Dating Sites For Indians In Usa Who Grew Up In India

• The online dating industry in India is worth over ₹2,394 crore ($323 million), and the country is the third-largest revenue generator, after the US and China.
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• Instead, she’ll most often find a reliable dating agency she can trust. There is a variety of such companies in India. There are also international dating websites who welcome hot Indian women living in the US, the UK, and other countries, and open to the idea of dating and marrying someone from a different culture or ethnicity.

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Some would call it an unintended consequence. Others would call it entering a global market. Most people would probably just call it dumb luck.

Along with partners Dan Osit and Kevin Owocki, Adam Sachs started a dating website called Ignighter.com in New York City in 2008. The idea was to make online dating 'safer, less awkward, and more fun.' The premise was simple: Online dating was weird, but less weird if you did it as a group. After a year of modest success in the States, the founders noticed a puzzling trend that has completely reshaped the company's business strategy: The company was becoming incredibly popular in India, where Western-style dating remains somewhat taboo. Ignighter, which organizes friends to go out in groups, solves a problem in the traditional culture. And the market there is huge: Approximately 65 percent of India's 1.1 billion people are under the age of 35.

Aisle — Dating App For Indians. Based out of Bangalore, Aisle is India’s market leader in 'high-intent' dating apps, built for Indians by Indians. Aisle connects people of Indian or South Asian origin from around the globe to build a community that believes in long-lasting relationships. It has staked its claim to the middle ground between.

So in March, Sachs is India-bound, with a one-way ticket to Delhi, where he will be setting up Ignighter's official Indian outpost. Raised in New Jersey, Sachs has never been to India before, let alone set up a business there. 'It feels like such an adventure,' he says. Sachs recently spoke with Inc.'s Eric Markowitz.

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Yes. People talk about how start-ups are a rollercoaster. For us, it feels like such an unexpected, unanticipated ride that we're on. We just never expected to be where we are when we started the company three years ago, but I think we're in a cool place.

When you started the company, whom did you envision the demographic to be?

Ourselves. When we started the company, we were 24-, 25-year-olds. We built it because we wished something like that existed.

We started to notice it in the middle of 2009.

Was there any promotion or word of mouth in India that spawned it?

Nope. The first product we ever had was a Facebook app, and at the time we noticed that people internationally were signing up. It wasn't in huge numbers, but it was not insignificant. I think that was enough to seed some of the growth that we saw in 2009.

Right now, what percentage of your users are based abroad?

About 90 percent of our users are overseas, and of that the majority are in India.

Six months ago, we sat down with Sanjeev Bikhchandan, founder of Info Edge and Naukri (one of the most popular sites in India). He said, 'You guys might not realize this, but you're in the Top 10 in terms of user growth of all websites in India. The companies in your bracket are Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, and Naukri.'

Was there ever a point where you kind of just looked at the numbers and scratched your head and wondered, like, Why is this happening?

(Laughs) Yeah, absolutely. It wasn't like one point. It was like one year of that. We were certainly intrigued, and we didn't have an answer. We made it our mission to understand why it was happening. We've gotten to a pretty good place there, but I think we're going to learn more as we open our office there and spend more time there.

I guess that raises the question, Then, what have you learned?

The universal story that we've heard is that people in our target demographic, the twentysomethings in India, are growing up in a different India than their parents. Their parents grew up in an India where arranged marriage was very much the norm, and a love marriage was rare. But their children grew up with more exposure to Western culture, through Facebook and TV, and so many of their interests about dating are starting to align with how Westerners date. But they also want to be respectful to their parents, and so being able to date with your group of friends and tell your parents, 'I'm going to go out with my friends, and we're going to meet some people' is a lot easier than saying, 'I'm going on a date.'

What do you look forward to getting out of this trip?

If you are running a dating website in New York City, you can just go to a bar and see the way people interact. But because we have so many users in India, we can't just watch people on a date to get a feel for how the culture works. We're learning a bit about dating in India through our investors and our mentors, but we want to see it firsthand. We want to live it.

So, you are a couple of guys from Jersey who have never been to India. Now, you are leaving in a few weeks to officially open your business there. Do you feel like that is, I don't know, a little strange?

(Laughs) Yeah, but I think it's a good strange. I think one day I'll look back on it and be, like, Wow, that was really cool. I would feel like more of an outsider if we hadn't surrounded ourselves with a lot of good people in India. I have a network that will welcome me.

Does it ever make you sad that your company isn't as popular here in the States?

I have buddies in the start-up world that have companies growing nicely in the city, and it's cool for them to see people they know using their products. I think there's something there that's really fun. And when we move to India, I guess we'll get to experience that, too.

I've never seriously dated an Indian guy before. I don't willingly avoid them; it's just kind of happened that way.

I'm Indian-American. My parents came to America in their 20s and had me in Long Island, New York, where I grew up. My hometown was a predominantly white, upper-middle class town, where I was one of the few brown people in my high school.

