"I use both Tinder and Hinge. In between I was using Bumble as well, but it just stopped working. Not quite sure why. Tinder was becoming a chore. However, the paid version actually works in terms of meeting better people and getting more matches,” says Rahul, a skinny, lanky 28-year-old techie from Bengaluru. (Rahul is not his real name, but you already knew that.)
We’ve met Rahul at a typical Friday-night beer soiree, you know, the kind where you compare notes on hooking up. Everyone in the group is between 28 and 32. And everyone is a prolific user of (heterosexual) online-dating services. It’s like a focus group for Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Happn, OKCupid, and Aisle.
That last one is the lone Indian app that crops up in the conversation. Other local attempts — TrulyMadly, Woo, QuackQuack — barely find mention. And, needless to say, the group has no time for the long list of other apps — Vee, Krush, Cogxio, DateIITians, Thrill — to have downed shutters.
The Indian online-dating market is growing up. From a quarter of a billion dollars today, it is poised to touch the magic figure of USD1 billion in three years. But at a time when all other desi consumer businesses are cool, Indian dating apps have been thanda.
If this were any other sector, you’d see headlines lamenting one of the great missed opportunities of our generation. Nevertheless, the struggles of Indian dating apps offer rich insights into the challenges of building new businesses in a market that runs on one (thorny) currency: trust.
From user experience to business models, the overwhelming impact of that one factor makes you wonder if desi dating apps were always …
… destined to fail
The stuttering uptake of Indian dating apps is not for want of trying.
Take TrulyMadly, a pioneer in this space. The platform has been around since 2010 and raised USD5.7 million from Helion Ventures in 2015. (The same year, Woo picked up USD2.35 million from angel investors, as per sources.)
“TrulyMadly was specifically tailored for the Indian audience,” says Ritesh Banglani, a former board member. “In 2015, they had nearly 1 million users, and the average daily user spent almost an hour a day on the app. It is very rare to see such engagement levels in an Indian social app.
“In India, online dating is still a nascent concept. In our user research, we found a very high willingness to date, but a relatively low level of trust in online platforms. TrulyMadly looked to bridge this trust gap by using a combination of technology and processes to assign each user a unique trust score. They also provided users, particularly women, a larger set of parameters on which to base their swipe decision — not just pictures.”
In 2016, it launched TrulyMadly Select, which allows you to scout for “serious relationships” for INR133 a month. (“No more wondering if she’s just here for a date or stress about his intentions. Once you start using Select, we’ll show you profiles of singles who are also ready for a long-term commitment.”) Think dating, but with an eye on the ultimate Indian prize: marriage.
But the app hasn’t quite been able to build on its early promise. It now has 100,000-120,000 monthly active users, including 5,000-6,000 paid subscribers, and closed FY17 with a revenue of INR7.2 crore. It has been pushed to second position after Tinder’s arrival and is holding ground only in tier II and tier III markets.
Globally, Tinder, which is synonymous with the category, had 3 million paid subscribers, according to its parent Match Group’s FY17 annual report (the group also owns OkCupid). Tinder added 1.5 million paid subscribers in 2017, a massive spike compared with some 900,000 in 2016.
According to a May report in Financial Times, “Match’s growth in recent quarters (it turned in its best revenue figure of USD407 million in the quarter ending March since its IPO in 2015) has been turbo-charged by the performance of its Tinder app, which accounted for about 30% of the company’s revenue in 2017, making it the second highest-grossing non-gaming app in the world last year, behind only Netflix.
Tinder continued to expand during the first quarter [of FY18]. Average subscribers came to 3.5 million in the quarter, up 1.6 million from a year ago and 368,000 from the previous quarter.”
Match Group does not report app performance by country. However, if you believe industry insiders, Tinder is the leading dating app in India both by downloads and revenue.
Buoyed by the early response, Tinder opened up its premium version Tinder Plus to Indian users last year. For INR200 a month, it offers features like “unlimited likes, rewind last swipe, five super likes per day, one boost each month, and passport to swipe around the world”.
ET Prime downloaded most of the apps to understand how they differ. Apart from Tinder’s total abstention from any promise of “long-term commitment”, here are the key diagnoses.
Culture eats design
To anyone who has experienced Tinder’s uncluttered interface, Indian apps can appear clunky and overloaded with information.
