Singapore’s LoveByte, an underdog at 25,000 weekly active users, is building something special

Private chat apps for couples are an experiment. None of them have reach the stratospheric heights of Whatsapp, KakaoTalk, and WeChat, and they won’t: Simply because they’re a niche product. The top couple app around, Between from South Korea, has just over 1,000,000 monthly active users as of March 2013, a far cry from Kakao’s 27M daily unique visitors.

As such, revenue models that work stupendously on apps like Kakao — selling emoticons and creating mobile game platforms — may not work as well for Between, Couple, and LoveByte, simply because they won’t amass the volume to make micro-transactions worth the effort.

Which brings us to LoveByte, Singapore’s very own attempt at making a couple chat app. Relatively late to the game, team has managed to gain early traction despite being waved off by investors, and it recently surpassed 100,000 downloads, out of which 37 percent are active monthly and another 25 percent are using the app weekly.

These figures are encouraging, but also indicative of the long road LoveByte has in front of it. Compared to Between, it has a lower conversion rate from downloads to monthly active users (the Korean app stands at 60 percent).

In terms of messages sent, Between is processing a hefty 20M messages and 200,000 photos a day, way ahead of Couple’s 1.25M and LoveByte, which has 3M messages since it launched in July 2012.

But despite being an underdog, I believe LoveByte do have some upsides. At this stage of the game, absolute numbers don’t mean as much as the ability to innovate on business model and features. LoveByte has an opportunity to work on user retention by making itself more useful and relevant to users. With a small investment from Crystal Horse Investments and Ruvento Ventures, it has a few months to experiment and raise another round.

The company has already begun to do this by trying out a Gifts feature, which allows partners to browse gifts in-app and purchase it off the mobile web browser. This could be a step in the right direction — although it’ll have to work on improving the implementation (by keeping the entire purchasing process on the app, for example).

There are many partners that LoveByte could potentially work with that cut across verticals. Between had a try-out with subscription commerce company Memebox, and LoveByte could certainly explore a partnership with VanityTrove or Bellabox. The startup could even work with travel, flight and accommodation partners, or enter the events and wedding services verticals.

So it would seem that the direction for LoveByte and similar apps would be to evolve beyond merely being a chat app and into a convenient one-stop service for couples to enhance their relationships.

Unlike many startups, which usually have no problems securing business partnerships but are stumped by user acquisition, LoveByte does have good initial traffic. It’ll just need to grow its userbase and capitalize on it.

Even if it hits a plateau, it still stands a chance of being acquired by the likes of Between and Couple (if they succeed), or the various mobile chat apps in the region. So it’s definitely not a zero-sum game.

Whatever the future holds for the company, what we do know is that the team, led by Steve Sng, Amelia Chen and Ang Hee, has displayed a propensity for innovative thinking and a can-do spirit that’s hard to quantify.

I’m excited to see what’s next from them.