Born and brought up in the beautiful city of Jaipur, Shruti left home at the age of 18 for education. After working in companies like IBM, Pepsico, Wipro, ICICI Bank she decided to start-up BondForever - an exclusive relationship platform with her brother-in-law, Sagar. Apart from that she teaches at Udaan India Foundation, an NGO that provides free education to those who are less privileged. We talk to her about her start-up and her journey -
What made you start-up bond forever?
Working in the corporate world, I realized that I was not adding any value to my personal growth nor to the society at large. Hence I decided that I should do something of my own and not just be a brick in the wall. Entrepreneurship holds a lot of promise in terms of professional and mental growth because of the varied experiences that you come across.
Coming to why I chose the matrimonial space, I have a large group of friends and have always played a cupid for them anyway. Over multiple conversations with my friends on the issues they were facing, I realized that there is a very big gap in this market where there are lot of eligible single females and males who are looking for a long term relationship, but are lost in the gamut of current platforms that exist in the market, which tend to commoditize people. They are just enabling people to have short term flings, which is not what the urbane working educated people are looking for. Eventually nothing works and people end up relying on their parent’s networks or friends for introductions.
How is Bondforever different from other dating apps?
We are an exclusively urban network, allowing only educated, and working professionals in Delhi NCR, Mumbai-Pune and Bangalore (Our plans are to expand to Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai soon)
Bondforever proposition is, let us do the main heavy lifting work of searching the right partners. There is no user self searching on the platform. Users don’t have to do anything. As a woman, I have realised that what we really want is to be directly connected to just a few quality prospects. That’s it. Numbers are irrelevant. Correctness is the key. Need to make sure that the users connected are in the same league and also that they would have a good mental frequency. They just sign up and periodically they are introduced to other awesome people like themselves. They can directly start chatting or exchange numbers and take it to any other medium if they are comfortable.
We connect matches only when we think they can bond well. The mutual introduction is done once/ twice a week, depending on the profile and their preferences. We prefer sending matches that have mutual friends. 65% of all matches sent till-date have common friends on Facebook, the platform we use for sign ups.
All the other apps in the relationship space want the user to spend more time on their system searching, swiping, etc. Our thinking and approach is bang opposite to this. We know that most working professionals truly have limited free time. They want to use it efficiently, talking to only the relevant and genuine matches. We think that swiping takes away the integrity of the intent and forces everyone come across as shallow. Choosing to want to try a serious relationship with someone is a complex decision.
Privacy is another hugely important issue. In our case we send a mutual match each week. So the profiles are mutually shared. You know EXACTLY the people who you are matched with you and who saw your profile.
One tip for young women professionals to balance life and work.
I believe that if you are very passionate about doing something, it doesn’t really feel like work at all. In fact, that is what makes the entire journey a lot more fun. I take care of my start-up, volunteer at an NGO and being a married woman, take care of my family as well. This isn’t possible if your heart and soul is not into what you do.
How do you see bond forever growing in the next 3 years?
We wish to make Bondforever change the ecosystem of matrimony in India. Women who wish to marry should have an efficient and trustworthy platform to find their soul mates. We wish to become that platform.