When’s the last time you met someone in the wild?
If you’ve dated in the past two decades, chances are, you’ve used an app. My bar hopping days are past, and I no longer have any interest in being set up with “really great guys” by my married friends.
Enter Bumble. Online dating isn’t exactly my style, but if you want to meet a partner, you’ve got to put yourself out there, right? And, besides, Bumble was different—founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd, a former Tinder exec, with the intent to empower women, on Bumble, when hetero couples match, the woman has to make first contact.
So, I made a profile and began swiping through images of potential partners in my vicinity—oh, yes, the ubiquitous fish pics, shirtless gym-selfies (come on, guys), and endless backwards hats. Every few weeks, I’d log on with the hopes of finding my diamond in the rough.
One cold night in January, I had just settled in at home, poured myself a glass of wine, and opened my laptop. A former prenatal yoga client had emailed me. She and her family were about to move across the country, and her husband wasn’t pleased at the prospect of toting the hundreds of ounces of frozen breastmilk in their freezer with them.
My next email was from another client. At 36 weeks pregnant, she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Soon after delivery, she would undergo a bilateral mastectomy. She was devastated that her youngest child might not receive the benefits of being fed human milk.
As the weight of these emails sunk in, my phone pinged. A match notification from Bumble lit the screen. A lightbulb went off. It was a mind-altering moment; if I could use an app to find a potential partner, why couldn’t these families use the same technology to help them feed their children?
At that moment, I had zero clue how to create an app, and a movement, but the idea for Share the Drop was born, and it was all I could think about.
So, Whitney Wolfe Herd, thank you. Thank you for creating a dating app that empowers women. Thank you for inspiring me to voyage into the tech world. I can’t wait to see who I get the chance to motivate along the way.
