Interview with a Public relations Intern at Datedosti.com

This is an interview with a friend who was working in marketing and was promoting the online dating website, Datedosti.com in the summer.

Q1. Do you know how this idea of creating a dating website came up?

Ans: Well, I don't know much about how they got the idea as I am just an intern here but I know the owners wanted to get the youth to engage in a platform that has a varied bunch of people and create it online to connect to the Indian youth, who spend most of their on the internet, or surfing or on Facebook, which basically connects them socially to everyone they know.

Q2. Can you describe your role as a PR?

Ans: A PR basically markets the idea to a targeted group of people, in this case starting from age 18. I have a huge list of men and women, some of them in college, while the others working and what  I do is basically call people up to tell them about our website and ask them to take part by creating a profile and seeing what kind of response they get, people they meet etc and then once theyve done that and I call them to get some feedback.

Q3. How many people are on your list?

Ans: In a week I talk to around 600-700 people. And I will be working for 4 months.

Q4. Do people willingly agree? What has the response been like?

Ans: Well, its very shocking to say this but most men agree easliy however, women (20-25 ages) are more reluctant to join it, mostly because they think there will be creepy men stalking them and they cant trust without meeting and make profilers would be fake. To shoot things off the ground, we have literally paid many girls 5000 rupees to just try the website and really see that we are trying to change it. as our website works in a slightly different way and needs women to be on it first.

Q5. Can you elaborate on the 'slightly different' aspects of it's design and function?

Ans: As the ratio of men to women in India is 70:30, so our website wants these 30 percent women to start the website by inviting their male and female friends. But as their is a bad reputation of online dating in the country, we need the women to be able to trust that this website is totally genuine.

Q6. But isn't this a bit biased towards the women?

Ans: Laughs. Well, thats a way to see it but the more women there are on it, the more men want to join it so it works really well, as we have chosen women from varied places doing various different things and come from different social backgrounds and to start things off, we have got the perfect start and the ratio of men and women on this site is 40:60 (really good start)!

Q7. How was your overall experience working on datedosti.com?

Ans: Well, it has been very fruitful in terms of how to create strategies when trying to develop a market that is termed 'unsafe'. So it was very challenging to talk to all the people but it was very interesting to see their reactions. It gave me a good idea of how to market a start up and get it off the ground.