Arranged Dating
Will it work in India or not?
I recently discovered this dating app called Yidui through Twitter, where people go on live-streamed video-dates arranged by human matchmakers, who facilitate the conversation while a live audience comments and participates.
When I first learnt about this app, it seemed like the traditional “bride-seeing” ceremony taken online. Being a closet feminist, I felt borderline triggered at the thought of anyone bringing back this system. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessively debating (in my own head) if Yidui will work in India or not.
Today, I’m putting this debate out in the open.
The Chinese landscape
First of all, going on a date is nerve-wracking, imagine also being watched/ judged by thousands of people while at it. I was mortified by the idea of Yidui. Immediately, I pinged a couple of my Chinese friends to get some cultural insight.
Firstly, much like India, arranged marriages continue to dominate the Chinese marriage market. In the last decade, dating apps have helped youngsters get initiated into the process of choosing their own partners. Like in India, China has seen a similar evolution in the matching space with Jiayuan (a Shaadi equivalent) being replaced by Momo (Tinder equivalent, although it pre-dates it) with “arranged dating” emerging as a sweet spot between their historical culture and growing aspirations.
Secondly, American social apps are banned in China, so the market is primarily shaped by local competition. The first few dating apps such as Momo or Tantan, that emerged around the same time as Tinder, continue to be popular even today as they’ve gone through a series of overhauls and acquisitions to stay locally relevant. There are also a tonne of other smaller apps that scratch niche itches, and Yidui is just one of them.
Back to my story
While my initial instinct was to vehemently protest the arrival of anything like Yidui in India, the more I thought about the product, the more convinced I was that it would absolutely work in India. But in order to not be biased by my later revelation, I will present to you my initial thoughts on why…
Yidui won’t work in India
Firstly, we Indians may import our cheap goods from China but culture and our slow waking sensibilities come from America. So, as consumers, we’ll never trade privacy and freedom for an elusive promise of love.
Secondly, a lot of people building dating apps today are personally affected by the problem. This means, they bring their personal biases. So, it’s challenging to keep an open mind while building the product.
Thirdly, it’s a Chinese app. It won’t come to India until 2024 (at least).
The privilege bias
My business serves the top 1% of Indians worldwide. My clients are independent, highly educated, professionally successful and sometimes famous, who place a premium on privacy when it comes to relationship matters. My business has no scale, and so it’s quite easy for me to have a biased view on the dating culture.
But thanks to technology, love is accessible to nearly half of the Indian population today. So, if we’re talking about 50% of the Indian population, my personal views about how Yidui can shape our dating culture going forward are irrelevant.
So, I wanted to challenge my own views with a mass market approach to argue…
Why Yidui will work in India
Yidui is a fairly complex app with multiple sets of users - single people, matchmakers, audience, etc. But that’s the beauty of it. It values the marital decision making unit of an average Indian household in it’s entirety. So, I wanted to build my argument in a similar fashion using various characters in the dating market to make it well-rounded.
Matchmakers
Two years in, I hear Yidui has 40,000+ matchmakers on their platform. That number would be even higher in India. Afterall, matchmaking is our national hobby. Imagine giving us a platform, and even money for our favourite pastime? It would be a riot.
Since dating apps were launched in India, brick and mortar matchmakers have suffered. So, the promise of improved revenues and the opportunity to make more matches is always alluring. Much like social commerce, this market will follow power law. Matchmakers who are already well-established will continue to dominate the pack, while giving rise to many new businesses that were previously being run as mere hobbies.
It’s not technology, but incentives that will make a difference to these matchmakers as they’re running just fine operating via Telegram/ WhatsApp groups today. It would be interesting though to watch how these matchmakers would influence each other and how culture would get shaped in a social environment.
