Paktor is The App That’s Changing Dating In Southeast Asia

Dating services have had a historically difficult time cracking the Southeast Asian market. While the stigma of online dating has disappeared in the West, it remains alive and well in much of the East. Cultural norms have largely kept the region’s dating rituals in the past.

Things may finally be ready to change. According Forbes, an increase in developer tools has brought more discreet dating options to Southeast Asia, and that may be the key to cracking the market.

Paktor is one of the apps leading the charge into the sector. Since launching in 2013, the company has built a network of around 15 million users and more than 5 billion swipes, making it the largest dating app in the region by both downloads and usage.

Getting there wasn’t easy. Paktor co-founder Joseph Phua had to transform what he’d learned from US and European dating apps into strategies that suited Southeast Asia’s more conservative dating norms. The Paktor team focused on tapping into their own knowledge of local culture and people, and used their insights to launch features carefully targeted to their customer base.

One such feature is Group Chats. Group Chats allows users to talk within a collective community, rather than in the one-on-one interactions more commonly seen from dating services. Other features - like the left or right swipe - borrow from the app’s Western predecessors.

Ng Jing Shen, co-founder and CTO, says it was this localized thinking that drove Paktor to succeed.

“Data is the best way to understand what your customers want,” he wrote for Forbes. “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.”

He also credits allowing users to sign up with phone numbers, rather than social media profiles, as key to Paktor’s success. A phone number better preserves user anonymity, and that confidentiality is essential in a region where there’s still shame and secrecy attached to online dating.

This carefully considered, locally focused approach has proved highly potent. Paktor raised $32.5 million in new funding in October 2016. At the time, Phua told TechCrunch the company had recently hit net profitability and had yet to touch the $10 million round that it closed over the summer.

“Previously, we raised funding to survive [but] this round will enable us to stretch our legs,” Phua explained.

If Paktor’s first three years are anything to go by, that stretching could be groundbreaking.