Case Study: Coffee Meets Bagel achieves 26–27% increase in retention with Branch

Coffee Meets Bagel Boosts Retention Rate with Branch

Coffee Meets Bagel, a dating app for millennials focused on real relationships, wanted to grow beyond word-of-mouth by building a two-sided referral program that let members gift matches to friends. Their in-house approach struggled with device/IP switching and many sharing channels (SMS, Facebook, desktop), making it hard to pass referral context through installs and requiring lots of fragile engineering to handle edge cases.

By integrating Branch’s SDK and contextual deep links, Coffee Meets Bagel launched a “Gift” feature that reliably passes referrer and match data through install, removes compatibility headaches, and cuts development and maintenance time. The result was a frictionless, personalized onboarding experience and measurable retention gains for referred users: +26% one-day, +27% one-week, and +26% one-month retention.

Coffee Meets Bagel

Adam Berlinsky-Schine

Chief Technology Officer