Audience
The ones who have always had most fun in the matching market have been the on-lookers. So, this form of entertainment is more than welcome in India. We’ve seen ample evidence for our love for reality entertainment through the likes of Bigboss and Tiktok. We are so addicted to all this that it took us 2 minutes to switch to Takatak when Tiktok got banned. Over a period of time, I can imagine a subscription model for the audience, which would run the business in itself.
VCs
Believe it or not, it’s not movies but it’s VCs who make or break culture today. They may not invent this stuff, but they bring scale to it. Yidui has a lot of interesting things that are a hardcore sell for VCs – AI & ML based matching algorithm, thousands of on-demand jobs created and a social addictive experience. Unlike most dating apps, this one is likely to have lower churn and higher CLV as the user navigates from being a single person on a date to enjoying the date as audience. If properly executed, VCs will have a decent exit.
Creators
A lot of dating app founders are usually personally affected by the problem at some point. So, when matters of heart meet tech entrepreneurs, you leverage scale, and the Yidui model has scale. In fact, Yidui has the other ingredients of start-up aspirations – impact and potential for massive funding. Given the diverse user base, you’ll surely make a dent in the industry. Today, a lot of livestreaming technology is getting built worldwide for creators. So founders could easily build an MVP using plug and play to secure funding to build the actual tech and onboard brokers. The rest will follow if there’s a reasonable vision, and they don’t run out of motivation before they hit scale.
Single people
Despite the many dating apps, single people continue to find it challenging to meet new people. The big issue with the matching market is trust. Unless we can systematically address the issue of trust, women will continue to feel unsafe and not use these platforms as much. This is where bringing in a human chaperone can really make a difference.
If you’re not single, it’s hard for you to understand what people can or can’t do for love. While dating in public may like seem like an invasion of privacy to me, it may not be to a lot of other people. Also, it’s about time we de-stigmatise dating in India, and if it means dating in public while our parents watch it live, so be it.
Since the onset of the pandemic last year, dating apps like Bumble have seen a surge in downloads. This tells me that people are less afraid of putting themselves out there and are doing so using technology.
Personal anecdotes
Are matchmakers coming back?
Back in 2019, when I quit my job at Amazon and I was navigating the decision of how to launch my entrepreneurial venture, I had a similar idea. I wanted to build a SaaS based marketplace for matchmakers/ brokers in order to improve customer experience and liquidity in the matching market.
When I shared this idea with a few friends, people said this is against the industry trend, the society is moving away from an arranged model, brokers are shady fellows, you can’t scale with humans and what not. Being a nonconformist, I felt very reassured by all the critical feedback.
It’s a lot of fun
When I ran Dinner Club, I’d facilitated a few dates and they were immensely fun for everyone who was a part of it. I have a clear memory of one date where the boy shared screen and played a scene from the popular song “maari kaNNu hori myaage”, and the reaction from his date, I’ll never forget.
Do addictive experiences sell?
When Dinner Club ended, I remember chatting with a few friends about possible future paths for the project. Most people asked me about how I would scale the matching process. One of the ideas that was an immediate sell was matching using a combination of human matchmakers and an algorithm that would use social ratings from the community, which would also make the experience addictive.
While I may have scoffed at the thought of building an addictive dating app, the Yidui model does a brilliant job of shifting the addiction from the set of users who are very dear to me (the single people) to the ones I don’t have an opinion on (the on-lookers). In this model, single people will come and go, but the only people who’ll stay on and be subject to greater judgement, outrage and memes will be the Sima aunties.
With the traditionalists entertained, and the woke outraged, I am convinced that this will work in India. The only question that remains is – who will build it?
Sneak peak into what I’m reading/ watching/ listening to:
The Orphan Master’s son by Adam Johnson - this is the first book I’m reading on North Korea, and calling this Pulitzer-winning thriller disturbing would be an understatement.
My long awaited love story: this was my first ever Japanese rom-com. Predictable plot, but I watched it nevertheless.
Shapely Gal song of the month: Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell. If you catch yourself singing this song after listening to it, write to me.