Dating Tinder Case Study
Often people might think that the path for dating apps is to focus on romance and love. But that may not be the case for Singapore-based dating Tinder-like app in Asia, Paktor.
Launched in 2013 by founder Joseph Phua, Paktor (a Cantonese term for dating), is a dating app that utilizes a double-blind model. Today, Paktor have grown from 0 to 7 million users in just a short span of 3 years
Hi, everyone and welcome to another episode of the SME show where I bring on proven entrepreneur around Asia and reverse engineer their strategies and tactics to succeed. Now in this interview I’ve got a very special guest. His name is Joseph Phua and he is the co-founder of Paktor. Now some of the points that you will learn in this interview are, firstly …show more content…
Was absolutely nothing. It was Greenfield.
Marcus: Not even Tinder?
Joseph: None. Tinder wasn’t here at that point. There were another dating app and products like OKCupid. OKCupid was slightly more enthusiast for my case then you have other foreign applications like Russian brides and more. Nothing specific tailored for the local scene and I'm extremely local. There wasn't anything that suited what I was looking for.
Marcus: I see. So you came back to Singapore and you saw there's a problem. You then realize that, hey a lot of the things that you stumbled upon in US could actually be built and there's actually an addressable market in Southeast Asia. So from that, you build up the entire application yourself.
Could you walk me through the story of you know how you started the whole thing?
Joseph: Well I did a couple lines of code while I was in secondary school in Singapore but beyond that I know nothing about code and so the way I went about doing this was actually paying somebody else to do it for me.
Marcus: How much did you pay?
Joseph: …show more content…
The plan was to never to build a team to serve but to spend a little bit of money to build a better product.
Marcus: So, once you have the 15,000 people on board and I would assume a lot of people would be frustrated because they want to meet new people like yourself but they were probably struggling with the app. How do you react to that?
Joseph: Panic and lost because I don't know what to do and. After all, my background is nothing about technology. I did few years in sales and operations, spend some time doing consulting, banking and well none of that had anything to do with technology.
So I didn't know what to do at upon a time but what I did right at that point in time was to call and identify people around me who could help me. So the first person I called was my primary school classmate, Jazz who is my co-founder now.
Jazz spent three years at Amazon where he was a software engineer at AWST. So that's a cloud computing team and he is one of the smartest guys I know and so I called him for help. He came in and looked at what I had and he was like, “I'm not touching
Launched in 2013 by founder Joseph Phua, Paktor (a Cantonese term for dating), is a dating app that utilizes a double-blind model. Today, Paktor have grown from 0 to 7 million users in just a short span of 3 years
Hi, everyone and welcome to another episode of the SME show where I bring on proven entrepreneur around Asia and reverse engineer their strategies and tactics to succeed. Now in this interview I’ve got a very special guest. His name is Joseph Phua and he is the co-founder of Paktor. Now some of the points that you will learn in this interview are, firstly …show more content…
Was absolutely nothing. It was Greenfield.
Marcus: Not even Tinder?
Joseph: None. Tinder wasn’t here at that point. There were another dating app and products like OKCupid. OKCupid was slightly more enthusiast for my case then you have other foreign applications like Russian brides and more. Nothing specific tailored for the local scene and I'm extremely local. There wasn't anything that suited what I was looking for.
Marcus: I see. So you came back to Singapore and you saw there's a problem. You then realize that, hey a lot of the things that you stumbled upon in US could actually be built and there's actually an addressable market in Southeast Asia. So from that, you build up the entire application yourself.
Could you walk me through the story of you know how you started the whole thing?
Joseph: Well I did a couple lines of code while I was in secondary school in Singapore but beyond that I know nothing about code and so the way I went about doing this was actually paying somebody else to do it for me.
Marcus: How much did you pay?
Joseph: …show more content…
The plan was to never to build a team to serve but to spend a little bit of money to build a better product.
Marcus: So, once you have the 15,000 people on board and I would assume a lot of people would be frustrated because they want to meet new people like yourself but they were probably struggling with the app. How do you react to that?
Joseph: Panic and lost because I don't know what to do and. After all, my background is nothing about technology. I did few years in sales and operations, spend some time doing consulting, banking and well none of that had anything to do with technology.
So I didn't know what to do at upon a time but what I did right at that point in time was to call and identify people around me who could help me. So the first person I called was my primary school classmate, Jazz who is my co-founder now.
Jazz spent three years at Amazon where he was a software engineer at AWST. So that's a cloud computing team and he is one of the smartest guys I know and so I called him for help. He came in and looked at what I had and he was like, “I'm not touching