While we don’t have any data on paid subscriptions of NRIs, we do have data about new profiles added in each month. Since it’s been barely two months that we are live, our data is limited to last 5 months including January. And the truth is, well, boring. The percentage on NRI profiles has been moving in a narrow range of 15-18%.  Here is the chart for the same.

Now you can tell your friends in India about Bandhan by SMS.    You can also pass a word about Bandhan by email. You get the message text that you can send to your friends. Copy-paste that text of the message in email body and send it to your friends.

Go ahead and invite your friends who you think will find this service useful.

Oh, BTW, we are now on twitter.  Follow us at @Bandhan.

Here is how easy it is. You provide your match criteria once, and then add the feed in your Reader. You will keep on getting stream of profiles right in your feed reader. It can’t get any simpler than that.

We also added capability to browse profiles based on a certain criteria. For example, if you are looking for brides with management education, you can get it in one click.

You can browse profiles by education, location, language, religion and community.  Browse the profiles of brides and grooms.

Hope you like the progress in baby steps.

Coffee cup RSS icon courtesy: FastIcon (via Smashing Magazine)

• Maheshwari
• Agarwal2Agarwal
• Jain2Jain
  

These services are targeted at Maheshwari, Agarwal and Jain communities, respectively, especially in North India.

We are also adding a service from Kerala. I hope, this will bring smile to our Malayalee friends.

• M4Marry

Together, these services have over 1,00,000 profiles. And growing.

Along with compliments, we also started receiving “hey, can you do this?” requests also.  One of the request from multiple users is being accepted. Now, you can see the sort the profiles  by recency.  The default order is the best matching results first. But many of the users are already using other services and they are interested only in the new profiles which meet their criteria. So, we offer them to order the profile list with most recent profiles appearing at the top.

Click on the link as shown below to get latest profiles.

Show Recent Screen

Trust you will find this feature useful.

What’s the need for matrimony search? Currently there are 4 major services – namely BharatMatrimony, Shaadi,  Jeevansathi & SimplyMarry – and many more niche services. Each of these services have their own strong user base.  In a recent conference call, Hitesh Oberoi, COO, Info Edge (the company which owns Jeevansathi) said,

“We (Jeevansathi) have become, a very, very strong player in the North…. Bharatmatrimony is a very, very strong player in the South because they are based on Chennai… And Shaadi is a very strong player with NRIs and in the west. So, that’s how the market has got fragmented / segmented over time.”

To rephrase it, BharatMatrimony is very popular in South India. Shaadi has dominance in Western region and overseas. Jeevansathi says they are strong in North India. SimplyMarry positions itself as “Metro-monial” service.  Similarly there are niche service catering to a specific region, language or community.

These services have a strong brand value and user base.  Users in specific regions know the suitable service for them. But, what about the users who can’t make a choice? Currently, the only way to go about is to searching at various services. That is, obviously, very cumbersome, slow and time consuming.  We help those users offering an easy way to search across all the services.

The matrimony services also stand to gain from Bandhan.  It is obvious, but worthwhile to reiterate. We don’t host any profiles. We show only a snippet of the profile in search result, just like any other search engine. That means, when user wants to know more about a profile or wants to initiate communication, they will visit destination site.

We are working on to make Bandhan more comprehensive, compelling and delightful.  Go, give it a whirl. Do let us know your feedback.

More about the company: Bandhan.com is a service from Discrete Log Technologies, Pune.  The company was founded by Shashikant Kore and Sachin Doshi. The company focuses on India-specific vertical
search opportunities.

Bandhan Team