2RedBeans is a dating startup for the global Chinese diaspora

One of the biggest problems for young Chinese adults both at home and abroad can be finding a partner. Parents and grandparents are often anxious for their offspring to get married and have kids of their own, but finding someone you actually want to marry? That’s not easy.

That can be doubly true for the tens of millions of Chinese people who live outside China’s borders. Many of them would prefer to find a Chinese partner given the linguistic and cultural similarities they’d like to share with their future spouse, but finding the right person isn’t easy, especially if you’re a busy student or a work-focused young professional.

That was the situation 2RedBeans founder Q Zhao herself in years ago while working on 3D TVs for a big company in the US. She noticed that like her, many of her Chinese friends in the States were having trouble finding serious partners who could lead to marriage. Having always been interested in entrepreneurship, Zhao did a bit of research to see if there was a market. “I realized that this was a serious problem that needed to be solved,” she told Tech in Asia. “So I just quit my job and started to work on 2RedBeans.”

The site first launched in 2011, but it really started to take off last year. “For a dating site you need a critical mass,” Zhao explained, “so the beginning part is quite slow.” But there’s nothing slow about 2RedBeans today. Zhao said the site has over 400,000 users and is currently growing at a consistent rate of 10% per month. If the company can maintain that rate, it will hit the one million user mark in less than one year.

2RedBeans founder Q Zhao

The 2RedBeans advantage

Currently, 2RedBeans operates much like other dating sites: membership is free but limited; users can buy a VIP membership to remove limits and browse to their heart’s content. Currently, the site is bringing in about US$1 million in revenue per year, Zhao said (and that number is growing, too). The company is supported by angel investment, including an investment from Match.com founder Will Bunker, which came through in 2013. It just closed a US$2 million second round of investment this fall. “We’re not too worried about money at this point,” Zhao laughed.

Although it looks similar to other dating sites, 2RedBeans does have a number of specific tweaks to the dating site formula designed to make it more attractive and effective for first-generation Chinese singles. You can use 2RedBeans in Chinese, of course – about 70 percent of its users do – but it goes much deeper than that. 2RedBeans profiles include questions about the user’s immigration status and what year they came to the US, so other users can find partners in similar situations to their own. And the site features a “secret admirer” feature that allows meeker users to find whether their crush likes them back without having to put themselves out there, which is important. As Zhao puts it, Chinese people are “more shy” than Americans when it comes to dating, and the site is designed with that in mind.

Zhao also thinks 2RedBeans offers better security than many other dating sites. The company uses an adaptive machine-learning algorithm that it developed to detect and weed out scammers, people searching for one-night-stands, and other potentially dangerous or misleading users. “We wanted to create an environment where people can feel safe,” Zhao said. “I use a lot of [dating] sites,” she told me, “and I feel like we do really well on the scammer side of things.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly given that it serves an audience that comes from mobile-phone-crazy China, 2RedBeans is mobile ready, and so are its users. Between its app and the mobile version of the site itself, Zhao said that about 55 percent of the site’s visits come via mobile devices. And Zhao expects that to get even higher. She’s “ashamed” of the company’s current mobile app, she says, and work on a better one is currently underway.