Why dating & matrimony apps don't work, explained in 1 word…

The bazaar model has a bunch of user experience problems:

1. Privacy & Inefficiency: Indian women feel uncomfortable putting themselves out there on a bazaar and prefer private matchmaking channels, which is what is leading to skewed gender ratios (~80 men for 20 women) on dating & matrimony apps. Interestingly, offline matchmakers which are a more private channel, see an opposite gender ratio.

   Skewed gender ratio causes inefficiency:

   • Leads to a problem of plenty for women who get inundated by matches from men who find them on the bazaar. They are hence overwhelmed by quantity and underwhelmed by quality, even though good men they’d match with exist as needles in the haystack. And another second order effect is ghosting, say when a woman is chatting with 10 guys and then eventually picks 1, finding it too tedious to “break up” with the other 9.
   • The odds of success hence drop for men given the high degree of competition to even get noticed. As someone put it: Both men and women are dying of thirst on these apps. Men because it’s a desert. Women because its an ocean, water water everywhere but not a drop to drink.
   • 2 out of 3 users of dating & matrimony apps in the top 8 Indian cities have hence never met anyone in person from these apps, it's crazy!

2. Mental Health Toll: In a bazaar everyone aims out of their league v/s being realistic (but human) and then gets disappointed on being rejected. Bazaars further give the false illusion of there being plenty of fish (though most people you see don’t match your criteria and vice versa) and so lack of success hurts even more. Also bazaars (essentially feeds like Instagram/YouTube, LinkedIn or Google Discover) lead to timepass behaviour - where users often come just for validation (say after a bad day at work) or just to check out the field from afar, without any real intention of meeting people. This endless cycle of rejection that this causes has led to a mental health toll. Match Group (owner of Tinder and Hinge) is being sued in the US for this, and 48% of singles in India’s top 8 cities said dating & matrimony apps have adversely impacted their mental health.

3. Scams: Bazaars (endless scroll of profiles) require a large no. of users. That is why apps haven’t made verification mandatory because if they did, they worry users would drop and they won't have enough to sustain a bazaar. This has paved the way for a whole gamut of scams that the media is now reporting, apart from users’ blatant lying about their particulars on their profiles. 70%+ of Indian women and 50%+ of Indian men (yes, men too!) feel the apps lack adequate security & privacy.

The bazaar model causes a business model problem as well:

The high no. of users a bazaar needs to enable near endless scroll also necessitates the apps to have a freemium model. What now happens is that the most popular men and women use the free tier, match and leave. So the apps fail to monetize their happiest users. Instead they monetize users who have got left behind and pay for virtual goods like superlikes or roses to get noticed amongst the crowd. Now the user is smart, and you can only extract so much money from an unhappy user you can’t deliver success to. So this is an inherently flawed business model, right? No wonder the apps are struggling to get more than 5-15% of users to pay them and not seeing revenue growth commensurate with the Street’s expectations leading to their stock prices being at historic lows.