Yugam Jethi

IIM Ahmedabad alumnus. CEO @pinnayaofficial. Building the anti-dating app for urban India. Writing about trust, product, and what data says about love in India.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@robertlasagna1 Gentle pushback. Put the same people in a context with real introductions and some accountability and the behaviour shifts quickly. What looks like bad people is usually a system paying for attention instead of outcomes, and people optimise for whatever they are scored on.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@Xgenetics_007 A game nobody knows how to play usually means the rules were written for someone else. The scoring here rewards time spent in the app, not people actually matched, so the confusion is the design working correctly rather than failing.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@Srishreads There is real signal in that instinct. A mutual who vouches for you carries information no profile can show: how you behave over time, whether you follow through. They also stake a little of their own reputation on the intro, which is why warm introductions beat cold ones.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@RyanColeHq In investing, you pay for due diligence before the trade, never after. Matchmaking applies that same logic to dating: someone verifies the person before the introduction, which is why it earns roughly 5x swipe economics per user in India.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@kiara7829 That question is the whole game once you are past your twenties. Attraction is easy to verify in five minutes. Whether someone will actually show up for the life you are building takes real vetting, and a swipe never gives you enough time to do that before you decide.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@warikoo Dating is the purest version of this. Every profile becomes another option to compare against the last one, so the emotional read never forms. A real introduction works the other way. One person, full context, room to feel something before you compare it to anything else.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

30 days of writing. The full thesis in one place.

Dating in urban India is broken in ways the industry refuses to name.

The market is not maturing. It is misallocated. Users grow from 82 million toward 124 million while revenue stays flat near $400 million and per-user value falls by a third. The category leaders have lost 50 to 75% of their market value since 2021. The one segment still adding revenue, serious-intent matchmaking, earns five times swipe economics per user and receives a fraction of the investment. Every public number points the same direction: the category is collapsing slowly, and the product that ends the collapse has not been built.

The economic root cause is simple. Subscription dating monetizes the search, so the search must never end. Every metric the industry celebrates, engagement, daily actives, time in app, is a proxy for users not finding what they came for. The business model is at war with the user's goal, and the business model has been winning for twenty years.

The cultural root cause is just as simple. The products serving Indian professionals were built for a different country. They do not model the family in the room. They do not respect the clock, which is real and gendered. They do not acknowledge that matrimony and dating run in parallel on the same phone. And they were built for attention in a market that is starving for trust: 83% of women reporting harassment, 26% of users reporting bots, and, from our own research, 60% of women reporting below-average experiences driven substantially by the fear of being publicly identified. The supply side of this marketplace is hiding. Everything else is downstream of that.

Pinnaya is the inverse, built as a company and not a feature list. Verification as the foundation: government ID, face match, liveness, invisible and continuous. Visibility on her terms: profiles hidden until trust is earned through real conversation. Depth over volume: active matches capped so attention concentrates. Economics aligned with the user: we monetize guidance and the relationship journey, and we win when someone finds their person and leaves.

We are live and building in the open. Two provisional patents filed. 50+ structured interviews shaping every decision. No inflated numbers, ever, because a trust product that lies about its metrics has already failed.

If we are right, the next decade of this category looks nothing like the last one: smaller pools, higher trust, better endings, and companies that are proud of their churn.

We are betting the decade on it.

I write the build here daily. The pinned threads below carry the data behind every claim. Pinnaya is in the bio. The replies are open, and the pushback is the point.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

Day 30. I started writing here to build an audience.

The audience came. The surprise was what else did: sharper conviction, better arguments, and the discipline of being checkable in public.

Writing in public is the cheapest way to find out what you actually believe.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@anishmoonka That gap says it all. Paying users shrinking while revenue holds up means the model is squeezing whoever is left, not fixing why people are leaving. Matchmaking is the only dating segment still projected to add revenue every year, paid for an outcome, not time spent swiping.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@Uldouz Matches the forecast data. Matchmaking is the only dating segment still projected to add revenue every year this decade, while swipe volume bleeds paying users. Apps were built to optimize time spent, not the moment someone stops needing the app. That gap is the real story here.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

Tonight 9 PM IST: the manifesto.

Everything this month of writing has been building toward, in one post. Why the category is collapsing, why India is different, and exactly what we are doing about it.

It becomes the pinned post. It is the one to share.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@heyyynoahh This is the actual case for matchmaking over swiping. You do not vet for spark in a photo, you vet for values and follow through first, then let the spark happen once two people already know the other is worth the time.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@itz_sura01 That split only happens because the product being sold is visibility, not outcomes. Charge for a real introduction instead of a boost and the incentive changes. You are paying for a good match, not a better spot in someone else's feed.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@cherryoatmeal Mostly you don't, by swiping more. Two people choosing each other over everyone else usually takes someone who already knows you both doing the filtering first. That is closer to what a matchmaker does than what an app does.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@WSJ This is not really about LinkedIn. It is verified detail beating an anonymous swipe. A real job title and headshot earn more trust than a bio built to be liked. Matchmaking runs on the same principle, real information first, chemistry second.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

Closing the month with the numbers that matter most, one last time.

83% of Indian women report harassment on dating apps.
26% of users report talking to bots.
60% of women in our own research reported below-average experiences, and named fear of being publicly identified as a core driver.

None of these are engagement problems. All of them are trust problems.

The category spent twenty years optimizing attention in a market that was starving for confidence. That misdiagnosis is the entire opportunity.

Everything we build starts from these three numbers.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

Question I now get weekly from non-Indian followers: how different is Indian dating, really?

Completely. The family is in the room. The clock is real and gendered. Matrimony and dating run in parallel on the same phone. Trust is the scarce asset, not attention.

India is not a slower version of the Western market. It is a different market that has been measured with borrowed instruments for twenty years.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@Mr_Husky1 That is swipe culture's real legacy. It trained people to expect exclusivity's benefits while keeping every option open. Choosing someone only works if it actually costs you the other profiles you did not pick.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@pallnandi This is the real gap. Availability got optimized, accountability did not. Feeling safe again does not come from another match, it comes from someone verifying intent before you ever see a profile.

[Yugam Jethi @YugamJethi]

@jsharanarthy That return to community is the real story. The old filters screened for values, even through blunt tools like caste and religion. The new ones need to do the same job, shared intent and character, not just a shared love of hiking.