Tinder (above) and Quack Quack screenshots of the user interfaceBut this is driven by compulsion — Indian apps seem to have suffered because, ironically, they built for the market they are in.
“Indian women like more information when they consider dating,” says Sachin Bhatia, co-founder and CEO of TrulyMadly. “This is because [Indian women] are not exactly looking for casual dating or hook-ups. Even if they are, they are very discreet about it, and want to know as much as possible about the man before chatting with him.”
Even the signing-up process on Indian apps is intentionally far more complicated compared to Tinder, which asks for a simple Facebook-based login. TrulyMadly and Woo, in a bid to increase the trustworthiness of the profiles on their platform, insist on connecting to the user’s LinkedIn ID (not that LinkedIn doesn’t have fakes) or uploading a government ID card. The more of these hoops you jump through, the more is your trust score, which the platforms claim increases the chance of matches.
In the case of TrulyMadly, connecting Facebook equates to a 30% trust score, LinkedIn a further 15%, verifying the phone number another 10%, uploading a photo ID adds 30%, and having references adds 15%.
A former employee of an Indian dating app says while the emphasis on the trust score did seem logical, it added to the complexity of using the app, something that most users weren’t enamoured by. When the competition is offering remarkably simple user experience, this, the former employee says, made the UX seem unfriendly. “Many users felt trustworthiness was more a function of how their match chats with them on the app rather than their driving licence,” the former employee says.
Ceding the initiation advantage
As with most social apps, in dating too there’s no space for more than one on a user’s phone. Tinder is part of pop culture now, so unseating it is difficult. The Financial Times report cited above notes how bolstered by the soaring popularity of Tinder, Match Group has held its own even in the face of rumoured competition from a dating service from the mighty Facebook.
Tinder is the most likely entry into dating for the next generation of users. Bhatia of TrulyMadly says, “One of the reasons these international applications are so popular among users is that most consumers get introduced to the concept of online dating for the first time because of them.”
That doesn’t mean Indian dating apps can’t carve a space like Bumble did in the US by giving control to women. But they would really need to figure out a differentiator that is relevant in India, one that doesn’t make the app cluttered or dilute the premium on trust.
Losing the women
On Tinder and other international platforms, you can text and initiate a conversation with someone only if both of you have “liked” each other. Otherwise, you are basically sending the “like” on any profile to a void in the Internet.
Indian dating platforms, however, do allow you to send some form of communication to another profile, prior to a mutual like, usually for a fee. Most of the well-known Indian applications, in an effort to increase the chances of interaction between the men and women, allow men to send texts to women users even before there has actually been a match.
TrulyMadly allows you to leave a text on someone else’s profile; the recipient can reply within 24 hours. Woo allows you to view all the profiles that have “liked” you. And QuackQuack allows people to send you requests in the form of texts in the application. In a span of three hours during our research, we received 10-15 requests from each application. Anonymity and the option to choose to converse with someone or not was either low or non-existent. This makes women wary about using these apps, resulting in a lack of women, which in turn keeps away men.
A majority of the apps maintain a ratio of 80:20 between male and female users. This is because paid subscriptions are driven almost entirely by men. Getting users to pay has not been easy outside of Tinder, bar a few thousands who pay on TrulyMadly and Woo.
Ravi Mittal, founder of QuackQuack who bootstrapped the platform, says, “Women do not pay for online dating applications. This is what we have observed over the years. And the truth is, since the male to female ratio is so skewed towards the former, the latter does not need to pay to get the number of matches she wants.”
Then there is the conflict that is at the heart of a dating-app business: Should you offer the best matches upfront to a paying user? The chances of a paying user dropping out of the subscription funnel once they find a good match is very real.
Many users felt trustworthiness was more a function of how their match chats with them on the app rather than their driving licence.A former employee of an Indian dating app
No money, no love
Banglani, who was with Helion Ventures when the fund invested in TrulyMadly and now runs Stellaris Venture Partners, says, “If local apps have to win the online-dating market, they will need patient investors. While this business is not capital intensive, you need to build a network before building monetisation. It may take five years or more to get to a healthy level of monetisation, during which time the company will need to be supported by investors.”
But for investors to stick, you need evidence of money flowing in from subscribers. The list of Indian online-dating applications that have shut down due to lack of subscribed users, and consequently investors, is long.
