Bridging the Gap: How Flutrr is Redefining Dating for Tier 2 and Tier 3 Cities

Despite being the second largest English-speaking country in the world, only about 9.8% of Indians speak English So about 90% of Indians don't speak English. Kaushik Banerjee, Co-founder and CEO of flutrr added, “Additionally, 82 per cent of Google searches in India are in the vernacular language, and India has one of the youngest populations in the world.”

Intending to fill this gap, Banerjee supported his son Anirban Banerjee’s idea of building a vernacular-first dating app, focused on Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, called flutrr.

While India is the fifth fastest-growing online dating market in the world, national and international players in this sector have primarily focused on only Tier 1 Indian cities with a considerable English-speaking population and high disposable income, he highlighted. The smaller towns and cities took favourably to flutrr.

Flutrr now boasts over a million downloads and has facilitated over 18 lakh matches.

HerZindagi dives deep to understand how the app is catering to the evolving dating landscape of Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

This is our series ‘Business of Love’, where we dig deep into businesses carving a niche in the romance and relationship space in India.

Rising Aspirations of Tier 2 and Tier 3 Cities

Kaushik highlights that with cheap data and affordable smartphone prices, the youth in small towns consume a large amount of content online. “India is the largest video consumption market in the world. It is five times bigger than China. So, the aspirations of even the small-town youth, become similar to those of large city kids, and they also want to find romantic partners online.”

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However, since they aren’t fluent in English, they hesitate to use the available apps in the market.

Co-founded in December 2021 flutrr seeks to revolutionize online dating by catering to the Tier 2
and Tier 3 markets of India. The app is used most in the Hindi heartland, in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Haryana.

The app supports 6 Indian languages, enabling young Indians to forge meaningful relationships rooted in shared linguistic, traditional, and cultural interests.

Bridging the Gap Between Flings and Arranged Marriages

Kaushik explains how he and his team did a bit of digging around in the landscape of apps built for relationships in the market. “We found that on one end of the spectrum, there was Tinder and Bumble, which had become synonymous with casual dating and hookups. On the other end you had shaadi.com and other matrimonial apps, which parents basically use to help with arranged marriages,” he said.

With rising aspirations, the youth in smaller towns do not want arranged marriages any longer. At the same time, they aren’t welcoming to the idea of casual dating or hookups, as it's a taboo to them. “So, when we advertise, we call ourselves a relationships and romance app, because that is what the youth in the small towns really want. They want to find a long-term, stable romantic relationship,” he highlighted.

One of the pillars on which flutrr is built is helping these youth find partners in their mother tongue, and the second is helping facilitate long-term stable relationships.

Prioritising Safety and Privacy, Especially for Women

Kaushik highlights a story, where a girl from Jhansi wrote to them saying that her cousin saw her on the app, and went and reported it to her parents, which led to a lot of trouble for her.

Given the Indian societal context, the team then focused on building stricter safety and privacy measures on the app. A feature called “block known contacts”, which when switched on hides their profiles from contacts of their phone books, helped eliminate privacy concerns, especially for women in small towns.

Another girl from a small town in Madhya Pradesh wrote to them saying that their town was so small, that a boy could actually track her down to her house, using the location she had put. So the team incorporated a ‘ghost’ mode option, which shows a broad city like ‘Meerut’ or so, without revealing the location details of the user.

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The app also doesn’t let users take screenshots. Another ‘clean chat’ option, when clicked, helps erase chats from both devices.

“If we have to give freedom to small-town women to choose their partners, we have to do it in a safe and private environment,” said Kaushik.

Vision for the Future

Flutrr recently launched fii - flutrr interactive intelligence – a feature that helps create an AI Avataar, which simultaneously chats with thousands of profiles and then recommends 3-5 profiles with the most potential and the highest degree of compatibility. This feature combines Psychometric tools, NLP and Gen AI.

“Our vision is to create a romance ecosystem for the youth of Bharat,” he said. “This is where you go from online, to offline to the metaverse, where one can have virtual dates.”