In India, a Tinder for marriages

Photo credit: m-bot

In December 2014, KJ Dhaliwal watched the rise of mobile dating app Tinder, thought about matrimonial portal websites like Shaadi.com, and decided the industry needed something better. A marriage between the two, if you will.

In his experience, South Asians in large English-speaking countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK wanted to marry within the South Asian community, but had a hard time finding and connecting with other South Asians. Moreover, they wanted to find a partner who fit well with their parents’ criteria for a future son or daughter-in-law.

In India, dating sites like Shaadi and Bharat Matrimony already existed to get people intent on marriage together. But KJ and his business partner, Sukhmeet Toor, had the idea of creating an app that, as their website states, “turbocharged” technology to increase the chances of a South Asian individual finding a match within his or her community. Together, they founded San Francisco-based Dil Mil at the end of 2014.

The idea of online dating or dating via apps is not new, and KJ is aware of that. He quickly drops several familiar names in addition to Tinder: OKCupid, Hinge, and CoffeeMeetsBagel. Tinder launched in India at the beginning of January. Though Dil Mil takes inspiration from Tinder’s success, KJ claims this app takes it a step forward.

“What we found was that over 80 percent of South Asians marry and date within the same community…so it made sense to make a vertically-focused product for that market,” he tells Tech in Asia.

In the past year, Dil Mil has managed one million matches, 3,000 new users a day, and an average of two user marriages per week. That sounded good to the founders, who decided that they needed to add another country to their list. In May 2015, they received a US$1.1 million angel round of funding from a group including Will Bunker, the founder of Match.com. In December 2015, they raised an undisclosed amount from one of the founders of Saavn, a US-based music streaming app.

Hook up, or wedding bells?

KJ Dhaliwal, co-founder and CEO of Dil Mil

Dil Mil’s approach to a vertical dating market is not just limited by cultural background or the profile that a user fills out at the beginning. It also uses a deep learning algorithm to let actions speak louder than words. It reads a user’s activity on the app and builds a virtual picture of what that user is looking for. From there, it can recommend potential spouses – or, if a user doesn’t seem to be jumping into marriage right away, it can also recommend partners based on that information. With Dil Mil, it appears that the amount of work you put in is the quality of the people the app puts out.

For example, KJ says, a user who uses the app and has a few matches but really engages with those matches, chatting with them on the app, will be shown other users who want to engage – users who are most likely looking for commitment. Meanwhile, a user who casts a wide net – likes a lot of users but doesn’t chat with them as much – will be shown people with similar levels of commitment.

“The biggest [challenge] for most matchmaking platforms is that you can’t differentiate on intent – so you’re going to have people looking for hooking up, looking for dating, and looking for marriage,” says KJ. “So how do you differentiate that? That’s the reason why technology should solve that problem.”

So, Dil Mil is marketed as an app that helps people find the mystical “The One,” but there’s a little bit of wiggle room for intent – only a little.

“The way the business model works is that you get a limited number of likes per day, and once you’ve exhausted that number, you can buy more with a premium subscription, which gives you an unlimited number of likes,” says KJ. “We noticed that on an app like Tinder, people would – guys, especially – sit there and hit ‘like’ on every girl they saw to maximize their chances.” For Dil Mil, the magic number is 10 likes per day. The quality of the user matches increases then, he adds, because that already shows a higher level of commitment and interest up front.