Marrily, started an year ago, is a mobile app based match finding platform for educated, working and independent singles. Mastering the rudiments of social trust and intelligent matching, it helps singles meet beseemed prospects and take the matter to the next level once both the candidates are absolutely certain.
Present Scenario Of Match Making
Online matchmaking is estimated to be a INR 1000 crore business. Parents and guardians who are 55+ years online users make a significant share of customers. With people marrying late, an average shift of 4 years is observed over the last decade. Role of parents is diminishing and singles are taking matters into their own hands.
But the market potential cannot be judged as the singles segment is completely different from the parents segment. 25-35 year olds using mobile internet segment is 6 times the size of 55+ years online user segment indicating that the difference is going to diverge more with time.
Marrily’s Value Proposition
What users look for in any match finding platform are genuine prospects with simply no creepy factor. While most of the other competitors like Shadi.com and Bharatmatrimony.com work on the same conventional pattern, Marrily works with a bohemian approach. Fetching its inspiration from the Co-founder Sourabh Verma’s own experience on online matrimony sites of “strangers acting strange”, Marrily aims to make partner search significantly easier and reliable for singles by ensuring zero fake and intelligent matching.
With all its potential users already active on social media, it uses their social graph for authentication and for knowing a person better. Marrily is currently working on using social graph for personality mapping which will provide a great deal of insight about the person. Further, it uses learning algorithms for knowing partner preferences better with time and serving more relevant matches in future.
It offers an experience that is starkly different from that on matrimony sites – no unwanted solicitation by members or their family, no fakes, no bombardment of irrelevant profiles, no unwanted interference and no ignominy of rejection, eliminating all the plausible reasons for not using a match making platform.
Marrily’s Merry Journey So Far
Marrily raised its initial seed from Kunal Sinha of Healthcaremagic with which they built an MVP prototype for Android. They launched a private beta on Playstore in September 2015. Initially their tech was outsourced but soon they decided to bring the tech in house.
The next three months Marrily spent in breaking and building everything based on market feedback as well as their vision for the product. All the team members turned into product managers, designers and coders during that period and the result was the 2nd MVP which was a completely new platform. They launched it on Play store on 21st Feb 2016.
Related Read: How Can You Fund Your Minimum Viable Product ?
Marrily enjoys an edge over its competitors because of its user acquisition and marketing. Their user acquisition costs are almost 50% less than that of competitors and others who have been targeting similar segment. The credit for the same goes to its continuous experimentation. With a limited marketing budget, Marrily was able to acquire over 5k users within 1.5 months.
Post that the team realized that they can use content as an acquisition channel and since then the costs of acquisition has come down even more. Marrily has successfully crossed the 10k user milestone by the end of August with over 70% of these installs coming from its content and social channels.
Here is quick look at their marketing strategy to become the mother of all apps
Marrily is comprised of 4 co-founders Sourabh Verma, Ajay Pandey, Harsh Vardhan and Sukamal Pegu and 1 support staff for administration and operations. It has also taken in interns for technology and social media.
Not So Merry Aspects Of Marrily
The most critical challenge for Marrily is technology. When the team brought tech back into Marrily, none of them had any expertise in Android. It was a steep learning curve to build it from scratch and put out a product that works seamlessly.
From December to February, the team was huddled inside a small room reading up on Android programming with a trifling social life. All these efforts did not go in vain. The team finally put up a complete working product out in the market and with over 50% users coming back to the app the very next day.
Marrily Moments
Slaying each and every hurdle coming across Marrily’s path, the biggest realization that the team went through was not accepting STATUS QUO. Bringing the tech in house instead of outsourcing was the biggest turning point in Marrily’s journey until now.
The team also learned leveraging content channels. They had to rely on content channels to build awareness. What started out as an experiment soon turned out to be one of their most effective channels for user acquisition.
Funding And Future Expectations
Marrily is actively looking for funding and can come up with something big by the end of September. The coming months of 2016 are really crucial for Marrily. The team intends to solve multiple issues- Fund raising, product launching and partnership.
The team is also investing a considerable amount of time in beefing up the technology and product teams. Marketing will also announce some key partnerships in the coming months.