"We'll become more stylish, fashionable, youth-oriented." What's happening with "Mamba" after "Tinder's" departure

Over the past two years, popular dating services have left the Russian market: "Badoo", "Bumble", "Fruitz" and "Tinder".

They were all notable players in the market, and their departure has played into the hands of Russian dating apps: they are observing an influx of new users.

Thanks to this, one of the oldest online dating services in the country, "Mamba", was able to improve its financial performance. In 2023, the company's revenue nearly doubled to 1.61 billion rubles, and profit quadrupled to 450 million rubles.

We spoke with "Mamba's" General Director, Andrey Bronetsky, and learned how the Russian dating service market changed after February 2022, how much the company earns abroad, when it plans to go public, and what dating sites really have to compete with.

– The dating market doesn't consist of just one or two apps; it's saturated. There are different themes, different age audiences, and accordingly, there are different apps that are quite successful.

Tinder's departure, of course, affected a certain segment of the audience—we saw an influx of new users when the service stopped working in Russia. Naturally, it was nice that a quality audience came, and practically for free. But overall, the market was developing and will continue to develop.

The departure of one competitor freed up financial resources, as attracting an audience became easier and cheaper. Thanks to this opportunity, we are investing more in the team that handles product development.

– Tinder had its own audience only in a few major cities. It had an expensive subscription, it didn't focus on the regions. Our audience, however, is distributed across the entire country, although our core user base is also concentrated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities with over a million inhabitants.

According to our data, part of Tinder's audience migrated to us and to other services, and part didn't find their product. Unfortunately, we couldn't quickly implement technological changes to attract more Tinder users. You can't change a product with a snap of your fingers. But we are working on it, and I expect that this summer our service will become more stylish, fashionable, and youth-oriented.

– Probably, there's not an outflow, but some decrease in activity among the male part of the audience. These restrictions are made not so much for monetization, but to improve the quality of contact. If a certain girl gets many messages, we don't want her to get even more. We know she has many unanswered messages, and we set restrictions so she doesn't get more. If someone wants to write to her, they won't be able to do so without a compliment.

This is just a specificity of our business, which allows us to balance between monetization and activity in certain audience segments.

In any dating service, there are users that the majority wants to get to know, and there are less in-demand segments. This depends on age, appearance and physique, photo quality, and many other factors.

As a result, some users can get a huge number of likes, while others don't. Our task is to seek and find a balance: not to overload some with attention and not to leave others completely without attention. For this, we have developed and are constantly improving recommendation mechanisms.

– In this regard, we really do things differently than the Americans. "Tinder" is more lifestyle-oriented—you can just look at beautiful users you'll never meet. Or maybe you'll just get liked—and you'll understand you're still something.

We, however, strive to create connections that turn into correspondence. For us, this is the main metric. The quality of correspondence is a separate story, but we generally strive for people to start getting to know each other, start chatting. Currently, over 70% of "Mamba" users find at least one chat partner within a month of registration.

– Besides that, we removed several services: video streams, comments under photos. Some functions are currently in the process of being turned off.

Simply put, we realized that such group communication services within dating are not our story. Ours is an individual connection between users, so they can find each other and calmly figure out within personal communication whether they suit each other or not.

– Two significant factors contributed to this. First—the ability to accept payments from external processors in apps downloaded from the "Google Play Store" appeared. Previously, such payments only went through "Google" and it kept a 30% commission.

The second factor is the departure of competitors, which reduced our marketing costs. They didn't drop to zero but became significantly less.

I'm sure this situation won't last forever. The market will come to a new balance, new players will appear. We expect that profitability will decline in the future. It probably won't be as low as when there were large international players on the Russian market, but not as high as immediately after their departure either.

– Into the team. If before one person handled a certain direction, now we can afford three. This concerns work with spam, cleaning the database, deeper study of user behavior. This also concerns the technical team, which is now breaking our complex product into small services. And in general, all directions that "Mamba" had are now being strengthened. It's a kind of technological reworking inside the product that will also manifest externally.

I think within six months we will roll out various updates and it will become clear what I'm talking about.

– If there are good offers, we are ready. But so far, we haven't seen interesting projects at reasonable prices.

For a service to interest us, it must cater to a segment of the audience that we don't. In that case, we can create some synergy since we have our own infrastructure that will make any dating business more efficient.

We won't buy a direct competitor just to turn it off. It's important that it's an additional flower in the bouquet.

– About 20-25%. Primarily, this share comes from CIS countries, but not only—also Turkey, Israel, Germany, USA.

