Whitney Herd : Thank you so much. So I’ll set the stage on AI machine learning. So I think it’s very important to note that AI is not some new thing for us at Bumble, our work has been deeply rooted in a lot of machine learning and AI historically. But we are really excited about the way AI can really benefit our business moving forward. So I think, before I get in the in-house or other, I will just talk about how we see this enhancing our business. Really across three main domains. So I would say starting with better products. Using internal tooling or taking this trust and safety and machine learning recommendation engine to the next level by deeper integrating with external large language models and data labeling. And then the second category is really building faster.
We think that there’s a huge optimization opportunity and productivity opportunity, which really improves engineering and marketing efficiency by adopting AI based code generators and automation frameworks. And then the third category is really new products. And this is enhancing the product experience. What I mean by enhancing the product experience that might be adding something new that doesn’t exist yet. Or it could be an optimization of something that say, someone struggles with on the product journey. So, we see this really as an onboarding to your real life date opportunity. This could start with struggling to pick the best photos. This could be helping you write your bio or set up your profile with the touch of a button. There’s so many opportunities along the way.
We’re also a business before we turn to Compliments based on women making the first move. And this has been such a driver of our success and it continues to be. But we believe we can lean into the optimization of that, make it easier for women, make it safer and faster, and more enjoyable overall. And so there’s tons of opportunity here to really drive performance improvements across the board. And before I take this to Tariq to double down on the integration strategy on AI, I will just touch on Compliments briefly. So Compliments by way of update, Compliments was really our first foray into the message before match category. We have continued to expand the Complements feature, and we are growing adoption and increasing retention. Both things we’ve been very committed on.
So in Q1, our focus was really on growing adoption, and we are seeing promising results. So thus far, nearly 15% of our Bumble monthly active users have sent a Compliment. And we’re very confident in our ability to grow that penetration over times through things like continuous product design improvements, and strategic placement in high intense scenarios, and broader future education, and also marketing the product outside of the app, which you can expect to see this summer. We’ve also prioritized ensuring a strong and safe user experience, as we scale this feature and roll it out more broadly. So we are working on the receiver experience in tandem. So given this recent rollout, Complements revenue contribution is fairly modest today, but it is building momentum.
So we’re very excited about the potential and we expect revenue from Compliments to ramp over the year. Tariq, would you like to add anything on AI?
Tariq Shaukat: John, the only thing I would — so the models that we’ve been using historically are internally built models. They work really well. We’ve actually benchmarked them against externally available long large language models from the usual suspects. And in most content areas, they benchmark actually better. It’s really a reflection of the fact that it’s tuned to our data. And at the moment, that tuning beats out the sort of power of the other models, we are experimenting exploring. How do we have a best of both worlds type of model where we use our internal capabilities and supplement that in areas that were weaker with some of the external? Models we’re pretty happy with some of the kind of offline experiments we’ve done on this so far, and I think we’ll be doing more in that area before.
John Blackledge : Good. Thank you.
Tariq Shaukat: Thanks.
Operator: Our next question comes from Laura Champine.
Laura Champine: Thanks for taking my question. It’s about Badoo, which I know is only 20% of your business, but I think we keep waiting for it to stabilize revenues from that unit still down double digits this quarter. What are the signs of stabilization that you’re seeing? And when do you think we could see a positive turn in Badoo’s revenues?
Whitney Herd : Yes, thank you so much for the question. So I think it’s important to reemphasize that we do have maintained its strong position. So — but do really continues to be a leader in its key markets. And it’s still a top three dating app in a number of countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America. In late Q1 and continuing into April, we have seen the due return to registration growth. And we’ve achieved good progress in stabilizing revenue. So these are the first steps in really returning the due to that growth and we continue to execute our strategy to deliver these results. And there’s, of course, still work to do. Badoo was very challenged, had a series of challenging events between COVID and the war in Ukraine, we still remain confident in Badoo’s long-term opportunity and that value proposition.
So turning to the product side, we’ve shared this in the past, but Badoo’s most loyal customers care about this instant connection and spontaneity that this product uniquely delivers, and we’re really continuing to lean into that. We attribute the return to more positive numbers to this strategy and to really listening to the customers and building for them. So really that paired with enhanced monetization offerings to really offer promotional bundles and new consumables we’re feeling better about the Badoo’s story. And we have delivered several revenue and ecosystem experiments. Throughout Q1, and those resulted in improved revenue trajectories in key markets. So we expect to be active internationally with market expansion efforts in APAC and continued investment in LatAm and Eastern Europe.
So with that, I think Anu you want to make a comment?
Anuradha Subramanian : Yes. And I think in terms of when we expect Badoo to be positive year-over-year based on our guidance, you can see what the goal for 2023 is for the Badoo and other line items to start to stabilize. We are still not expecting that. It will be in positive territory this year, but the goal definitely is to get it to be stable and then get to positive. I think the first step towards that is getting a sequential net adds to be positive, which a path that we are on for Q2. Like I said earlier, we know — we recognize we still have a little bit more work to do there, but we definitely feel like we’re on the right path.
Laura Champine: Understood. Thank you.
Whitney Herd : Thanks, Laura.
Operator: There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.
