Cupid goes online! Find love Truly Madly style

Harry met Sally is a universal phenomenon. But in India, Harry met Sally on the road and fell in love or Harry’s family met Sally’s family and fell in love. Fast forward to 2015, Harry’s love is online now—on Truly Madly- a dating app that helps meet like minded individuals to find their ‘perfect love’.

“Truly Madly is a dating app meant to cater people in the age group of 18 to 26 years old. We realized that this is the group that we can cater to as most of them did not want to settle down so fast but definitely wanted to meet interesting people. So, we decided to create a dating space for this group rather than disrupting the matrimony space,” says Sachin Bhatia, co-founder of Truly Madly at his office in Delhi.

Disrupting the matrimony space? The Makemytrip co-founder and CMO explains that last year, the founders of the company- Sachin Bhatia, Hitesh Dhingra, co-founder of electronics ecommerce firm LetsBuy.com, and Rahul Kumar, who formerly worked with travel portals such as Expedia, Makemytrip got together and started looking at online Indian businesses that have not evolved up in the last one decade in India.

“So, we looked at real estate and then we saw matrimony. On going deeper, we realized that this segment did not really do anything different and decided to disrupt this segment. I mean the players are still matching in a regressive way-based on caste, creed and religion. So we thought of doing something interesting and disrupting this category,” he adds.

Bhatia points out an interesting fact here. According to their research, 30% of the men registered on these match-making websites are married and are only looking for fun. “On researching more, we got the feedback that girls were wary of being on such apps as none of the profiles were verified, which may be accessed by stalkers and corny men. And hence, we came up with our verification feature on the app,” notes Bhatia.

So how does Truly Madly work? It’s simple. You will have fill in your details and then answer some fun quizzes which allow the app to understand your preferences. The second process would be the verification, which can be done by linking all your social media profiles including Facebook and Linkedin along with documents such as the passport in order to assess whether profile created is genuine or not. The app will then match you with profiles and a chat access is given only when there is a mutual like.

“Truly Madly is built on two pillars- compatibility and verification. We can’t promise love and perfect matches but at least we can help you sift through bunch of profiles based on common interests and likes. This works well with the women,” avers Bhatia.

Talking about the competition, Bhatia feels that the biggest competition in the segment is the US based dating app Tinder. However, he also believes that the concept which governs Tinder is not for the Indian market. “Tinder is more of a casual dating, which works well in the US but not in India,” he asserts.

Seeing the potential of the dating space in the country, the company has raised Rs 35 crore recently. And it will be used for primarily two things—expanding the team with the best talents on board and creating quality content for the app.

“We have half a million users now with 35% girls. One major area of concern is that people won’t go on Facebook and announce that they are on Truly Madly. But they may share original content that the app offers. So, we are really focusing on creating original content,” Bhatia explains.

The company also aims to create dating as a category as it is still considered to be a taboo. Bhatia tell us that even today people prefer to say ‘going out for coffee or a movie’ rather than calling it a date.

So, who are the core target audience for this dating app? Bhatia quickly tells us that the company is only targeting women. “Once women are on board, men will follow,” he chuckles.

Interestingly, the app has seen a higher number of women from small towns registering themselves than those in the big cities. “In terms of downloads, metros lead but 30% of our users who are from non-metro cities are more engaged,” points out Bhatia.

The company will soon make its business model subscription-based and will charge a meager amount. While it may hurt a few pockets, until then, enjoy dating online.

Image credit: Indiatimes.com