Delhi-based dating app TrulyMadly is flooded with requests for plasma donors on its week-old feature update which uses its matchmaking algorithm to connect Covid patients with plasma donors near them as the country battles a more virulent coronavirus strain.
The feature, an update on its last year's initiative Corona Clusters, has seen the number of plasma requests from different parts of the country almost triple to 4,100 by Monday morning compared to 1,600 on Friday. The number of registered plasma donors has gone up from around 450 to 632 as on Monday, even as the team is tweaking its platform to improve the success rate in matching the two categories of people.
"In the next 3-4 days, we should hit the 1,000 donors-mark," TrulyMadly CEO Snehil Khanor told BusinessToday.In. In the week since they built the platform, they've had more than 20-30 people thank them for helping them find plasma donors, he said. There could be more matches, but they don't have a way to find out unless the users inform them, he said.
Soon, the scarcity of donors should also reduce, especially in Delhi-NCR, because the cases have surged in the last two weeks. When the patients recover and become eligible for donation, the acute shortage should end, he added. The platform captures donor details such as date of turning positive, date of turning negative and contact number other than basic information.
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But a cursory glance through the list shows discrepancies in donor details such as hardly any gap between the donor turning positive and negative in some cases. Khanor said this is mainly because the donors do not change the default date on the online form, and the platform is remedying this by calling up the donors themselves to fill the right details. "We have already called up almost 60-70% of all donors. Going forward, anybody who registers as a donor on the platform will get a call within 10-15 minutes for verification of the details they have entered."
The team asks donors the same questions mentioned in their online form and checks their eligibility for plasma donation based on the government guidelines. TrulyMadly, which has been downloaded more than 5 million times on Google PlayStore, recently raised $2.1 million in a pre-Series A funding round. Investors included Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma. The team is also using the dating app to redirect traffic to their plasma matching feature through a pop-up when users go through dating profiles.
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Khanor said their initiative is different from a database in that when you submit a request, it will show you some matching donors much like a dating app. The underlying philosophy of matching a male and female profile on TrulyMadly is used to match a donor and patient profile here, he added. Those interested in donating plasma or looking for donors on TrulyMadly's platform may go to https://coronaclusters.in/plasma
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