(Credit: Photo courtesy of Paktor)
For singles in Southeast Asia, finding love online has been historically frowned upon. While our unmarried peers across the globe have found matches on OkCupid and Match.com for more than a decade, cultural norms and lingering stigmas have kept Asian dating rituals firmly in the past. Yet, the recent emergence of new developer tools, including those that reduce mobile app account details to a phone number, is facilitating more discreet access to dating platforms throughout Singapore, Taiwan and other parts of Southeast Asia. An eager market has responded, and millions of people are finding dates — and sometimes a lasting partner — as a result.
Paktor is one such popular mobile option for singles throughout the region. Since launching in 2013, we’ve helped blaze a new frontier for online dating in Southeast Asia with a network of about 15 million people, more than 5 billion swipes and the largest activity in the region by downloads and usage. We achieved this growth by deeply understanding our local customer, deploying Facebook’s Account Kit to enable mobile phone numbers as a universal login — and boosting our acquisition rate up to 90 percent.
But growth hasn’t always come easily for us, and we’ve learned important lessons that apply to other app developers about how to design a successful global product with a distinctly local focus — and maybe even shift cultural stigmas in the process.
Understanding Our Customers Instead of Chasing Competitors
As an MBA student at the University of Chicago, Paktor CEO and co-founder Joseph Phua learned the first-hand benefits of online dating. So when his family called him back to Singapore after graduation, a single Phua returned on a mission to launch an American-style mobile dating app on his home turf. His goal? Launch a successful app and maybe even find his wife.
The Paktor team soon found that successful tactics used by US and European dating apps didn’t translate to Asian societies because of our more conservative dating norms. Our approach had to be about thinking local, and Paktor started differentiating itself by tapping into our own knowledge of local culture and people. We introduced features distinctly valuable to our customer base, such as Paktor Group Chats (providing an environment to facilitate chats within a collective community) instead of the more standard one-on-one interactions. While we found ourselves in the company of several competitors upon launch, many of those apps have since folded, while we’ve managed to grow.
Data is the best way to understand what your customers want. Two or three times per month, we’ll test out different features, icons and the overall user experience. And we’ll often make surprising discoveries; for example, users would rather indicate that they like a person with a check instead of a heart, which was seen as carrying too much commitment. This simple insight resulted in a 20-30 percent uptick in activity.
Mobile Login a Key to Success
Shortly after launch, we also realized that a reluctance to expose user identity was fast becoming the biggest hurdle to user acquisition. We were losing 60 percent of all users at entry by relying on traditional social media logins, which allow people to tap into an app with their social media accounts.
Despite promises of confidentiality and other strategies to encourage acquisition, nothing seemed to stick. For us, the driver was clear: a cultural resistance to admit to dating online was preventing people from wanting to risk exposure.
We needed a new method that would allow users to discreetly sign into the app with their phone numbers — a common denominator across the dozens of countries in our region — and we found that tool in Facebook’s Account Kit. Launched earlier this year, Account Kit is a back-end developer feature on Facebook that lets users sign up for third-party apps with their choice of a phone number or an email address. It doesn’t require a Facebook or other social media account, offering an anonymous form of access. Account Kit is also free, meaning we’ve saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, while also leading to an astounding spike in our business.
To ensure a seamless user experience without exposing user identity, we complemented the adoption of Account Kit with our in-house proprietary technology to weed out fake user profiles algorithmically – such as detection of abnormal user swiping. All Paktor users are also empowered to make an anonymous report on other users.
As for our founder? His Paktor experience is a testament to the success of online dating in the region. Shortly after launching the app, he met his now-wife, and they welcomed their first “Paktor” baby last year.