Moreover, before February 2022 it was 30% or even a bit more. It decreased because there were many users from Ukraine. Now the share of foreign revenue is growing again. On one hand, due to the change in the dollar exchange rate. On the other, because we are getting better at working with the audience. Users appreciate this abroad as well.

– Doesn't "Mamba" plan to go public?

– We are thinking about it, but are far from it for now. We have our own internal problems, we need to do re-domiciliation, it's a complex process that stops us.

But the situation for such a method of raising funds is favorable. The current valuations of companies going for IPO on the Russian stock market look interesting. The conditions for going public are also clear, plus the current state policy contributes to an increase in the number of IPOs.

– I think in a year or two.

– Partial mobilization had some influence for about a week, but then the situation stabilized. The news background, user expectations had a greater impact, whose interest shifted from the topic of dating to other issues.

Regarding the LGBT* law, we had to make some changes to the product to comply with it. We had interactions with Roskomnadzor on this topic. But since our project wasn't focused on such an audience, it also didn't have a substantial impact on us. "Mamba" is still initially oriented towards heterosexual connections.

There were LGBT* representatives among the service's users—and they remained even after we made changes that made it harder for them to meet. But I repeat: this is not our main audience, and we didn't face any difficulties because of the new law.

– Here it's necessary to understand that searching for a partner is, in a way, work. You need to make an effort to get a good result. Starting with how a person presents themselves, how completely their profile is filled out, how many photos they have and how fresh they are. All this forms an impression of the person. If they indicate they are looking for a serious relationship, but the photos don't correspond to that statement, that's not very good.

Besides presenting yourself correctly, you need to search, you need to communicate, you ultimately need to translate everything into a date. But you need to understand that not every date will lead to success, unfortunately. At the same time, I have examples even from my immediate circle where people met on "Mamba" and built a family.

It all works. Some manage to find their soulmate from the first like, from the first chat, others need time. In any case, it's important to make an effort. Fill out the profile, carefully choose a chat partner, communicate, meet. This is a normal strategy, and it works. That's what you need to do on a dating site.

– I don't know such life hacks. I can only say that you need to treat others with respect. You know, some indicate in their profile, like, "don't write me this and don't write me that." Probably, they have positive thoughts about this, thinking only good people will write to them. But such a toxic description in the profile only repels—no one wants to write to them.

– Since on such a site one stranger enters into communication with another, it's a convenient place for all kinds of fraud. This is done by people who create profiles, and it also happens at the level of some software complexes that create many profiles. Such a problem arose simultaneously with the appearance of dating services.

It exists in messengers and social networks too, but it's easier to fight there because a person accumulates social connections and it's visible who is real and who isn't. Newcomers on such platforms are treated more carefully. On dating sites, it's difficult to treat a newcomer too carefully: it could be a normal person who really came to meet someone.

Of course, we still fight accounts engaged in fraud. We have various tools for this: behavior analysis, moderation, responding to complaints. We block, probably, from two and a half to three thousand profiles every day for various reasons.

– If we talk about the direct goal of meeting someone, probably, dating services don't have any competitors. All the mechanics of dating have moved to the internet. There is American research that showed that before people met through friends, at work, at school, on the street, somewhere else, now all that is not popular. At least in the USA, only two directions of meeting people are growing—bars and dating services. That is, if a person wants to meet someone purposefully, they go to a bar, see those who are also open to communication, and start interacting. Or they go to a dating app.

So in this sense, we practically have no direct competitors. And if we talk about indirect ones, it's all services that attract a person's attention. The same "Tinder" can show beautiful profiles not for people to meet, but for the user to simply spend time, look at beautiful people. Conceptually, I would even say that to some extent games, beer, and any entertainment now compete with us.

I'm probably touching on a philosophical topic now, but let's take those who are around 40 now. In their youth, they had a small choice of activities. They could do sports, read a book, have a drink, or meet a girl. Now the quantity and quality of entertainment has grown significantly. These are computer games that hook users on a dopamine needle, social networks, online cinemas, accessible pornography, and so on. All these services are competitors for us. In general, one can live quite a quality life and not try to solve their problem of lack of communication.

– Zoomers also come to us in a fairly large volume, but they have more impulsive behavior than representatives of older generations. They come, try a little something there, and leave. The older a person is, the more responsibly they approach dating, purposefully solving their problems.

So it's not difficult to attract Zoomers, they just behave differently.

And society itself has also changed: sometimes people, instead of building a family, instead of searching for a partner, choose another format of spending time.