Digital Matrimony — A case
study on [Link]
Sagnik Mukherjee
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8 min read
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Feb 11, 2022
So you’ve reached the ripe age of 27, you’re sitting on the sofa flipping
tv channels and then your Dad suddenly says, ‘toh beta shaadi ka baare
mein kya khayal hai?’ There is a 95% chance that you’ve not really
given this question much thought and you tell your parents to find you
a partner. If you’re among the remaining 5%, then there’s a 2% chance
that you’ve found someone and will be opting for a love marriage and a
3% chance that you’ll settle for a love-cum-arrange marriage. Also,
these aren’t random figures but have been quoted based on a survey of
1.6 lakh Indian households in 2019.
Now, lets assume you’re a part of the herd and outsourced the job of
finding a partner to your parents. Let’s travel back to 1995, before
internet was a thing in India and we didn’t spend all day looking at
pictures of cats. Your dad would call his relatives and spread word
within the network that he’s looking for a ‘bahu’. He’d also drop
newspaper ads in the matrimonial section, exonerating your features
and lineage and would start getting multiple calls and
recommendations on potential matches. There would be a bunch of
people who’d come to your house and ask your parents what kind of
bride they’re looking for. After multiple cups of tea, this individual
would have information on the age, religion, caste, height, complexion
and qualifications expected from your potential partner. They would
also have the same set of information about you and would then start
finding a suitable match. These people are called marriage brokers and
take the responsibility of finding you a suitable match, ensuring that
the horoscopes of bridge and groom match and then will get a priest to
carry out the relevant rituals to get two people married. Well, I don’t
know if you’ve noticed, but the finding your life-partner is now directly
tied with the caliber of your marriage broker and the size of his
network or as Seema Aunty would call it, his database. Also, even if
you’re marriage broker was as capable as Seema Aunty (who claims to
be India’s best matchmaker), you’d still need to compromise i.e. settle
for less than what you’d expected.
Interestingly, one such encounter led to the formation of the website
now called [Link], now relevant in pop culture because Anupam
Mittal made fabulous shikanji’s (lemonade) on Shark Tank India.
Anyhow, in 1997, Anupam was working with a Business Intelligence
Software firm in the US and was on a trip to India when one such
marriage broker tried to get him hitched. While Anupam didn’t partake
his services back then, he did realize that the broker could be made
redundant by creating a matchmaking service on the internet. Thus,
[Link] came into existence in 1997. While [Link] started as an
experiment, the site started gaining traction and in 1999, Anupam quit
his job in the US and invested all his efforts in [Link]. The website
in fact was relaunched as [Link], a domain name for which
Anupam paid 21 lakh rupees, a sizeable sum in 1999.
But hold on, life wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies for [Link] and
the site in fact struggled from 1999 to 2008. To begin with, [Link]
was an online matrimonial website and in 1999, only 0.1% of India’s
population, about 10 lakh people were actually using the internet,
compared to about 50 Crore internet users today. Moreover, marriages
are a big deal in India and customers found it hard to trust an internet
based startup for such a major life decision. However, Anupam Mittal
and [Link] weren’t just going to sit around and crib. They focused
on three main areas to overcome these hurdles: (a) product design, (b)
strategic partnerships to obtain traffic and © breaking out of an only
digital shell.
Product Design: matchmaking through a traditional matchmaker is a
very personalized process where your parents sit down with a
matchmaker and go on and on about the kind of bride they’re looking
for. The internet however, enables businesses to provide a
standardized service at scale. So how did [Link] balance the trade-
off between personalization and selection? To begin with, [Link]
finalized the most important criteria that influence one’s choice of
partner: religion, age, education, height, work area and caste. There are
23 other filters apart from these to further streamline matches. Users
can browse any number of profiles using these filters and once you find
a profile that catches your eye, you’ll need to pay a subscription fee that
ranges between ~1200 INR per month to 3000 INR per month. To add
an extra layer of personalization, in 2014, [Link] launched
personalized plans through Select Shaadi that offers a relationship
advisor, handpicked matches and also facilitates meetings and
introductions. This service is priced at ~10,000 INR per month and
considering an average time of 6 months to obtain a match is cheaper
than the average fee of 1–1.5 lakh that’s charged by traditional
matchmakers.
While the product features mentioned above improve discovery, we
also need to talk about how [Link] verifies profiles and protects
clients against exploitation through fraudulent profiles. This wasn’t a
pressing concern when [Link] had a low user base i.e. till about
2010. However, in 2014, a woman had been cheated of ~2.5 lakhs by a
conman she met on a competing matrimonial site, BharatMatrimony.
After a prolonged legal case, in 2016, the Mumbai High Court ruled
that BharatMatrimony was not liable for fraud. [Link] In 2018,
[Link] started asking new users for their aadhar number to
further weed out fraudulent profiles. This is in addition to the
government ids that [Link] already asks for. Moreover, in a
survey, 82% women said that they are more likely to visit verified
profiles and Gaurav Rakshit, CEO of [Link] in 2018 had
recognized verified profiles as a key step in earning customer trust.
