Looking to build a separate identity from its print counterpart, TimesMatri, an online matrimonial portal has re-launched itself in a brand new avtaar as SimplyMarry.com. In conversation with Dataquest's Studi Das, Times Business Solutions president R Sundar claims to simplify and offer exact matches for searches on his portal. Excerpts:

Why did you re-brand TimesMatri.com?
TimesMatri was launched when the Internet was booming and as a dominant print medium player, we did not want to lose out on our print customers. The matrimonial portal was an extension of the print version. While this certainly benefited the print medium customers (as they got their advertisements posted for free on the portal), our online business was getting stagnated, as most advertisers did not feel the need for placing their ads on the portal, since they were getting it for free. A rigorous market research followed which threw up some surprising results-firstly we were perceived to be a friendship portal as the name 'matri' implied friendship and dating in Hindi, and secondly we were believed to be very closely linked with our print counterpart, The Times of India. This prompted us to go for a re-branding exercise and we re-launched with SimplyMarry-a simple and easy to navigate portal which promises to provide exact searches.

What is the USP of the portal?
After a quiet re-launch in November, in just three months duration, we have overtaken one of the established players, BharatMatrimony, in terms of page views per month. During the last month we had 70 mn page views, approximately three million page views in a single day, which is a good start. We will address the basic requirement of any matrimonial portal user and that is to search for the right match and provide that albeit in a simple and less complicated manner. In the long run, our motive is to offer the entire package right from anyone looking for a home to classified information, and in the process build a community and have a lock-in with our customers.

What is your business model? Have you had any funding from VCs?
Even though we are in the online business, we do intend to have a healthy mix of both online and offline businesses. We are going to raise the number of offline centers from 300 to 1,000 this year itself. As far as funding from VCs is concerned, as of now we are a closely held company with the seeding coming in from the Times of India group, though in future we do intend to go for an IPO to fund future business ventures.

What are your future plans?
In less than six months from now we will be launching our services on mobile, owing to the high mobile penetration in India. We are looking to become a one-stop matrimonial portal for the whole of South Asia and at the same time benefit Indians living abroad in places like Indonesia, the Middle East, US, Canada, Singapore, etc. 'Times Swayamvar', meant for the various communities which have been discontinued as of now, will also be re-introduced soon.

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