In dating app Bumble's early days, CEO and founder Whitney Wolfe Herd realized something: Twitter and Instagram were two of the most popular apps out there, but she never saw advertisements for them.
Instead of traditional marketing campaigns, Wolfe Herd put together a series of"crazy hacks" to drum up interest in her Austin, Texas-based startup, she said. In one of them, she went to a cookie shop and paid the bakers $20 to adorn yellow-frosted cookies with a white Bumble logo. Then, she took the box to a nearby college sorority.
"We did not have countless marketing dollars ... we actually had to be really scrappy," she said."Lo and behold, you have several sorority women download it, several fraternity men download it, and then they started matching. And that's when the snowball effect really started.".