Though homosexuality was legalised, it was very difficult to discover LGBTQ people. Sunali and her partner at that time, Aditi Gupta started looking at various online platforms. The duo realised that most of them are just hook-up apps. They decided to develop an app that is exclusively for the LGBTQ community. In May, Sunali and Aditi (who has exited the company now) launched an app called As You Are (AYA). “AYA is a social networking platform built specifically, especially, for Indian LGBTQ+ people. At AYA, we understand the unique dating challenges that Indian lesbian, bi, gay, trans, and queer people face — lack of opportunity, lack of privacy, lack of acceptance, harassment, social judgment. Our platform uses carefully designed features and processes to provides users a safe space, a place where they can meet other people, their kind of people, easily, discreetly, and confidently. We believe declaring sexual orientation and/or gender identity is an individual’s personal choice. We verify, we match, but it is the users who decide what level of detail they want to share, with whom, and when,” Sunali tells DT Next.

Unlike other dating apps, AYA doesn’t give much value to the profile pictures. “We give more weightage to the profile of the person than the picture. During the research for creating the app, we realised that there are a lot of fake profiles on other dating platforms. So we have made sure to have a safe verification process. People have to fill in basic details like gender, orientation, an email address and a phone number. They also have to upload a selfie that will be verified by the team. We verify as many people as possible from our end before they start interacting with others on the app. By this, we can easily filter out a lot of junk profiles. Though our verification process takes 24 hours, people are happy to wait. Many who are using the app have lauded us for the app’s unique factors,” she adds.

The team is also planning to go regional with the app in the future. “If the content is shown in the regional language, more people from the community will be able to use the app. In the past few months, we have got decent downloads and we hope the numbers will increase in the coming days,” says Sunali.