, who who are offended in some ways that th that this empowers women? I mean does it does it make

Some people angry. Yes. Bumble gets a lot of that, you know, just last week we became under attack from this website call the The Daily Stormer, it's a neo-Nazi site. And we had upwards of a hundred men sending us threats. We actually had to have police at our office all week. Wow. Um, they were emailing my employees, calling my employees, calling me, leaving the most vulgar messages. Because you're you're self proclaimed feminist organization. Yeah.

female empowerment is not something that they they believe in, unfortunately. So you know, we get this too. The the bullying Now I don't let that doesn't hurt my feelings anymore because I know these people are just atrocious, but it fuels me. The anger fuels me to try harder at work and try and And and you know, change this misogynistic mindset that exists. Yeah. And so now we're putting such an emphasis to get all these people off of our app. If there are any, we're hoping there's not. Um We now have a whole new set of moderators looking for hate symbols and hate speech on our platform. We're really just trying our best to build a clean, safe community. Yeah. It's been two and a half years since you launched.

This company, I think. Correct. And you have how many active users now? twenty million registrations, nearly. So twenty million That's I mean, that's pretty amazing. Twenty million downloads of the app. since you launched. Yeah. And when will you know that you have m really created this hugely powerful thing when you've got a hundred million, a billion I'll never feel like we've made it. We we gotta just keep going. I I mean, it's funny I used to say to myself, Oh, when we have one million, when we have five million, when we have ten million, oh imagine if we had twenty million. And now we're here and I'm like, you know what?

We always need to evolve and be better and try harder and have bigger reach and better reach. And once we have that reach, we need to start over and do it in a different vertical. How much of of your you know, of of your story w through Tinder and and Bumble now is luck and how much of it was because of your skill and and talent hard work? You know, luck is a funny word. I don't I don't know if I'd call any of this lucky, because I don't feel You know

I think luck is probably a certain element, but if people think I just, you know was at the right place at the right time and just snapped my fingers and twirled a couple times and here's Bumble. I mean They're really wrong. This has been

We're talking all day, every day, ups, downs, high, lows, and and laser focus. So you guys are still a Really young company. Do you do you like

worrying about a competitor or somebody else coming in and just You know. Totally replacing you? We

really truly aren't super worried about competition for one reason. I really believe anybody can copy a product. Anyone. I'm at the U T campus speaking to you right now. I could go to the engineering school, probably find five really talented young engineers, and they could build bumble. With the right support. somebody could rebuild any piece of technology, it's it's engineering.

However You cannot just copy someone's brand and become them. There has to be authenticity when you build a brand, and there has to be true purpose. And so yes, you're right. Anybody could go and build a competitor version of Bumble. But where I don't think they can just come in and and sweep us off our feet is I don't know if there's another group of people with the exact same

story or the exact same m mission and motive and That goes back to what I lived through that summer of twenty fourteen and what landed on my phone every morning. And it was I almost

built my remedy to The the hard ships that I personally was going through and Bumble saved me.

That's Whitney Wolf. founder of the dating app Bumble. And by the way, Whitney now goes by the name Whitney Wolf Heard because she got married last year. And guess how she met her husband? Through No not through Bumble, they actually met their friends on a ski trip. Bumble has not yet gone public, but a few months ago, after reports of a possible IPO,

Bloomberg Intelligence valued the company at$1.1 billion. Please do stick around because in just a moment we're gonna hear from you about the things you're building. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today we're updating a story from about a year ago. And you may want to turn up the volume for a second, because I've got this sound that I want to play for you. It's kinda subtle, but I think you'll know what it is. Okay, a needle scratching on vinyl, which is kind of a cool sound, right? It's full of romance and anticipation, especially if you grew up with it.

And even if you didn't. I started being really interested in records when I was a kid. I would go through my parents' record collections and play Herb Albert or Creed and Clear Out of Revival. And this was in the late nineteen eighties when Mike Dixon was growing up in Wichita Falls, Texas. And I just was always fascinated with the fact that you had to really interact with the music in a physical way. to pull the record out of the sleeve, put it on the turntable, and play it. As Mike got older, he started hanging out in clubs and recording some of his friends' bands. And a lot of them wanted to put their songs on vinyl because as we've already established.

vinyl is kinda cool, but to cut a vinyl record at a legitimate pressing plant? is expensive. your general investment was about two thousand dollars and if you couldn't sell five hundred copies you were Definitely not going to break even. But around this time, Mike discovered that if you just wanna do a really limited run of records, like say 20 or 30, you can learn to do it yourself.

With something called a record lathe. A recordly it basically looks like a large turntable. And the needle is vibrating as the disc turns underneath it and the sound wave is etched into the disc. And you would have seen these old record lathes in recording studios or radio stations in the nineteen forties and fifties. And you can still find them, usually in a dusty attic or of course

on eBay. I got really obsessed with the machines. I bought everyone that I could find. And eventually I had so many machines I was having bands from out of town come over to my kitchen and cut records straight to the lays in the other room. The drummer would be Right next to the sink.

The guitar player and bass player would be next to the refrigerator. and I would be cutting the records while they played the song. Anyway, this is all happening in Olympia, Washington in 2010, 2011, and I should mention that in real life, Mike was teaching high school, but he's also got this final record label going, and eventually he moves out of the kitchen and into a studio and then into the world to small events and pop-up festivals where he uses his portable record lathes. to cut vinyl on the spot.

And then in twenty twelve Mike and his partner. Got a phone. We got a call from Converse. about cutting record for a band called the XX at their Coachella VIP party. Right, so Coachella, huge, the XX, also pretty huge. And suddenly Mike and his partner Chris are at this big party with two record lath.

Making vinyl dubs of Jamie XX for like two hundred people. The attendees would go and listen to some samples. And they'd say I want this song on the A side, I want this song on the B side, and then we would cut it for them right there. And then they walk away with a disc that they can take home and play and show their friends. And after that event, we had a ton of people that said, hey, I want this at my party, I need this at My activation or at my festival. After launching his company, Mike quit his teaching job and moved to Tucson, Arizona. He and Chris have been making vinyl records and traveling around the world to places like Paris, Canada, and New York. And they basically have the coolest job ever.

It's something that I fell into and uh Yeah, I can't imagine having a cooler job either. Mike Dixon is the co-founder of Mobile Vinyl Recorders. If you want to find out more about Mike or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, how IbuiltThis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at hibtnpr.org, and if you want to send a tweet, it's at how I built this.

Our show was produced this week by Rachel Faulkner with music composed by Ramteen Arablui. Thanks also to Julia Carney, JC Howard, Noor Kutsi, Neva Grant, Melissa Gray, Sanas Meshkinpur, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Candice Lim. I'm Guy Roz, and you've been listening to how I built this.

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