Tarun Davda, managing director of venture-capital firm Matrix Partners India, says, “In 2011, when I was running StepOut.com (an Indian social-networking platform), we had 5 million registered users and 17 million messages exchanged each month. However, the problem happened when we tried to monetise the business and added a paywall. The challenge with this industry is, one can’t monetise early on, you have to be patient. Unless and until there is sufficient user engagement, adding a paywall won’t help. Tinder has been around for years, and then they launched the paid model. For a long period, they worked on expanding their network and increasing engagement among users.
“With StepOut.com, when we launched our paywall, it was too early in the product development, and the engagement immediately dropped."
A miscellany of mood killers
The experience of Vee, which was launched in 2015 and has since shut down, indicates another hurdle: coy users.
“We did not see word-of-mouth spreading for the product. Even if people were on the platform, they were not talking about it. I feel that is a very important metric for any social-based mobile product,” said founder Nitin Gupta to VCCircle. Being part of conversations is important because of the sheer power word of mouth has in dating circles.
After Vee closed down (along with Fym, another app its parent company ran for users already in a relationship), it morphed into Wedlock-Real Relationships, which itself no longer exists.
Thrill, which was developed by Devin Serago and Josh Israel in 2012, was sold to Shaadi.com in 2015 for USD1 million. The app’s distinct feature was that it allowed women to have more control over texting and connecting. However, Shaadi.com merged it with Fropper, its own dating website. Three years on, Fropper remains a dud.
Krush, launched on Valentine’s Day in 2014 by Rajat Rao, also gave more control to women. But now it has disappeared from Play Store.
DateIITians and Cogxio, founded by Kinshuk Bairagi and Layak Singh, went through several false starts before finally shutting down. “On July 15, 2016, we decided to shutdown Cogxio & DateIITians based on various factors, including unit economics, the current market, lagging in the industry, and more. The another (sic) reason was fundraising too cause of already-existing new players in the market (even all players are struggling in the market today too),” wrote Singh in a LinkedIn post.
The bottom line
The average Indian, as per the Central Intelligence Agency, is 28 years old. And according to the 2011 Census, almost 50% of Indian women and 46% of Indian men are married. That leaves a considerable share of the population in the age group considered “marriageable”, single.
Can local dating apps claw back into this burgeoning market? Unless users tire of Tinder, or the double-edged sword of “trust”, don’t bet on it.
We’ve met Rahul at a typical Friday-night beer soiree, you know, the kind where you compare notes on hooking up. Everyone in the group is between 28 and 32. And everyone is a prolific user of (heterosexual) online-dating services. It’s like a focus group for Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Happn, OKCupid, and Aisle.
That last one is the lone Indian app that crops up in the conversation. Other local attempts — TrulyMadly, Woo, QuackQuack — barely find mention. And, needless to say, the group has no time for the long list of other apps — Vee, Krush, Cogxio, DateIITians, Thrill — to have downed shutters.
The Indian online-dating market is growing up. From a quarter of a billion dollars today, it is poised to touch the magic figure of USD1 billion in three years. But at a time when all other desi consumer businesses are cool, Indian dating apps have been thanda.
If this were any other sector, you’d see headlines lamenting one of the great missed opportunities of our generation. Nevertheless, the struggles of Indian dating apps offer rich insights into the challenges of building new businesses in a market that runs on one (thorny) currency: trust.
From user experience to business models, the overwhelming impact of that one factor makes you wonder if desi dating apps were always …
… destined to fail
The stuttering uptake of Indian dating apps is not for want of trying.
Take TrulyMadly, a pioneer in this space. The platform has been around since 2010 and raised USD5.7 million from Helion Ventures in 2015. (The same year, Woo picked up USD2.35 million from angel investors, as per sources.)
“TrulyMadly was specifically tailored for the Indian audience,” says Ritesh Banglani, a former board member. “In 2015, they had nearly 1 million users, and the average daily user spent almost an hour a day on the app. It is very rare to see such engagement levels in an Indian social app.
“In India, online dating is still a nascent concept. In our user research, we found a very high willingness to date, but a relatively low level of trust in online platforms. TrulyMadly looked to bridge this trust gap by using a combination of technology and processes to assign each user a unique trust score. They also provided users, particularly women, a larger set of parameters on which to base their swipe decision — not just pictures.”
