If the current shape of things is anything to go by, love is in the app.
If on one hand food tech is booming, on the other, finding a date online has never been easier. Gone are the days when looking up a date meant lounging around on seedy chat rooms or using American dating sites with a handful of legit users from India. Finding genuine people with real identities was another concern. Yes, don’t be surprised if the 24 year, voluptuous, cosmopolitan Riya, turned out to be a 40 year Suraj looking for a kick from his basement room in the hinterlands of Bihar.
QuackQuack is one such offering that aims to make dating normal, sane and effective for Indians.
Founded by Ravi Mittal in 2010, QuackQuack is a dating site in India with verified listings, moderated content, and a premium option for more features and a better experience. According to the founders, QuackQuack is a full fledged web and mobile app catering to singles in India looking to find a date in their city. On QuackQuack, it is free to sign-up, create profile and express interest in other singles. If and when you wish to proceed further and message or exchange contacts, users can upgrade to premium subscription and take the conversation forward. QuackQuack also provides a unique feature for busy users to create and contact their matches without logging in to the website / app everyday. They can simply create their auto message senders to express interest and send messages to potential matches which gets sent on their behalf everyday by the system.
The dating site was born out of an entrepreneurial itch by Ravi Mittal, who started working from the age of 16, and found that with time his social circle was shrinking as well. Dating sites if any were full of creeps, shady behaviour, and suffered from lack of a wide enough pool to choose from. That’s when he decided that it was an opportunity waiting to be grabbed and started Quackquack. Ravi had studied almost all popular dating platforms all over the world when he was using them to find Indians on those sites. Having used them extensively, he figured the best approaches used in these websites and gave it a shot. He hired a team and kept iterating with optimizing the platform for Indian users. He figured that some Indian users were not comfortable with making their photo visible so he introduced the option of controlled photo visibility. Friends and networks pilot tested the platform and gave feedback, based on which the platform was tweaked and improved accordingly. A final landing page was opened to an initial target audience and received tremendous response.
Encouraged by the reaction, Ravi decided to launch the platform full throttle.
Today, the platform has clocked a million sign-ups, with 5,00,000 users in the last 12 months alone. Quackquack has a team of 15 members and is completely bootstrapped, with a look out for venture capital to grow the company further.
Interesting to note is that QuackQuack is a revenue generating company and has crossed 4.1 crores in revenue from subscriptions.
That said, some of the biggest challenges for the startup have been getting female members on board as it’s difficult to get their trust in a dating platform. However, backed by a strong in-house moderation team which takes action on spammy and abusive content and users immediately, they’re confident that they will be able to overcome the problem.
Among other growing challenges is seeing the wave of mobile users. “Previously we had 70% desktop and 30% mobile users, which is now almost 55:45. The challenge remains to optimize the features in such a way that mobile users find it easy to use.”, says Ravi.
With an IOS app on the cards, and 2 million members about to be clocked soon, things are looking up for QuackQuack, and its users on a look out for a date.