Contents:
If they have a date and they need a company, we can assist them. We go beyond the site and the mobile app. People want more events.
We felt that there is a need for Filipinos to learn how to date. We noticed that many men do not know how to initiate a conversation, while women are too shy to talk. So we want to put them in an event where they will get used to having a conversation. The reason why dating has become more acceptable is because dating apps are coming in.
However, we primarily target women. Why focus on women?
A lot of people are asking me about women empowerment. But it is more of people having more options, apart from deciding on something because you are receiving pressures from your friends or the society. There is this one girl whom we interviewed about dating apps. She told us that she hates it when people are calling her flirt.
She explained that she dates because it builds up her standards in choosing the right person. To be honest, Peekawoo is not too different from other dating apps in terms of user interface. The only difference is that it is run and owned by female founders. A guy founder is usually not concerned with hookup stories. But in Peekawoo, we are more concerned about those stories, because if our site receives a lot of those, it means that it is becoming less friendly for females.
We are also concerned about the parents of our users and the people who are living with them, since we have a family-centric culture.
I came from a Catholic family with relatives who are serving in the church, so when I started Peekawoo, I ensured that it is an app which my parents can be proud of. It is another proud moment for my parents. Even if Peekawoo is a dating app, it is appreciated by the Catholic community. With the Valentine season upon us, what is your advice to those who are looking for love through dating apps? Sometimes, I feel as a Filipino that we are too focused on our group. In the case of Peekawoo, it began with Valenice Balace.
Peekawoo is an all-female startup from the Philippines , and has a more wholesome and friendly approach to create a female-friendly dating app for Filipino women. Balace and her company seem to be excelling at just that, having recently surpassed 15, users. The users on there would chat with them briefly and then suddenly make a bold move, such as invite themselves over to their place. You also have to set your birthday, gender and email address on your profile first to access the meet page. Until we resolve the issues, subscribers need not log in to access ST Digital articles.
In August of , the then year-old entrepreneur got the idea of a dating site with the dream of making it the premiere one in the Philippines and a competitive one in the global marketplace. Balace and her best friends were single at the time and found the traditional options for dating lacking.
They would go out to popular nightspots, such as Skye, as well as try out special-interest organizations, such as Junior Chamber International. These proved inefficient for meeting and getting to know new people, much less potential partners. The users on there would chat with them briefly and then suddenly make a bold move, such as invite themselves over to their place. After all, young professionals, like her — she was a project manager for websites and applications — were busy.
Balace wanted to bridge the extremes of real-world dating and online dating. Dating for people like her ought to be low-pressure, as is the case with meeting people in groups or in bars, and efficient, as is the case with meeting people through dating websites. The startup that eventually came to be known as Peekawoo sought to achieve this middle ground.
The fifty to eighty beta users she invited from her immediate social circle all raved about the site.
Of course, having some friends praise your beta site is quite different from having thousands of people using it to meet complete strangers. This would present an especially daunting task because her target demographic — single millennials aged 19 to 29 who wanted to meet new people — grew up with the Internet. In other words, they would be unforgiving of a website that was not up to snuff. To get to the fully functional site that it is now, Balace and her co-founding team — she was soon joined by her younger sister, Belle Balace, as well as Mara Ang — had to overcome many of the challenges startups typically face.
One of the earliest issues related to funding. Balace initially self-funded the project out of her own monthly paycheck. I was at the age where I was earning enough and I had to decide to either invest or to save. I chose invest, of course, but it was not that easy.
Part of the problem was that Balace felt that much of her money was going to waste. With a developer charging her upwards of 60k and a designer charging her upwards of 40k, you would expect efficient work.
But it took them more than six months to get the first version of the site up and running, spurring Balace to wonder whether she should keep up with the piling costs or just stop. Luckily, she soon got funded by Kickstart, but the challenges did not end there.
She first had to make the difficult decision to quit her full-time job and pursue Peekawoo full-time. This was not easy, given that she loved her job and that it represented a path into a secure, well-paid future. Peekawoo, on the other hand, was at this point still more or less a dream on a piece of paper. With the support of Kickstart, she took the leap into entrepreneurship.
This began my sleepless nights thinking of my company, our employees, their futures, our users, their wants, and the endless trial-and-error it takes to figure these things out. Despite these stresses, Balace still makes it a point to encourage other young Filipinos to consider the path of entrepreneurship, such as when she drops by her alma mater - De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde - to speak to students. This is one of her most passionate advocacies, given that she hails from a family of entrepreneurs - no one in her family holds a single corporate job.
As an entrepreneur in a startup, even one backed by an incubator like Globe and getting significant traction in the form of new users, you are always facing new challenges, and sometimes, even old ones.