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If you have landed here, you might be looking for dating app development. Well, you are in the right place. To help you out, we have made a complete guide. A few years back going on a date with a stranger you met online was a strange concept. In the last decade, online dating has upturned these old-fashioned attitudes and become one of the most fruitful mobile app categories. 

Looking at the popularity of dating apps like Tinder, you will realize its acceptance levels in the people. The unique concept behind all the popular dating apps is its easy to use interface, and high security promised. 

Why invest in dating app development?

The dating mobile app market is growing at a rapid pace and millennials are playing a key part in this pitch. 

Let us have a look at some interesting figures that will help you out in your analysis.

• In the age group of 18-29 yrs, 60% of the people have used a dating website or app once in their lifetime
• In the US, 20% of the couples met through online dating apps
• Since the year 2013, the usage of online dating sites and apps by young adults has nearly tripled 
• Daily 1.6 billion swipes take place on Tinder
• $1.8 billion per year is the revenue accumulated by dating apps across the globe 
• According to Statista, in between 2020-24, the dating services are estimated to grow at an annual CAGR of 10.8%, with a projected market volume of$9911million by 2024.

Check Out The Types of Dating Apps

Things To Consider Before Creating A Dating App

If you have already made up your mind and planned about how to create a dating app, then what are you waiting for? The creation of dating apps has some specific features. Before you start the development process of the dating app, answer the following questions:

How is your app different from other dating apps?

Discover the most important characteristics of your app, otherwise, you will have another clone of an unremarkable dating service. Your USP (unique selling point) is what makes you different from others.

Who is your target audience?

Are you creating a dating app for a certain age group or who share the same interests? So decide who will be your target audience and note that it’s not a good idea to have either too narrow or too wide an audience.

How will you monetize the service?

Most of the existing dating apps charge money for improving a user’s dating profile. There are few other options also like at Badoo one pays to find out who liked the photo, at Tinder you have to pay for the expansion of the geographic coverage, etc. Come up with your own authentic idea when developing your dating app.

How and where will you get the user base for your app? 

The chief concern of dating apps is the user base. Imagine you have created a fantastic functional app, the user enters the app, but there are no profiles for his city. So be ready with your plan to solve this issue.

Add new profiles to your dating app

1. Start with a small audience

Start with a small region or a small niche. You should have at least 1000 profiles ready while app launch.

2. Partnership with the existing service

 Many dating services offer special partner programs. They provide a profile base and work on profit sharing model. You can negotiate with them on the basis of your requirements. 

3. Think of viral mechanics

Dating is not the app that a user generally promotes with his friends and family. So, to promote your dating app, think of something that the users wish to talk about with their friends. Not only users but make people, as well as media, talk about you. For example, one dating app used a great strategy. 

The app promoted the idea to use a smart matching algorithm. Like “look at the map to see who is searching for a partner” and it was a WOW function that was in the media spotlight. Media attention was attracted to a service devoted to sexually explicit relationships, termed and promoted as “Pure”. Service positioning “only for sex” was also much talked about.

4. Rapidly receive traffic from advertising

Advertising your app to promote will be a bit expensive but it can buy tons of traffic within a short period of time. It will help to get numerous profiles quite fast. You can advertise your new dating app at:  

• social media advertising;
• app advertising on GooglePlay and AppleStore;
• contextual advertising;
• banner advertising

5. User base burning-out

It is very important to understand the concept of ‘critical user base’. To ensure the system’s functioning, you need a certain number of active users. The chore is not to allow the user to meet all the users of the opposite sex. There should be some new connections – profiles that were not viewed earlier by the user. When there is no critical user base, the base burns out. Or in other words, you have already known everybody or met them, and eventually, you lose interest in using the app service.

This is the main reason why dating services are not very popular in small towns. As, for a small town there are only a few user profiles, so app users meet each other very prompt and then stop using the app, as they don’t get any new options. 

Additional paid functional features!

Few specialized paid facilities can be provided to the app users who buy VIP-account. These additional features mostly include the following:

1. Increase in popularity- where the user profile will be advertised in the first place, and user photos will be highlighted. 
2. Invisibility – where the user can hide age or location, or visit other profiles without being seen or online presence of the can be veiled.
3. No advertisements.
4. Ability to go back on your decision as to the last swipe.
5. Virtual gifts.

How do dating apps make money?

1. Subscriptions: The user subscribes to the app by paying a fee for using the app for a certain period of time.
2. Selling Advertisements: Apps make money by selling space for advertisements to multiple companies.
3. In-app purchases: Users buy in-app charm, smileys, etc.
4. e-Commerce Integration: The e-commerce software is synced with the dating application and selling goods at dating sites, that couples tend to gift each other is a great e-commerce idea to generate revenue.
5. Access to Premium plans: In this method the user pays a fee to unlock additional features.

Dating apps typically make revenue by offering supplementary features in their premium plans. Here are few examples. Restraining the access to few features in free versions and only allowing premium users to enjoy it. It is a motivational factor to make users pay for the premium plans. 

How to monetize your dating app? 

1. Love is just around the corner – Geolocation lets people find singles in the vicinity. 
2. Matchmaking – your way: You can add any algorithms you like in your dating app. 
3. Encourage romance – Status update, chatting, comments, and video messages make it easy for those first interactions. 
4. Play it safe – Providing advanced privacy setting features and letting users block unwanted attention and as a result, people will feel safe while using your app increasing user engagement.

Bottom Line

While developing the dating app one needs to take many things into account like identifying the target group and studying competitors, designing matching algorithms, security, and chatting features. And, also it is a costly affair if one wants a high-quality app. But with good monetization and promotional strategies, those investments will pay off. So, if you are looking for app development services, you can contact us. Q

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