Since we’re talking about customer trust through verification, lets
quickly touch upon how [Link] maintains privacy. Now, lets dial
back to the pre [Link] era where newspaper ads was a preferred
mode of getting leads for a potential match. This scenario though,
exposed your contact information to the world, a pretty undersirable
situation for most people. On [Link], if you’re interested in a
particular profile, then you’ll need to express interest (through a
button) and only if that profile accepts your interest, will you have the
person’s contact details. A pretty neat solution to the privacy problem.
We can go on and on about the product, but a product would be useless
unless it attracts traffic. So let’s talk about how [Link] brought in
traffic through strategic partnerships. In 2002, [Link] partnered
with [Link], a leading online search engine back then to create a
tab for the matrimonial services it provided. This allowed [Link]
to attract users that visited [Link] to its website that served as a
major competitive advantage. In 2009, [Link] partnered with Star
Plus to launch Star Vivah, a reality tv show that aimed to find suitable
partners for contestants through [Link]. This helped create
awareness regarding online matrimony and the features of better
discovery offered through the portal. Moves such as this helped drive
significant traffic to matrimonial websites and in 2009, about 12
million people (48% of India’s internet users) started using
matrimonial web-services, up from 4 million, just a year back.
To further attract customers to [Link], in 2004, [Link]
launched brick and mortar shaadi centers. A family could go to these
centers and an attendant would help you register on the [Link]
portal, assit you with the services and provide printouts of suitable
profiles. This service, complemented [Link]’s larger vision, helped
increase the number of registered users on the platform and provided
the right customer experience, in line with the form of commerce
prevalent at the time.
Well, enough about the past. Let’s talk about [Link]’s future
growth prospects. Specifically, let’s look at two things: (a) network
effects that will drive organic growth and (b) acquisitions to stay
relevant in a changing market.
[Link]’s user base has closely been tied with the internet adoption
in India. As of 2019, internet adoption in India stands at 41% and is
expected to grow by 45% (~10% CAGR) by 2025, leading to an increase
in the addressable user base for [Link]’s core business.
[Link] as of now is a stable company with a registered user base
of 3.5 Crore people and an active user base of 50 lakh people. Such
companies grow through network effects. Network effects help social
networks to grow through word of mouth once the network reaches a
critical mass i.e. a minimum number of users. The company then
primarily attracts new users through word of mouth from existing
users. With respect to [Link], network effects plays out as follows:
As the number of registered users keep growing, the opportunities of
finding a better match keep’s growing, thereby attracting more people
to the site, leading to a virtuous fly wheel. In this case, you can see
similarities between Jeff Bezos’ philosophy of virtuous cycles and
Anupam Mittal’s idea of just simplifying the process of marriage.
The important thing for network effects to keep playing out is to stay
relevant. Apart from acquisitions that I’ll explain shortly, [Link]
stays relevant through a strong social media content game. In 2012,
they launched a Facebook game called Angry Brides to raise awareness
on the ills of dowry. The game featured an eight armed woman, an
avatar of goddess durga, armed with various household items that are
thrown at a man shaped character as he demands dowry. The game
was very well received and the facebook page garnered 270k followers.
In 2014, [Link] launched Shaadi Cares, as a social initiative to
spread awareness on the ills surrounding marriage such as child
marriage, domestic violence etc. Since then, [Link] has
consistently launched well placed social media campaigns such as
#NotForSale and #FastForHer that have improved the brand’s
association with social change.
Now coming back to acquisitions, while a growing internet adoption
and network effects are tailwinds for [Link]’s growth, Indians are
also going through a paradigm shift in terms of how relationships are
perceived. Casual dating was earlier frowned upon, however, it is now
seen as far more acceptable and global dating websites like Tinder,
OkCupid and Bumble as well and Indian brands such as TrulyMadly
and Aisle have capitalized on this changing ideology. Casual dating
apps are essentially matchmaking apps like [Link], though with a
very different end goal.
All the matchmaking apps ranging from Tinder to [Link], can be
placed on a spectrum with apps such as Tinder and okcupid covering
the left side of the spectrum and specializes in casual relationships,
while [Link] and BharatMatrimony cover the right side of the
spectrum with products centered around facilitating arranged
marriages. The middle portion of the spectrum is occupied by apps
such as Aisle that’s centered around high intent based dating that have
the potential to translate into love marriages. It is a middle path
between Tinder where relationships end up being too casual and don’t
end in meaningful union and BharatMatrimony where the primary
decision drivers are parents.
[Link] too is looking at capturing the potential love marriage
space and acquired the Thrill group in 2016, which owns the Apps
Frivil and Fropper. As per Anupam Mittal’s earlier ideas of making
marriage simpler, he’s looking at creating a smoother transition from
dating to marriage and is seeing these acquisitions as play towards
creating an India-centric dating app. That being said, marriages in
India are still highly skewed towards arranged marriages with 95% of
marriages in India being arranged marriages, 2% as love cum arranged
and 3% as love marriages. While these acquisitions acts as a hedge for
People Group (holding company of [Link]) against long term
changes in attitude towards relationships, the numbers don’t suggest
any deterioration for the core business.
Case Study
Product Deep Dive
Business Analysis