In 2016, it launched TrulyMadly Select, which allows you to scout for “serious relationships” for INR133 a month. (“No more wondering if she’s just here for a date or stress about his intentions. Once you start using Select, we’ll show you profiles of singles who are also ready for a long-term commitment.”) Think dating, but with an eye on the ultimate Indian prize: marriage.
But the app hasn’t quite been able to build on its early promise. It now has 100,000-120,000 monthly active users, including 5,000-6,000 paid subscribers, and closed FY17 with a revenue of INR7.2 crore. It has been pushed to second position after Tinder’s arrival and is holding ground only in tier II and tier III markets.
Globally, Tinder, which is synonymous with the category, had 3 million paid subscribers, according to its parent Match Group’s FY17 annual report (the group also owns OkCupid). Tinder added 1.5 million paid subscribers in 2017, a massive spike compared with some 900,000 in 2016.
According to a May report in Financial Times, “Match’s growth in recent quarters (it turned in its best revenue figure of USD407 million in the quarter ending March since its IPO in 2015) has been turbo-charged by the performance of its Tinder app, which accounted for about 30% of the company’s revenue in 2017, making it the second highest-grossing non-gaming app in the world last year, behind only Netflix.
Tinder continued to expand during the first quarter [of FY18]. Average subscribers came to 3.5 million in the quarter, up 1.6 million from a year ago and 368,000 from the previous quarter.”
Match Group does not report app performance by country. However, if you believe industry insiders, Tinder is the leading dating app in India both by downloads and revenue.
Buoyed by the early response, Tinder opened up its premium version Tinder Plus to Indian users last year. For INR200 a month, it offers features like “unlimited likes, rewind last swipe, five super likes per day, one boost each month, and passport to swipe around the world”.
ET Prime downloaded most of the apps to understand how they differ. Apart from Tinder’s total abstention from any promise of “long-term commitment”, here are the key diagnoses.
Culture eats design
To anyone who has experienced Tinder’s uncluttered interface, Indian apps can appear clunky and overloaded with information.
Tinder (above) and Quack Quack screenshots of the user interfaceBut this is driven by compulsion — Indian apps seem to have suffered because, ironically, they built for the market they are in.
“Indian women like more information when they consider dating,” says Sachin Bhatia, co-founder and CEO of TrulyMadly. “This is because [Indian women] are not exactly looking for casual dating or hook-ups. Even if they are, they are very discreet about it, and want to know as much as possible about the man before chatting with him.”
Even the signing-up process on Indian apps is intentionally far more complicated compared to Tinder, which asks for a simple Facebook-based login. TrulyMadly and Woo, in a bid to increase the trustworthiness of the profiles on their platform, insist on connecting to the user’s LinkedIn ID (not that LinkedIn doesn’t have fakes) or uploading a government ID card. The more of these hoops you jump through, the more is your trust score, which the platforms claim increases the chance of matches.
In the case of TrulyMadly, connecting Facebook equates to a 30% trust score, LinkedIn a further 15%, verifying the phone number another 10%, uploading a photo ID adds 30%, and having references adds 15%.
A former employee of an Indian dating app says while the emphasis on the trust score did seem logical, it added to the complexity of using the app, something that most users weren’t enamoured by. When the competition is offering remarkably simple user experience, this, the former employee says, made the UX seem unfriendly. “Many users felt trustworthiness was more a function of how their match chats with them on the app rather than their driving licence,” the former employee says.
Ceding the initiation advantage
As with most social apps, in dating too there’s no space for more than one on a user’s phone. Tinder is part of pop culture now, so unseating it is difficult. The Financial Times report cited above notes how bolstered by the soaring popularity of Tinder, Match Group has held its own even in the face of rumoured competition from a dating service from the mighty Facebook.
Tinder is the most likely entry into dating for the next generation of users. Bhatia of TrulyMadly says, “One of the reasons these international applications are so popular among users is that most consumers get introduced to the concept of online dating for the first time because of them.”
That doesn’t mean Indian dating apps can’t carve a space like Bumble did in the US by giving control to women. But they would really need to figure out a differentiator that is relevant in India, one that doesn’t make the app cluttered or dilute the premium on trust.
Losing the women
On Tinder and other international platforms, you can text and initiate a conversation with someone only if both of you have “liked” each other. Otherwise, you are basically sending the “like” on any profile to a void in the Internet.
