hi4hi Matrimony: Google surprise

Yesterday we registered our 1000th customer. And today I got this from Google:

"This is a notification that your application, hi4hi Matrimony, with package ID com.hi4hi.mobile, has been removed from the Google Play Store.

REASON FOR REMOVAL: Violation of the paid and free provision of the Content Policy and section 3.3 of the Developer Distribution Agreement.

All violations are tracked. Serious or repeated violations of any nature will result in the termination of your developer account, and investigation and possible termination of related Google accounts. If your account is terminated, payments will cease and Google may recover the proceeds of any past sales and/or the cost of any associated fees (such as chargebacks and transaction fees) from you.

If your developer account is still in good standing, you may revise and upload a policy compliant version of your application as a new package name. Before uploading any new applications, please review the Developer Distribution Agreement and Content Policy.

If you feel we have made this determination in error, you can visit the Google Play Help Center article for additional information regarding this removal.

The Google Play Team"

With shaadi.com and jeevansathi.com apps still in the app store, and charging money for membership, I find it completely uncalled for. 

Anyways, we will be putting up the APK on the website so that users can directly download and install the app. We are also working on browser only version of the app so that we don't have to go through app store.  As as bonus, we will be available on all mobile phones that have browser. 

Hang on for a week. 

Rohit Karlupia, 

Founder Hi4Hi Matrimony Services 

hi4hi Matrimony: Introducing Circles

Problem:  hi4hi is not expensive to use. We only charge Rs 2 per invite and Rs 2 per minute for calls. Some of the users take advantage of this and send random invites to users. This wastes time of our users who check the profile and may even talk to these users only to find out that they are not serious at all.

Solution:  We are launching a new feature called circles. You get to choose your own circle. We will have different circles at different prices. User at lower circles will NOT be able to view or invite users at higher circles. Users at higher circles will have the option of viewing/inviting users in lower circles.

Circle approximates your social status and seriousness. It is designed to save you time by avoiding spam and finding people who value your time. You can only upgrade your circle. It is a one way street, so upgrade your circle only when you need to. There are two reasons why you should upgrade your circle. One if you are getting too many invites and it is impractical to even check out so many profiles or talk to so many people. The second reason you would want to upgrade your circle is if your invites are being declined or ignored. You will still be able to send invites to all the people you are currently sending invites to but coming from a higher circle, your invites are less likely to be declined or ignored. It goes without saying that profiles with photos and relevant about me are much more likely to be invited and accepted. 

hi4hi Matrimony - v2 and v3

The number one problem we faced with v1 was that users where not swiping to checkout new profiles. Some of them felt that we show one recommended profile which they could invite or leave. So we added the next and back buttons in addition to swipe so that users at least know that they can browse profiles.

Auto login and notifications had some bugs which were also fixed as part of v2.

v3 has only one change. Explicit user consent to verify their mobile number. Even though we have written all about the app in the google play listing and also in our FAQ's, many of the users were not aware of this fact. Some of them created opposite sex profiles just to check, some used login names which they didn't liked afterwards and some got scared when they saw call going to a number and some surprised when they saw call coming from a number. Hopefully this would ensure that only genuine users install and register with the app which is good for everyone.

I want to take this opportunity to say thanks to the users who trusted us with their phone numbers and are actively using the app and also want to apologize to those who got scared because we didn't communicated how we work clearly and early enough to these users. It is our mistake. We are sorry.  We have rectified it. We would love to see you again.

Rohit Karlupia
Founder Hi4Hi Matrimony Services
Download hi4hi Matrimony App from Google Play

hi4hi Matrimony

hi4hi Matrimony  is an android application for matrimony which allows users to talk to each other without sharing their phone numbers. Profile has just one photograph and maximum 256 characters of description, so that users can get started immediately. Application doesn't asks for Real Name or email address or facebook account. We believe that our best bet to privacy is to work with as little information as possible.

The core activity of the application is looking at user profiles and INVITING them. These invites can be ACCEPTED or DECLINED. No calls can be made, unless the other users accepts the invite. If an invite is accepted, two users have a DATE. This is a floating DATE over the phone which can be done anytime both users are available. Each DATE allows users to call each other ONCE. For talking again, users have to INVITE again.

Users can set their status to Busy or Available. Users with Busy status cannot be called. This is useful in case users want to talk only after office hours or say over weekend.

This video does a better job at explaining the concept.

Have a look and give us your feedback.

Download from Google Play

Concept Rounding Off

Number are nice. They round off nicely. But concepts are a different ball game all together. When concepts are rounded off, the results are spread all over the spectrum. The idea is that we understand new things in terms of things we already understand.  So no matter how accurately we define a new thing, the listener is going to do a concept rounding off to the nearest thing they understand. The implication is that being accurate might land you much far off in the listeners mind and being inaccurate  might help you reach close enough to the desired conceptual position. When I say being inaccurate, I mean choosing those concepts to describe your new concepts which are likely to be present in listeners mind and not some ideal abstract picture.

 Marketing people understood this all the time. Big data now universally means a Hardoop Cluster. Cloud is client server, though SaaS also meant the same. SOA, ESB and now finally people understand it as web apis. So Apigee became API Gateway. I had hard time explaining people why we wrote HTTP proxy at Apigee because everyone thought apache acts as a good reverse proxy.  It is even hard to explain that I work on high performance systems but I never do thread pool size tuning. LVS is a proxy but you don't see it opening any ports with netstat. Saving cream, shampoo, handwash and soap are all soaps.
 
I am tempted to call it Uncertainty Principle. The more accurately you describe something, less likely it is to be understood.