Why women leave matrimony apps: what six months on Shaadi.com taught us

Rishta exists because of a spreadsheet. Before a line of it was built, our founder spent six months on a paid Shaadi.com plan doing what any 25-year-old Sikh man in Auckland would do: searching, honestly and patiently, for someone to marry. He kept notes. The notes became the product.

The test

Filters: Sikh, no caste bar, women aged 22 to 27, in Australia, New Zealand and Punjab. Six months on a Pro plan. Here is what the numbers looked like.

• Female profiles matching those filters across all three regions: about 1,050.
• Of those, appearing active: roughly half.
• Based in Australia: about 100. Based in New Zealand: 12, of whom four or five were active.
• Male profiles matching the mirror-image search, seen from a control account set up as a woman: more than 10,000.
• Observed ratio: roughly ten men for every woman.
• Result of six months of paid outreach: zero conversations that went anywhere.

The control account is the part that stayed with him. Set up as a woman with a fresh number and an ID, it was live in minutes, no questions asked, and it received a steady stream of interest from around the world within days. Verification on these platforms is theatre. Some meaningful share of those 1,050 women were not women.

The ratio is not demographic

Australia’s 2021 census counted about 112,000 Sikh men and 97,000 Sikh women, a ratio of roughly 1.15 to 1. New Zealand’s numbers are similar. That is nowhere near ten to one. The gap between what the census says and what the platforms show is not a shortage of women. It is women who exist, are eligible, are looking, and have decided these platforms are not for them.

So we asked them why. Through sisters, cousins, friends’ wives and the women in our own families, we had conversations with Sikh women in their twenties in Melbourne and Auckland. Nobody was surveyed; they were asked what happened when they tried, and what would have to be different. The answers were remarkably consistent.

What they said

“Everyone can see me.” The single biggest reason. A public profile with a photo, in a community where your cousin, your colleague and the family from the gurdwara are all on the same platform, is not a matrimonial tool, it is an announcement. Several had joined and deleted within a week for exactly this reason. Several more had never joined because of it.

“Three hundred messages.” The second reason. The first week’s inbox was described, more than once, as “unreadable”. Not unpleasant, just impossible: hundreds of interests, most from men who had clearly not read the profile, many from countries they had no intention of moving to. Nobody can process that, so they stopped opening the app.

“Nobody’s actually helping.” The platforms had replaced the person who used to make introductions with a search box, and the women noticed. They wanted someone to filter, to make the approach, and to carry a “no” back without anyone losing face. What they wanted, in other words, was a vichola, and the apps had fired her.

“Free means crippled.” On the big platforms a free woman’s profile could not search, could not read messages and could not see contact details. Free was a shop window. Several said they would happily use a platform that was genuinely free for women and had assumed no such thing existed.

“I’d join if a woman I knew ran it.” Said in some form by most of them. The trust was in a person, not a brand.

What we changed because of it

Every one of those became a decision.

• Women join free, permanently, with nothing held back. Not a tier. A rule.
• Photos are private by default and shown to a man only after she approves him specifically. Not a paid feature, not a toggle to find.
• Women decide who can find them: every verified man, only men who match their preferences, or nobody but their matchmaker. The default is preferences-only, and there are no public profile pages for anyone.
• Every man shows government ID and passes a liveness check before he can search. The fake profile that took our founder minutes to make is not possible here.
• Every interest a man sends must carry a note he wrote. Nobody can bulk-send, so her inbox is real people who meant it.
• No phone number or email is ever displayed on a profile, at any tier. She shares hers if and when she wants to.
• There is a matchmaker: a woman from the community, paid properly, bound by a confidentiality agreement, and never from your own city, so she will not run into you at a wedding. Free for women.

The honest caveat

None of this is proven yet at scale. We are opening Melbourne and Auckland first and we will publish real numbers as they come, including the ratio, because it is the only number in this market that matters and nobody else prints it. If it turns out women still don’t come, we will have learned something true. If they do, then a reply here will mean something, which is the only thing anyone was ever paying for.