NSRCEL Startups: GoGaga

Though Indian culture is shifting slightly away from matrimonial matchmaking with youngsters preferring to find a match on their own, hook-up apps from the west have still not caught up yet as a replacement owing to a cultural mismatch. Both the solutions show profiles of strangers with just different filters (i.e., caste or distance), with very low chance that there could be a relevant connect. Other troubles with these apps are the prevalence of fake profiles, bots, married men, expectation mismatch, untrustworthy profile information, among others. 

In an effort to solve these problems and to provide a platform for meaningful relationships, we rely on the classical method of matchmaking used by societies for ages, connections via introduction/referrals.   

At GoGaga, we show users only friends of friends and make the common friend vouch for this connection, to establish trust. GoGaga gives a fun-twist to dating where committed ones can also download and match two single friends. The method is also very relatable to real-life and eliminates fake profiles/bots by the way of the concept itself.

About the Founders

Meet Kanodia, an IIT-D alumni with an MBA from Europe, who after 7 years of London-based Investment Banking experience covering technology firms globally, he has moved back to India to be full-time committed towards GoGaga. 

Neha Kanodia is the developer of GoGaga, with 14+ years of experience leading global teams for organizations including Oracle and SoftwareAG. I left my job at Goldman Sachs and became a mom-preneur, building a safe dating solution.

Achievements (till date) 

– Incubated by Facebook under its prestigious Pilot FbStart program (May-19 onwards)

– Incubated by IIM Bangalore‘s reputed NSRCEL (Jan-19 onwards)

– Final shortlist by YCombinator for their Winter 2018 batch (Dec-18)

– Recognized by Government of India, DIPP as a startup (Oct-18)

GoGaga was launched in April 2018 on Android and in August 2018, on iOS. We have more than 40,000 users and youngsters are already loving our product. 

NSRCEL’s contributions

Right from the time we entered NSRCEL’s pre-incubation through Launchpad, we have been mentored by the team that has helped us streamline the business model effectively. Some of the key areas where we have developed GoGaga through the advice and guidance received, thanks to NSRCEL are:

• Carving a relevant business model: when we came here, we were a free-to-use app. During our time here, we have started a freemium model
• Understanding how to price our product: the mentors helped us price the product through various A/B experimenting methodology
• Mentoring helped us make our ideas and pitch to investors sharp
• The NSRCEL team helped us understand the importance of talking to customers and taking regular feedback from them and continuously improve the product
• Storytelling workshop from Prof. Malavika has immensely improved our communication to the users
• Interacting with the fellow startups solves half of the problems, where other teams assist on the beautiful “give-and-take” community that exists
• The workshops and lectures organized by the team are insightful and helps young startups understand the nitty-gritties from their counterparts who have gone through a similar process

We would like to thank NSRCEL and the admin team to help us smoothen up the process of running a challenging startup.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.gogaga

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gogaga-dating/id1398192775?ls=1&mt=8