Know the vibes of your audience and speak their language; there’s no one-size-fits-all.
That’s A, B, C of marketing and that’s what local dating apps are banking on to drive loyalty among promiscuous consumers.
Apps such as Aisle’s Arike (Malayalam), Anbe (Tamil), Neene (Kannada) and Neetho (Telegu) and Kolkata-based Flutrr, which have cropped up in a last couple of years, are trying to connect singles through their native tongue and are tugging on their sense of community to forge a meaningful connection.
Take Flutrr, which mostly caters to singles in tier II and III markets and supports languages such as English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada. The app’s monthly active users have risen to more than 6 lakh now, compared to about 1.4 lakh a year ago. Similarly, Aisle’s Malayalam dating app Arike sees nearly twice the daily active user growth recorded by Aisle’s primary dating app. About 40% of the growth in monthly active users among all of Aisle’s apps comes from its vernacular ones.
The user growth is evident, albeit on a low base, unlike global dating apps such as Bumble, whose slide has pushed its stock nearly 90% lower from its listing price of $70.31 in 2021 to trade around $8.32 currently. Even Tinder, Match Group’s largest dating app, has seen a slump in paying user base and therefore revenue and in the third quarter of this year.
Despite this slow fatigue with the swipe culture, there’s no denying that it was the global dating apps that helped in mainstreaming casual partnerships in the country. But the thing is, in tier II and III markets, where local culture deems casual dating a no-no, the youth are no longer willing to settle for ‘arranged’ marriages, notes Flutrr’s co-founder and CEO Kaushik Banerjee.
Vernacular dating apps are filing that gap— and are connecting individuals who are looking for meaningful partnerships within their communities. India is the second-largest English speaking market in the world, but only 9.8% Indians speak English, reminds Banerjee. The app, co-founded in late 2021 by Banerjee and his son Anirban Banerjee, is backed by investors such as Kiani Ventures, Chennai Angels, The Times of India and actor Huma Quresi, among others. With growing content consumption on the internet, the aspirations of small town youths are becoming similar to their counterparts in large cities. They are looking to find romantic partners online but the language barrier remains, he adds.
Aisle’s business head Chandni Gaglani adds that when looking to date seriously, youngsters in these communities look for familiarity more than anything else. So language is one of the biggest factors and our app has prompts or conversation starters that are very specific to a community and nudges users to start a conversation in their native language, says Gaglani, who heads Aisle after the exit of founder Able Joseph following its acquisition by InfoEdge.
She adds that the adoption of these apps are also a reflection of the growing independence among youngsters who are taking their own decisions in matters such as academics and career choice. While Aisle’s vernacular apps still cater to a largely urban and overseas audience of a specific community, Flutrr has tapped the markets beyond metro cities.
To match the spending ability of young users in these markets, Flutrr works on a micro-transaction model, unlike most dating apps that mainly have periodic subscriptions. For anywhere between `25 and `50, users can boost their profile visibility, and send their matches AI-generated songs and poetry. In contrast, Aisle’s apps have weekly or monthly or subscriptions of upto 6 months, where plans start at `199 and goes up to `2,999.
The micro-transaction strategy has resulted in 18% paying users for Flutrr, Banerjee said, compared to the industry average of 2-3%. He explained that Flutrr’s user acquisition cost is `7 because of the lack of competitive apps in the vernacular dating space and large addressable market of around
500 million youth, while that of English-language dating apps are as high as `150 because of the competition and a relatively small total addressable market.