Indian dating platforms, however, do allow you to send some form of communication to another profile, prior to a mutual like, usually for a fee. Most of the well-known Indian applications, in an effort to increase the chances of interaction between the men and women, allow men to send texts to women users even before there has actually been a match.
TrulyMadly allows you to leave a text on someone else’s profile; the recipient can reply within 24 hours. Woo allows you to view all the profiles that have “liked” you. And QuackQuack allows people to send you requests in the form of texts in the application. In a span of three hours during our research, we received 10-15 requests from each application. Anonymity and the option to choose to converse with someone or not was either low or non-existent. This makes women wary about using these apps, resulting in a lack of women, which in turn keeps away men.
A majority of the apps maintain a ratio of 80:20 between male and female users. This is because paid subscriptions are driven almost entirely by men. Getting users to pay has not been easy outside of Tinder, bar a few thousands who pay on TrulyMadly and Woo.
Ravi Mittal, founder of QuackQuack who bootstrapped the platform, says, “Women do not pay for online dating applications. This is what we have observed over the years. And the truth is, since the male to female ratio is so skewed towards the former, the latter does not need to pay to get the number of matches she wants.”
Then there is the conflict that is at the heart of a dating-app business: Should you offer the best matches upfront to a paying user? The chances of a paying user dropping out of the subscription funnel once they find a good match is very real.
Many users felt trustworthiness was more a function of how their match chats with them on the app rather than their driving licence.A former employee of an Indian dating app
No money, no love
Banglani, who was with Helion Ventures when the fund invested in TrulyMadly and now runs Stellaris Venture Partners, says, “If local apps have to win the online-dating market, they will need patient investors. While this business is not capital intensive, you need to build a network before building monetisation. It may take five years or more to get to a healthy level of monetisation, during which time the company will need to be supported by investors.”
But for investors to stick, you need evidence of money flowing in from subscribers. The list of Indian online-dating applications that have shut down due to lack of subscribed users, and consequently investors, is long.
Tarun Davda, managing director of venture-capital firm Matrix Partners India, says, “In 2011, when I was running StepOut.com (an Indian social-networking platform), we had 5 million registered users and 17 million messages exchanged each month. However, the problem happened when we tried to monetise the business and added a paywall. The challenge with this industry is, one can’t monetise early on, you have to be patient. Unless and until there is sufficient user engagement, adding a paywall won’t help. Tinder has been around for years, and then they launched the paid model. For a long period, they worked on expanding their network and increasing engagement among users.
“With StepOut.com, when we launched our paywall, it was too early in the product development, and the engagement immediately dropped."
A miscellany of mood killers
The experience of Vee, which was launched in 2015 and has since shut down, indicates another hurdle: coy users.
“We did not see word-of-mouth spreading for the product. Even if people were on the platform, they were not talking about it. I feel that is a very important metric for any social-based mobile product,” said founder Nitin Gupta to VCCircle. Being part of conversations is important because of the sheer power word of mouth has in dating circles.
After Vee closed down (along with Fym, another app its parent company ran for users already in a relationship), it morphed into Wedlock-Real Relationships, which itself no longer exists.
Thrill, which was developed by Devin Serago and Josh Israel in 2012, was sold to Shaadi.com in 2015 for USD1 million. The app’s distinct feature was that it allowed women to have more control over texting and connecting. However, Shaadi.com merged it with Fropper, its own dating website. Three years on, Fropper remains a dud.
Krush, launched on Valentine’s Day in 2014 by Rajat Rao, also gave more control to women. But now it has disappeared from Play Store.
DateIITians and Cogxio, founded by Kinshuk Bairagi and Layak Singh, went through several false starts before finally shutting down. “On July 15, 2016, we decided to shutdown Cogxio & DateIITians based on various factors, including unit economics, the current market, lagging in the industry, and more. The another (sic) reason was fundraising too cause of already-existing new players in the market (even all players are struggling in the market today too),” wrote Singh in a LinkedIn post.
The bottom line
The average Indian, as per the Central Intelligence Agency, is 28 years old. And according to the 2011 Census, almost 50% of Indian women and 46% of Indian men are married. That leaves a considerable share of the population in the age group considered “marriageable”, single.
Can local dating apps claw back into this burgeoning market? Unless users tire of Tinder, or the double-edged sword of “trust”, don’t bet on it.
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