QuackQuack, Aisle, Woo and TrulyMadly – all homegrown dating apps – are turning to Tier II and Tier III cities as small-town folk warm up to the idea of using dating apps to find love virtually.
While popular global counterparts like Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid and Hinge rule the roost in the metros, the homegrown ones have a clear edge over them in second-tier cities owing to their “desi connect,” industry watchers told ET.
These dating apps are leaving no stone unturned to lure the lovestruck in the remotest regions.
They are customising apps to showcase the regional culture, adding astrology and horoscopes to cater to star-crossed lovers or simply ensuring that their apps are available in multiple regional languages to reduce entry barriers.
TrulyMadly has added an astrology or horoscope section to its app to assess compatibility based on eight parameters such as work, dominance, destiny, mentality, mental compatibility, temperament, love and health. This is based on a user’s place and time of birth. Aisle also has this horoscope feature on its regional language apps.
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Aisle has, in fact, launched several variants of the app – called “Arike,” “Anbe,” “Neetho” and “Neene” – for people from the four South Indian states. These provide the app interface and text in English but make sure to have elements that connect with that region and culture. Arike – with a romantic undertone – means ‘beside’ in Malayalam, while ‘Anbe’ means ‘darling’ in Tamil.“In pre-pandemic times, the number of signups from Tier II and Tier III cities was not much,” Able Joseph, founder and CEO of Aisle, told ET. “We launched our first vernacular dating app called Arike in Kerala in February 2021 and it surpassed our expectations. Since then, we’ve launched three other dating apps for all four South Indian states.”
Currently, 40% of the total traffic and revenue come from the newly launched apps, while the eight-year-old Aisle app proper is doing well in urban pockets.
The higher number of users from these towns is also translating to more revenue for companies.
Snehil Khanor, co-founder and CEO of TrulyMadly.com, said the app’s revenue from Tier II and Tier III cities has grown much faster than Tier I cities and now accounts for 45% of its total revenue.
“The cities where we are seeing most traction in this bracket would be Ahmedabad, Pune, Lucknow and Hyderabad,” he said. “But even cities like Vadodara, Bhubaneswar and Guwahati are fast growing in terms of revenue.”
Khanor said international dating apps are chiefly made for the West and marketed in India.
“We, on the other hand, are building for Bharat and we are seeing amazing Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), even from Tier II and Tier III cities,” he said.
The focus is also high on local languages.
Woo, for instance, has launched its app with an option to auto-detect the default language on the phone and ensure all communication on the app is in that language.
It has launched the multilingual feature in Hindi, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam as well as Spanish and Arabic to target the diaspora.
“We have around 10 million users on the platform. After 2020, when we became multilingual, we got around 4,000-5,000 users daily from the Tier II, Tier III and Tier IV cities. So, we look at around 1-2 lakh Monthly Active Users (MAU), organic from these markets,” said Ravi Raj, product head at Woo, which is part of U2opia Mobile.
MAU is a key performance indicator (KPI) used by social networking and other companies to count the number of unique users who visit a site within the past month.
“We are getting a lot of people from Tier II and Tier III cities and very small villages and towns who are getting on our app to make new friends and not to date per se,” said Ravi Mittal, founder and CEO of QuackQuack. “They want to interact with people from the opposite gender online and develop those friendships. We’re getting users from Jammu, from the Northeast – places like Shillong, Assam – and even the heartlands of UP.”
He said the app sees almost 20,000 new users added daily, and this has made the company double down on its efforts in the country.
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