One of the newest and most unique niche dating app concepts is an app called Fairytrail. Self-described as “Location independent dating for digital nomads and travelers”, the app is designed to help people find friends and romantic interests who are interested in short adventures or who might be looking to travel the world together. Today, our Matt Seymour took some time to talk with Taige Zhang, the founder of Fairytrail. The two discussed the growth of the app, what makes it different, some of the struggles and wins the new app has experienced, and what users can expect in the future.
Here’s the interview in its entirety now. Also, if you’re interested, Fairytrail has a free digital nomads community on Facebook and the app can be found online here.
Full FairyTrail Interview Transcript
Matt Seymour:
Hi everybody, this is Matt from Healthy Framework. Today I’m very excited to be joined by Taige Zhang, founder of Fairytrail. Taige, thank you so much for joining.
Taige Zhang:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Matt Seymour:
Absolutely. Well, let’s jump right into it. I’m wondering if you can tell me what separates Fairytrail from the rest of the dating apps that are out there?
Taige Zhang:
I think the key difference is really the quality of the users. I often get feedback saying that members are extremely impressed by the people that they meet on Fairytrail. Most of our users are super into traveling, so they have tons of crazy stories. Sometimes I’m just browsing profiles and it’s just incredible, users have been doing crazy stuff, like some things that are so adventurous that you wouldn’t believe, like going to a silent retreat for seven days or being chased up a tree by a rhino, just incredible stories. So it’s really the people.
In terms of the app itself, it’s unique in that we are geared towards people that love travel as well as digital nomads. So a lot of people, I was talking to a user today and she was saying how she was chatting with a guy and he was very straightforward, he was like, “I want to find someone to travel the world with.” I was like, “Oh, that’s actually one of our selling points,” so I wasn’t super surprised, but she was like, “That’s so exact,” and she was using it mostly just to make friends and meet other travelers and see how it goes. I love doing user research and it seems like people use the app for different reasons. So I think that’s a key differentiator, just the amount of people we have on our app which have very interesting lives with people. We have very good vetting system that keeps our community safe and friendly.
And I think beyond the people, I would say it’s really our interface. We have the ability for people to show their character using a fairytale avatar, so you can choose a character from a well-known fairytale such as Cinderella or Mulan or Peter Pan or Beast to showcase how you identify and your personality. So I think those are really special. So I would say those are the two biggest differentiators.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, no, I love that. And I think you hit on it quite a bit there, but just to reiterate if somebody’s unsure, how would you describe the ideal customer that the app’s designed for?
Taige Zhang:
I think the ideal customers are people that love to travel, and mostly remote. So the beauty of this app is if you’re not in the same city, it doesn’t matter, because if you work remotely, it’s pretty easy to be together. That’s why most long distance dating apps don’t work, because if you’re in New York and you match with someone in LA it is very hard to have a long distance relationship, and especially if you’re just getting to know each other, so it doesn’t work very well. But on Fairytrail, since most of our users, vast majority, are remote or have the aspirations to be remote, it’s quite easy. We had quite a few successful couples that I’ve talked to. One couple, one person was in Germany, another person was in Venezuela, and they were able to make it work. We had another couple, one was from D.C., the other was from Ohio. So I think that’s pretty interesting. Long distance matching actually works in this case because all you need is to buy a flight and you can be together for however long you want to be.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, that’s a great thing about remote work and the ability to pick up and, well, work from anywhere remotely, so that’s great. So switching gears a little bit, we’ve heard one of the most challenging things when starting a new dating app is getting new members. How’s your team finding success here and what have some of those challenges been as you’ve worked?
Taige Zhang:
Yeah, I think the good thing we have going for us is having a loving, supporting relationship is such a strong human need that there’s a lot of demand. So we have that going for us, which is great. The difficulty is, how do we get our app discovered by people? And so far, we’re almost at 50K users right now, and we haven’t really done any marketing, I think we spent 500 bucks on ads, which is nothing. So in terms of how we’ve been trying to grow is we did some outreach to bloggers, which has been pretty successful. Besides that, we’ve been getting a lot of inbound press. So we got featured on The Verge and Digital Trends, PC Mag, I think even Budget Traveler or Fodors, so that’s very helpful, getting our names out there. And I would ask users how they found out about us and one user wrote in the survey saying he found us through a Spanish travel book, which I have no idea why we were mentioned in the Spanish travel book, but it’s pretty much been all organic. It is very tricky because we haven’t really figured out a main source of user acquisition, so I think that’s what we need to focus on for the next while.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Taige Zhang:
Get to that big scale.
Matt Seymour:
And those are some amazing, some great coverage you’ve had, PC Mag and some others in terms of the pickup there, so that’s phenomenal. And free press is solid press, right? Overall?
Taige Zhang:
Yeah. Well, the funny thing is we actually had even bigger publications reach out to us, and then we got dropped once they found out how many users we had, which is tricky because I think we have to get big before they want to cover us. The big ones, like Forbes and Business Insider, those ones care a lot about size, and I think for us, we’re not there yet. I think when they reached out, we were only at 10K users, so we were even smaller, but I think they were looking for something like 300K or half a million or something like that. But we’ll get there. We haven’t really done anything special, and the times we did reach out to journalists, we haven’t heard back, so it’s been mostly just organic. You just do a good job and luckily they’ve been reaching out to us.
Matt Seymour:
Oh, great. Really glad to hear that for you. Switching gears yet again here is what would you say is one area that you feel like FairyTrail could be doing a better job on?
Taige Zhang:
I think we can be doing a much better in terms of marketing. Because I come from a product management background, I’ve been building product my whole career at various companies, Fairytrail is a very product centric company and I think we need to do more marketing. And I’m learning some marketing as well as we have a marketing person now on board who is definitely a lot better at marketing than I am, so I think that area is going to improve. And with more marketing, we’ll have more users, which means a more vibrant community and a better experience for our users. Without even influencing the product at all, without making any changes to the product, we’ll have a much better experience for users.
