How the co-founder of MakeMyTrip fell TrulyMadly in love with a dating app

Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.

Many singles will share D.H.Lawrence’s sentiment, but that doesn’t stop them from seeking love. They seek for it actively, on the ground, and virtually. And thanks to them, dating apps that promise true love or at least a tingling fling over social networks are a dime a dozen. And around Valentine’s Day, they see large flocks of the lonely.

But how do you find out if that cute, smart, and young lawyer you stumbled upon on an app is actually what he claims to be and not some creepy wife-beater looking for some action on the side? That’s one problem faced by almost all dating apps out there. Delhi-based TrulyMadly zeroed in on this and decided to figure out a way to solve it before launching its app last year.

To find love on TrulyMadly, you will have to submit copies of identity cards like passport, driving license, or PAN (Permanent Account Number) card. The TrulyMadly team will verify the ID proofs, social media profiles, and employment records to make sure that you are who you claim to be. If you make the cut, you will get a trust score based on how much real data you have submitted. Then the app will do the matchmaking. That will be based on the psychological profile it drew from likes and dislikes you confessed as well as what is evident from your social network persona.

Higher the trust score, more matches you will get. So girls and guys have an incentive to submit better and more ID proofs to raise their trust scores.

For safety reasons, your profile can only be viewed by the matches that the app finds for you. And you can only be messaged by those you approve from your matches.

“We think of ourselves as those over-enthusiast [sic] friends who always have someone great to introduce to you,” TrulyMadly states as its mission.

The founders, Sachin Bhatia, Hitesh Dhingra, and Rahul Kumar, already had good startup experience before they launched TrulyMadly around last Valentine’s Day. Bhatia is the co-founder of travel major MakeMyTrip. Dhingra founded Letsbuy which was acquired by Flipkart. And Kumar was a product head at MakeMytrip with stints at Expedia and Oracle behind him. They wanted to disrupt the matrimonial market but decided that finding love, which could well lead up to marriage, was the more exciting problem to solve.

Co-founders of TrulyMadly Rahul Kumar, Hitesh Dhingra, and Sachin Bhatia

The truth and the madness

The name “TrulyMadly” was inspired by a cheesy love song. Bhatia, Dhingra, and Kumar were at a coffee lounge in Gurgaon, near Delhi, discussing this startup when the song being played in the background struck them as rather serendipitous. It was a song called “Truly Madly Deeply” by Australian pop band Savage Garden.