Ng Jing Shen, the co-founder of Paktor, a leading dating app in Asia, talks about the business of love.
Five years ago, online dating wasn’t really a “thing”. The design was not appealing enough, some considered it creepy, and was rarely used. By 2015, it started becoming a trend. Several apps emerged, and even social media networks became dating hotspots.
In Asia, however, things worked a bit differently. Considering the relatively conservative culture in the region, dating platforms gained momentum slowly. But one thing was clear: the rising young, busy-looking-at-phone population was looking for love. Paktor was launched keeping this in mind, in June 2013. Since then, Paktor, best-known as a Tinder rival in Asia, has launched in 12 countries, including Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. It secured funding from investors like Yahoo Japan-affiliate YJ Capital and Singapore’s Vertex Ventures.
LOVE GAMES The founders of Paktor are primary school classmates —Joseph Phua and Ng Jing Shen. After completing his MBA from University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and dumped by his girlfriend of eight years, Joseph returned to Asia to start Paktor. The app, however, couldn’t handle the high volume of users and crashed. He then reached out to Jing Shen, a University of Michigan graduate, for help, who at that time was working with Amazon as a software engineer and was a part of the team that re-architected one of the world’s first cloud computing services, S3.
This story is from the December 2018 edition of Entrepreneur magazine.
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This story is from the December 2018 edition of Entrepreneur magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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