Match Lab

Your partner-in-search for life partner

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Inspiration

Pakistan has one of the highest unmarried youngsters’ ratio in the world. Nevertheless, it is hard to find right partner in a society with diverse and sophisticated family, social and cultural norms. Match Lab is an attempt towards creating an ever-growing resource of people looking for marriage by making use of powerful social media website, i.e. Facebook.

What is unique about it

Match Lab is pioneer among similar social apps that is entirely accessible with Facebook and Messenger. This implies that no separate signup / download is required (both for users and moderators). With minimal infrastructure and resources, Match Lab's daily reach is consistently growing and will soon surpass its peers.

What it does

Match Lab is a platform for people who are looking for spouses for themselves or their loved ones (family and friends) in Pakistan. It helps them connect with people with similar social values and search criteria. Here is how it works,

How it works

  1. User gets started in Match Lab's messenger inbox.
  2. User receives welcome message and Match Lab's profile form.
  3. User fills and submits form in Messenger's web-view.
  4. Match Lab's admin verifies his identity on Facebook by visiting his timeline.
  5. If user's profile is approved, it is posted anonymously on Match Lab's Facebook page with a unique Id.
  6. User is sent membership approval message containing his profile id and corresponding Facebook post link.
  7. User profile is reached to hundreds of people instantly, however only members can send interest in his profile.
  8. User can now also send interest in other members' profiles.
  9. To send an interest, user clicks a unique ‘m.me’ reference link at the bottom of each profile.
  10. User is directed towards Match Lab's inbox and presented a button to send interest to that profile.
  11. User’s own profile is validated by Match Lab with the preferences of that profile.
  12. If preferences match, an interest message is sent to other user with a link to sender’s profile and a reply button.
  13. Receiver visits sender’s profile and if he finds it suitable, he replies to sender by sending back interest in his profile.
  14. Both sender and receiver are given link to each other’s Messenger inbox.
  15. Match Lab has successfully connected two families with similar interests and relevant search criteria.

How I built it (my side of story)

Match Lab (initially Rishtagram) was started on April 15, 2020 as a free service. In the beginning, I manually asked users to fill a textual form (by copy pasting) and letting me know profile numbers of their interest.

After a week or two, I started to maintain members’ data and their interests in a fully functional excel database. It helped me a lot in those initial days by matching corresponding interests, generating relevant messages and links to members’ inboxes and timelines.

Due to overwhelming response by Match Lab’s community, soon I had to look for further automation. And therefore, I locally hosted a MongoDB database with NODE.JS server and HTML forms for parsing / validating user profiles and interests. Meanwhile, I started exploring Facebook and Messenger APIs. This was the time I evaluated Match Lab’s future by designing architectural diagrams, solving engineering problems and integration with Facebook and Messenger. This all happened in matter of weeks and led towards the inception of present version of Match Lab.

After finalizing the concept, I registered matchlab.pk and hosted it on a cPanel Linux server. This time I chose MySql and NODE.JS for development of Match Lab’s backend. Starting with Messenger SDK for membership form, there had been a release every week augmenting features and integrations.

I found about this hackathon two weeks before the deadline and hence final release was made on August 30, 2020. All this was done alongside platform maintenance, moderation and user support service. There is still a lot more to work on…

Challenges I ran into

During entire development,

  1. The biggest challenge was finding a way to integrate Match Lab’s concept with existing Messenger APIs.
  2. Another challenge was to design the user experience of a conversational app, which is still unknown to Messenger platform users.
  3. Data migration from MongoDB to MySql was the biggest technical challenge.

Challenges I still face

One of the challenges is to educate the community by designing a human friendly user experience of an app that is entirely used in conversation with a bot. That too for a community having little sense of internet and apps’ usage. Further, I’ve been trying to make few partnerships in this project with people who have experience in this domain. Team formation is still the biggest challenge for me as prior to this, I’ve no such experience.

What I learned

Technically speaking, I learned NODE.JS and MongoDB development during this project.

What's next for Match Lab

Upcoming releases include

  1. Use of further Messenger / Facebook APIs and features such as One-Time Notifications, Private Replies and more.
  2. A complete admin portal integrated with Messenger APIs.
  3. Comprehensive profile search based on user queries and keywords using Messenger SDK.
  4. Match suggestions based on past experience using powerful AI algorithms.
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