Matt Seymour:
Oh, that’s excellent. And glad to hear that you’ve hired somebody for marketing. I think when you and I first started discussing things a few weeks ago over email, you were in the process of that hire, so it’s good to see you guys growing, not only in terms of the users, but headcount as well. That’s amazing.
Taige Zhang:
Yeah. She’s super new, so I’m very excited to see how things go and hopefully it’ll be a really big impact for us.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah. No, that’s great. So all the buzz for the last, geez, almost a year now it feels like at this point, if not more than a year, has been AI, and AI technology, is Fairytrail using AI tech at all, or do you have plans to use it in the future?
Taige Zhang:
Yeah, I think AI is very valuable for larger companies. I think for us, we don’t have such a huge data set at this point. So there’s a few areas where AI can be useful, one is when it comes to recommendations, another is facilitating conversations and helping people meet in person. And I think for us, we’re such a young company, it’s a bit tricky for us to leverage AI to be super beneficial. That said, it is a tool that maybe we can think about leveraging depending on what challenges we have and what users want. So it’s a bit early right now for us to leverage AI, but I definitely think there’s a lot of potential.
Matt Seymour:
That’s good, and it makes sense as you guys ramp up, you can keep a pulse on it, see what others are doing, and see how it can help you solve future potential roadblocks or just things that come as you guys grow. And sticking along those same lines, looking dating industry as a whole, so not just FairyTrail, would you say are there any concerns for the dating industry when it comes to AI technology?
Taige Zhang:
So what I feel about the dating space is there hasn’t been a lot of innovation because, well, first of all, I think there’s only a few players out there, big players and they dominate the market, so that’s not a lot of competition, and so they’re pretty much stagnating on their product. That said, there’s so much demand, people really do need the product. Even though dating apps don’t work very well and aren’t such a nice experience, they are still quite profitable and successful businesses. So I think going forward, there could definitely be opportunities to disrupt the big players, I think they will come from startups. And initially, Fairytrail wasn’t a dating app, it was more of a travel matching app that solved the same problem as dating, but the logistics of it was such a humongous challenge without sufficient funding, we decided to start off as a dating app, and it’s been somewhat successful. So we’re looking to get more traction and then introduce more and more features that can actually change the market and can really improve the experience for so many more people.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, that’s great. You guys seem to be growing pretty rapidly and obviously things will scale more with time, so I’m excited to see how you continue to develop with time overall.
Taige Zhang:
Yeah, we’re excited as well.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah. Something else, at least in the dating community that I’m sure you hear a lot about, and I know we do too, are romance scams, and it’s something that we’ve seen on the rise quite a bit across the United States. How does Fairytrail combat this growing problem?
Taige Zhang:
Oh, yeah. So even with 3000 users, I was actually getting an email almost every day complaining about scammers, even with 3000 users. Every day. And it just was crazy because some of them were actually, they were sending me screenshots and it was just insane and I knew we had to do something about it. So we decided to implement an entry fee, so to use the app now costs $3, and this helped tremendously. So now, I don’t get almost any of these email complaints about scammers and fraudsters. Very rarely. Maybe, actually, I got one email, but that was saying how that person was already in a relationship and so it wasn’t a fraud scam, but more like, “Oh, this is a bad person,” email.
So we’re almost seeing none of it now, just because of that $3 entrance fee. And in terms of the fraudsters we were attracting, it didn’t make sense for them to pay an entrance fee of $3, and then our fraud vetting system would kick in so within a few days their account would be disabled, so they would’ve lost $3, so the economic incentive wasn’t there for them anymore because they couldn’t keep creating a lot of new accounts and chat with different people and scam people. So it actually works really well for us. So at this point, it isn’t a huge issue for us anymore. I’m sure as we scale, there will be more issues that pop up and when we do, we’ll have to think of creative ways to address them.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, no, and I think even the paid hurdle, so to speak, it’s a small hurdle for somebody that’s serious about wanting to date, but for scammers, to your point, they just can’t continue to pay that every time if they’re getting booted, and so I think that’s a really creative way to approach that, so props to you guys for that there.
Taige Zhang:
Yeah, it worked well and users appreciate a very safe dating environment, as well as some users have reported that they really like it because it keeps the community more sincere. Even people that are on it just for entertainment don’t use it as much and they get stuck, so the users who have paid are definitely more intentional, which creates a better experience for everyone.
Matt Seymour:
That makes total sense. So last question for you, just wanted to give you a chance, so would you say are there any misconceptions about FairyTrail that you’d like to clear up?
Taige Zhang:
I think Fairytrail has definitely evolved over time and I would say that our current positioning is Fairytrail is a dating and friends app for digital nomads and remote workers. I would say that’s probably the most accurate way to define us. I still get tons of emails from people asking me about, “Is this a friends app or is this a dating app?” And so I think the easiest way to describe it is it’s both, and people use it to meet other location independent people.
Matt Seymour:
Yeah, I like it. Well, definitely super appreciative of your time today, Taige, and for joining. And honestly, I’m hoping we can do a check-in maybe in another three or six months and just see how things are going there. But it’s exciting, I think this is an amazing app, to your point, for people looking for friends or for dating as they travel, or, to your point, even those who maybe wish to begin traveling more full-time with everything. But thank you so much for the time, definitely appreciate it, and super excited to see where the future takes you and the Fairytrail team.
Taige Zhang:
Awesome. Thanks for all the great questions and the support. We appreciate it.
Matt Seymour:
Of course. Yeah, absolutely.