Bhat's Notes

I ran family business for 7 years. Being bania I got into the family business when I was in intermediate. At 23 then I couldn’t find a girl friend. Then the thought has come. Shaadi com was the only competitor at that time.

I am not from tech background. I observed that face book and shaadi are built on PHP. We went ahead with it. I belive in strong UX. We invested heavily in UI/UX. Product went live in an years time. We made mistakes alot at launch.

Once we launched the platform, the big question was how do we get customer. I didn’t take money from my dad. I had no money. We used dating related key words on Google platform. We noticed foot falls happening quick. With little money, we could do this. I showed this to my college friends and asked them to give continuous feedback. We out a model photo on sign up page. We cut down on asking too many questions. We got our first paying customers in six months. I doubted some one must have paid to boost my confidence. It was real. It was proof of concept for subscription payment in India. We started investing more in adwords. 7 years ago term startup was non-existent.

We created dummy profiles in the name of women. Men would come and leave contact numbers. That has become a pool of target-able customer base. We eventually started sending promotional.messgaes to them. This chunk of sure vase turned out to be huge boost for revenues.

Using adsense we started advertising on other dating platforms. We could convert them quick. We advertised on Proper, a Mumbai based firm. We did allocation based targeting. We excluded Maharashtra else they may block us. We could get them to give us traffic. Before I let them go, I gave 3 months time. We hired them experts. Evaluated them well. New team advised us it takes 8 months to get ranked by Google. 60% of our traffic comes from SEO.

We reinvested the money into other marketing channels. SEO is one. We failed there due to poor hiring. Google even penalized us for black at techniques.

Then we launched an android app in six months. It was buggy the developer wasn’t good. Then we hired the best at double the price but he completed the project in three months.minry avoid is the same. We got great feedback.

Message: Hire the best talent

We are a small team of 15. We add about 100k users every month.

Our product is simple and easy to use. Not of a big support team.

This helps us understand psychology of people. I read hoe Amazon change the color to orange to get more people to purchase. We played with the sign-up button color. We figured orange attracted more people. We keep doing these A/B testing 5-7 each week. One tag line “sign up now and free” versus “sign up and meet a single”. Money saved through the second testing on CAC is our profit.

We did A/B testing with two dissident pricing. We went from Rs.290 to Rs.990.

We ensure people get logged in after clicking an email. No need to enter the login details. We have eliminate the navigation funnel for users.

We are in freemium model. We make the experience easy.

Don’t build an app first. Realize that you need to be available where customer is available. It could be Whatsapp. I met a guy who was building an app for reselling movie tickets. I advised him to use a website. Why would he install an app?

We are available on all four places: Android, IOS, mobile and desktop sites. Even Uber got a web app. Ola got SMS app. Font say “app only.” Indian funded competitors had a website them they replaced it with apps. We are very apply.

To handle the attrition, we give discounts on renewing up base. We came up with an option for free upgrade. We introduced referral program through points.

It is all about using common sense. We are among the top dating apps in India.

CAC is Rs.20-50 on FB and Instagram. Rs.100-150 for female users. ASO is free.

We learn ASO using Appquick and few other websites. My friend drives 100% of traffic through ASO with zero budget.

We advertise on Yahoo and Bing. Even we so it in Quora. We ensure we are available in AL the platforms, small or big. We do social,media related activities. We did a campaign called “happily single”. We used 20/25 posters with young folks. It went viral with 1 million views. We got covered by buzzfeed, scoopwhoop, huffingtonpost and so on.

An year ago, we were zero on Instagram and we got 16000 users now targeting people aged 20-23. Traffic comes in the nights and Saturday mornings.

Q) Do you do offline events?

We only do online events, no offline events. We picked QuackQuack as it resonates with young audience.

ASO works well with keywords mostly than the review.

We do phone and email verifications. We have backend teams who track some patterns. We track abusive messages and take actions.

We do.

We did trueJodi that failed miserably. We did 5-6 verifications there.

They and three verifications in the beginning and now they only have one.

Stage by stage as I am not a tech guy. We revamp UI/UX every 9 months. Scaling is always an issue.

Mongo, Cloudfront, MCash and AWS.

India is a huge market with different purposes to come onto a platform.  Our USP is unique.

80-20 men to women

You know how freecharge started? When you build business, if you go by ethics, you stay where you are. Facebook and LinkedIn (dark patterns to aquire users) have moral challenge too. Poo.com did do things. We did initially but we no longer do any fake profile creation. Only initial couple of months.

We made the inbox of the women clutter free and we keep iterating.