March 2025, I am sitting in an Investor meeting convincing him to invest in my dating app, This is my 4th meeting, after half n hour of meeting, He says “yes” and at that exact moment I knew I am shutting down this Idea.
so how did I reach here? back in August 2024, I was friends with Sik and Arnav. we all wanted to work on a startup but we were not getting a good idea. one fine day we got an idea that “why are these dating apps so costly? all they have to do is run some servers, They have hired all those unnecessary people. we think that’s the reason of their cost”
so we started building a cheap dating app
we soon enough realized that this was not a good idea.
in dating apps only two things matter for short term success
For Men
why will people download your app
why will they stick
in dating apps men stick when they are getting matches and men download your app when “they think they will get matches”
For Women
- Quality of Profiles
but for long term success only one thing matters
number of matches formed on your app, which depends on number of women in the app and quality of male profiles.
interestingly number of women on your app also depends on quality of male profiles and how good your marketing is.
This cheap dating app thing in short would make people feel like they will get matches because they can swipe more after purchasing the premium, but what this would result in women getting a lot of likes and swipes from a lot of low-quality profiles, which would drive women away from app
we soon understood that the idea was not good enough, so we started doing more research. talking to females, approaching through linkedin (which a lot of them told us was weird, but females do not reply on whatsapp to an unknown demand like this)
after a lot of failed and stupid insights we finally got onto our two main insights
Affluent class of India (India 1 - 120 million people / 30 million households) keep switching their dating apps, because after some years India 2 comes on the app and The experience is ruined.
so we would segregate profiles in India1 and India 2 at the time of onboarding itself and only allow matching within the groups
we would show you detail insights on your profile, so that even if you are not getting matches. you would get some response from the app.
twitter and substack do this very nicely, to prevent posters from getting demotivated
that’s a secret, I am going to use it on my other apps too lol
The Idea sounds good right? even we had the funds. so why did we close the idea?
to be honest I still do not have any concrete answer to this, it’s mostly vibes but here are some facts
at this time no-one is willing to invest in social apps in India. so there is funding winter in social space
we live an IIT Roorkee, no-body here uses dating apps. so to test a dating app. you have to launch in delhi or banglore and to market there you need live there which is costly
if we were in Delhi and would have friends who used dating apps, it was very easy to know what real problems are. It is totally possible that those two insights are all in the air and nobody needs it
subscriptions in india don’t make money. Netflix has a revenue of mere 37 crores in India
We are not marketers and film makers. We are tech people. The CAC without crazy marketing is too high to operate on
I personally do not have time. I want to get rich fast. I hate working (even though I work almost all day long from past 4 years) and social apps take around 10 years to really become something, so the time horizons are very long
having said all of this, This is the most exciting space to work on.
Nobody gets up being excited to do a B2B SaaS but this, I can’t even express you the addreline rush.
I did not wanted this post to be too long, so there a lot of things I did not include.
If you have any questions do hit me up at https://x.com/goyalayus