It Takes Two To Twango

“Twango is basically a Question-Answer based relationship platform, inspired by the famous 36 Questions that make you fall in Love for singles looking for life partners. Think of it as Quora for relationships.”

Sagar Dewan of Twango dishes on the app.

Why did you decide to make Twango?

So basically in 2012, I broke up with my girlfriend and at that time I was working full time at ITC Limited. That was when I tried a lot of dating applications in the market but found an integral part that was missing in most of them. I found them to be very superficial and focused on quantity over quality. I was not meeting people who were on the same wave length as me, you know those people you can really click with.

So my cofounders Suraj Pratap Singh and Minnie Jain, and I started working on Twango in November 2015 and launched Twango in April 2016.

What’s special about Twango?

Twango is very different than even its global competitors. Most of the dating apps in India are exactly like Tinder and are basically Tinder clones with the same Like/Dislike feature and almost the same offering. We were very clear from the start about not wanting to imitate Tinder.

Twango is basically a Question-Answer based relationship platform, inspired by the famous 36 Questions that make you fall in Love for singles looking for life partners. Think of it as Quora for relationships.

How did you manage to fund this idea?

We are currently speaking to a few investors. Up to now we have put in our savings.

What are/what will be your monetization paths?

We have in-app currency called Twangz that we use for monetization. We are seeing a lot of traction with Twangz. A lot of users are using up and replenishing their Twangz quite frequently.

Tell us how the business has grown so far

It’s growing steadily I would say. We work on improving the product every single day. We have over 3000 users using our application and a decent retention rate. [Remember Twango only launched in April, 2016, and is at a nascent stage]

What marketing strategies and plans are in place to grow the business?

We do a host of things in ranging from content marketing at Facebook, Instagram and emails to a hosting offline events for singles in the 20-25 age group. We try to keep these interesting here. So far we have had events like a cocktail making workshop, wine tastings and even puppy's day out. [Cue the ‘awwww’s from the female readers.]

What is the market size and opportunity here

Online dating globally is a 6 billion dollar market and India has just started to experience online dating. We expect the Indian dating market to be more than 600 million dollars in the next 5 years and a lot of migration to the dating market from the matrimony players.

Any challenges faced setting up? Anything unique to your situation?

Biggest challenge is dating being stigmatized hence word of mouth was never so easy for us as people are shy to talk about their dating lives.

Share with us the best and worst memories while running the business

The best memory was when we had our first transaction, we were so happy to know we were on the right track.

Worst memory is being discouraged by a few people from pursuing this idea which according to them was a bad career choice.