I remember my very first high school crush, whom I'd met in the drama club. Bernard* was tall and had cream-colored skin, with sea-green eyes and dirty blond hair (he was WAY out of frizzy-haired Sheena's league). Bernard and I never got together, but he ended up setting a precedent for many of the guys I found myself attracted to as I got older. 'I wanna join NASA,' he once told me while we jammed to music in his garage.

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Like Bernard, the guys I've dated have all had wild aspirations. And they were all white.

There was the music producer, the impassioned civil rights activist and so on and so forth. The white guys I dated were often encouraged to be themselves growing up. They usually had familial support to pursue their dreams.

They didn't have to deal with an added layer of pressure to go through years of schooling, against their will, with the end goal of earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, because their parents didn't come to America from a developing country with certain expectations of their children.

In the Indian-American households I've both grown up in and dropped in on, those expectations often were, 'You better make a shit-ton of money because we traveled WAY too far and gave up WAY too much for you to screw up your life.'

My one cousin just graduated from Columbia Law School. I have another who's doing a Ph.D at Columbia in International Affairs and another who's finishing up his residency in Internal Medicine. None of these instances are accidents or coincidences; they are the result of long, drawn-out conversations about what's worth pursuing and what isn't.

'What about dentistry?' my mom once asked me in our kitchen. I was 16 and we were throwing around potential career ideas for me. 'Just like your sister. You could try it out and see if it's for you.'

I briefly considered her suggestion, but knew it wasn't my style.

From what I've witnessed in the lives of friends and family friends, it isn't atypical in Indian-American culture for parents to suggest high-paying professions as viable options. In fact, we're usually encouraged to continue education after college. According to the Pew Research Center, 40.6 percent of Indian-Americans over the age of 25 have graduate or professional degrees, which makes us one of the most highly educated ethnic groups in America.

I am not a 'highly educated' person (well, not according to conventional standards, anyway. I still consider myself to be quite intelligent). And I never wanted to be; I was always the artist, the social outcast, the brown girl different from most brown guys who were on their way to pursuing a steady job and a steady income in law or medicine or business. I liked marijuana; they liked beer pong. I liked to talk about indie-pop artists; they liked to talk about which Mercedes they were saving up to buy. We had different interests and values.

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Simply put, brown guys and I had little-to-nothing in common besides our brown skin color. What would an aspiring writer and an aspiring cardiologist talk about over coffee, anyway? I tried it a few times. Most conversations fell flat.

There was this brown guy named Rohit*, the first of three Indian guys I've ever dated, whom I met in college. He was in the business school. One day, I had a beer with him while he talked my ear off about capital management and private equity. It was my fault; I asked him what he wanted to do with his life.

A clearly very smart guy, he looked at me with blank stares after he asked me about my interests. I'm a different kind of smart. I'm emotionally intelligent. I wanted to talk about my favorite piece of prose from 'Pride and Prejudice' and about why I feel sad sometimes and don't know why. But whenever I started on any of my favorite things, he would tune out.

I know my experience isn't reflective of every other Indian-American girl's experience. This isn't the year 1890 -- there are a bunch of Indian guys who are beginning to break the mold and expand into other areas like tech, editorial and even comedy (hey, Aziz Ansari!), but they are still far and few between.

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So why am I writing about any of this? Because recently, I've been accused of hating on my own culture. People call me out on social media for, uh, choosing vanilla over chocolate. They essentially accuse me of being racist against my own kind.

While I can always appreciate a passionate person with an opinion, I absolutely do not appreciate being accused of being racist against my own kind. Sometimes referred to as 'internalized racism,' it's the allegation that you believe the stereotypes that the world has created of your own kind, so you resist your own kind.

Well, I suppose I resist my own kind because of two things: all the bad dates I've been on with brown men and the fact that I'm not into my culture's idea of what a pristine Indian man 'should' be like (ie. the hedgefund guy; see above anecdote).

But I am not racist against my own kind. It's true that we all absorb stereotypes about all different races, but if I really bought into what Hollywood, some of middle America and actual racists believe all Indians to be -- nerdy doctors or otherwise 7/11 and Dunkin Donut owners with incredibly unattractive accents -- then I wouldn't have ever given any Indian guys a real chance to begin with.

Am I writing off dating Indian men forever? Absolutely not. If I met an Indian guy I could talk to, I would give him a chance. But as it stands, I've yet to meet an Indian guy who both appreciates and shares my affinity for Fiona Apple and likes to play guitar on the weekends with me while I sing. Until that happens, I'm going to keep doing what I've always done.

We live in a world where interracial dating is more widely accepted than ever before. It saddens me to see there are still people out there who can be so narrow-minded, so judgmental about the highly personal romantic decisions of others. You have no idea who I am. You have no idea where I came from.

I love my culture. But I also love Western culture. Can you give me a break? I'm just trying to find a balance between the two. And I'll tell you this: I'm certainly not the only girl who struggles with cultural identity and self-acceptance. This struggle I have is also an immigrant struggle. It's a struggle for anyone who doesn't know how much of their parents' culture they should fuse with the culture in which they were brought up. At the end of the day, each and every one of us is conditioned to think, act and feel a certain way because of the respective ways in which we were raised.

It's only human to do what you've always done. And we are all human.

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*Name has been changed.