What do you call it when your crush likes you back? A successful Elop match!
Love makes the world go round, and finding love around is world is easy thanks to dating sites. But what about those who have already found love? For them there’s Elop, an app that links you to your crush.
How Elop was born
Akash Mathew and Jim George wanted to solve a daily life problem through an app, and they found the one most commonly faced in college was falling in love. Expressing your feelings, awkward moments, rejections and the whole ball game isn’t exactly everybody’s cup of tea. The campus start-up took off their operations as a web app in 2014 February and developed a mobile app in September, where one could add crush anonymously to a list. Matches are made if your crush adds you to his/her list.
The app works only on the user’s community, that is, friends and friends of friends. So it filters out any unwanted activity and keeps the users safe.
But what if your crush isn’t a user of Elop?
Smartly, users can communicate to their crushes through their e-mail or SMS. And once they’re on Elop, communication is nothing less than romantic. The founders asked their peers what would be the best way to express their feelings, and songs were a winner! Music renders an emotional sentiment, one harnessed by Elop to break from the non-personal monotony of random chats. What’s better, the app lets you know if your crush liked the song you sent.
Passion and work don’t always come together, but a little bit of love is what binds it all together
“What I leaned is to fall in love. Fall in love with your dreams and your special ones. Because in love, you never give up”
Elop doesn’t just work for love, it’s built on love. A family has been made out of the 10 member team, with each member working on the areas they really love. The team began as a tech service provider, CIED Labs, which rendered services like automation, web development, and branding. Their services were booming and raking in 3 lakhs in a weeks’ time, but they found their true calling in creating Elop; as they say money can’t buy love.
It was a huge risk for them to make a sudden switch from services to a product. Next came materializing their vision, creating a product with a team with no prior experience in that sector. “The risks have paid us well, we now have a team of self-moulded experts!” says Akash.
As any entrepreneur is slapped with the challenges of funding, the team at CIED Labs had to stop their services to keep Elop afloat. By pinching their college security deposits and accepting the helping hands of family they were able to make a 70 lakh investment.
Today the app’s match percentage is 10%. That means for every 100 users who creates their crush-list in Elop, 10 of them find matches. That’s higher than matrimonial sites, and a couple even heard wedding bells through Elop!
“Sometimes you have to stick to your guts and numbers that your app is presently doing and think about how to scale it. Ignore the tough moments and just keep your eyes on the prize”.
Future plans for Elop
The song you sent your crush was a big plus but what if you could surprise your love interest with a gift in the real world? Bridging the gap between the virtual and real world love experience, in a month’s time Elop will allow you to send real gifts, cards, flowers and chocolates to your crush through the app! Their target is to tap into the mutli billion dollar Valentine’s Day business among their growing patronage of 30,000 users.
