 "Homepage of online dating app, Happn.")
French dating app, Happn, which went live in 2014 in Paris, is now turning to the Indian market for expansion. The firm is targeting one million customers by 2016 in the country.
To aid this plan, it also plans to set up an India office, which will mirror its Paris office and will work with as few employees as possible.
Happn also plans to launch a digital marketing campaign soon and, maybe, go offline as well. The company will spend $1.12 million this year to fund its expansion plan.
The dating app competes with the likes of the well-established Tinder and Truly Madly for space on the phone memory real estate but it believes that the difference in business model will help it cut away from the rest and achieve its 1 million customer goal by the end of the year.
“The app is different from the other dating apps. We don’t promise you love. There is no algorithm, we just try to connect with you with someone in your vicinity,” said Didier Rappaport, CEO and founder, Happn. If the user is at a public place, say a museum, or at a party and turns on the app they will be able to see others in the vicinity and will be able to make a connection. “The user has to hit the heart, there is no swiping right or left. If the other person discovers them and hits the heart too, they will chat,” said Rappaport. But this feature works only if the two are in a set radius.
Happn has not had an official launch in the country, but claims to have already gathered 200,000 customers through the word of mouth.
The company pays homage to the missed connection tab on Craigslist where singles post listings on the platforms if they spotted someone at a public place they wanted to meet and could not. Rappaport admits that it is a continuation of that and also that the existing apps were trying to keep connections virtual while he wanted to connect them in the real world.
But the missed connections tab picked up a lot of flak when anti-social elements and solicitation overtook the platform. “We use Facebook as our verification platform. Maybe later, we will let users sign up without connecting to their personal social media profile,” he said.
While this makes the used cases smaller, Rappaport claims that the company is adding 2 million customers every month.
Like other dating apps who had to change their strategy (while some transformed their platform, others tweaked their algorithm) when they entered India, Happn, too, is doing something against the norm by setting up a team in the country. The company has about 80 employees operating out of the Paris headquarters and has made plans to expand to 120 by the end of the year and 200 by the end of 2017 after which they will stop hiring.
Happn has raised over $20 million in two rounds of funding and reports said it was planning to raise another $30 million soon. It reportedly has 17 million users globally across 40 cities.
