Interview with Ashish Agarwal | DermaMatrimony.com
I hope this can inspire you to become a successful entrepreneur too! Why is it important to hear the story of a successful entrepreneur?
Having the vision to become an entrepreneur is great. Making it happen is another story!
In that frame, I had the pleasure to interview Ashish Agarwal, the founder of DermaMatrimony.
1. Please introduce yourself to us?
I am Ashish Agarwal, a working engineering graduate, based out at Delhi-NCR. I am dealing with psoriasis, a chronic autoimmune skin condition for the last 13 years.
2. What is DermaMatrimony.com about?
DermaMatrimony.com is a matrimonial matchmaking website for people with chronic skin conditions, including Vitiligo, Psoriasis, Albinism, Burn, Scar and other skin challenges to find their life-partners. With the help of this website, we aim to solve the marriage woes of people with skin conditions so that they can rise above the “skin” thing and live a more fulfilling and satisfying life. It’s an enterprise with a social cause and determined to bring long term positive changes in the lives of people with skin conditions and their families.
Note: People without any skin challenge can also join DermaMatrimony.com and search for a life-partner if they understand the non-harmful, life-long nature of the skin conditions and have no issue with that.
3. How did you come up with the idea of DermaMatrimony.com?
Chronic skin challenges, including vitiligo and psoriasis, are non-communicable, non-fatal and non-painful in nature. Apart from affecting the appearance of a person, they don’t impose any serious consequences as such. But, the lack of social awareness and acceptance bring a significant amount of stigma and mental trauma because everyone can notice and pinpoint the “imperfect” skin. The non-curable nature of these chronic skin conditions makes it further worse.
Being a person with psoriasis for more than a decade, I have the firsthand experience of all these troubles.
Although this social apathy can affect almost every aspect of a person, ranging from education, career and social life, the negative impact on marriage prospects hurts the most.
Often, these “innocent” skin conditions overshadow all the personality traits and professional competencies of a person to squeeze down the marriage prospects. Surrendering to the feeling of insecurity developing out of frequent rejections and delay in marriage, people make undesirable compromises in choosing their life-partners.
This emotional struggle doesn’t end with marriage but can escalate steeply if the spouse and the in-laws are not supportive enough to accept the long term challenges of these skin conditions. Their immature behaviour can make a person over conscious about physical appearance to adversely affect the quality of life. Many times, adjusting to the new life after marriage increases the stress level to trigger spreading of the skin condition as stress is the number culprit for all autoimmune health issues including vitiligo and psoriasis.
In light of all these long-term marital woes, many of the prospective brides and grooms with chronic skin conditions prefer to marry someone in the same boat that is dealing with similar skin conditions. It makes an instant connection between them and they rise above the fear of judgment to be extremely comfortable in their skin. The parents also support this decision and accept the spouse of their ward without any prejudice.
4. What is your source of Motivation?
I am running a blog (http://www.psoriasisselfmanagement.com/) where I share my psoriasis management strategies and experiences. Apart from that, I am an admin of a couple of facebook groups and pages that provide useful info to people with psoriasis and vitiligo. In the process of doing all this, I have been able to communicate with numerous people and almost all the men and women in marriageable age have the same questions. How will we get married and how my future partners and in-laws will reach to the skin challenge? Also, I have been connected to a few people who got divorced due to their skin challenges. So, all these obvious worries and troubles have prompted me to start this initiative.
5. What is it that makes this matrimonial site different from others?
Considering the low prevalence of chronic skin conditions, neither of the existing matrimonial websites have separate divisions for people with skin challenges. It makes it quite a tough task to find someone among thousands of marching profiles. Moreover, many of the users hesitate to mention about their skin condition in profile bio fearing rejections. It’s understandable because when you have the feeling that none of the matching profiles here has any skin challenge, so you also tend to hide your imperfection otherwise it will dry down your chances.
In short, people with chronic skin conditions feel like a neglected minority in the regular matrimonial sites. On the contrary, Dermamatrimony.com allows them to feel completely comfortable in their skin and explore all their chances to find the ideal match.
6. How easy is it to use this website?
For a matrimonial website to succeed, it should be easy to use and should give utmost priority to user’s security and privacy. Any person with a basic knowledge of English and the internet can easily register on DermaMatromony.com. Apart from the candidate, parents or siblings can also create a profile on behalf of their ward.
As far as security and privacy are concerned, the user can choose to hide phone number and photo so that it will be visible to the other party only after acceptance of the interest. In short, the user has full control over their account activities.
7. What comes first to you, money or emotions?
DermaMatrimony.com is not a business model. It can never be, so because a project targets only 1-2% of the total population doesn’t look attractive from a hardcore business point of view. So, our obvious target is to provide a safe, comfortable and trustworthy matchmaking platform to people with skin conditions so that they can discover their life-partner without making unwanted compromises.
However, running a full-fledged matrimony site and continuously improving it require funds, so we do take membership fee from the users in exchange of premium services to keep going.
Note: It is completely free to register and use the website. However, to avail premium services, it required to upgrade by paying a membership fee.
8. Have you been planning to make DermaMatrimony.com a bigger site? How much investment would you need?
In these 15 months of the website launch, we have crossed 3000 registered members with 20 odd success stories. So, we are making gradual but smooth progress and we hope to touch 6000 registered users milestone by March 2020 when DermaMatrimony.com will be 2 years old.
DermaMatrimony.com is not a commercial project, so we are not seeking investors for fundraising. It has been a self-financed project and we plan to keep it the same way.
9. How is your brand ambassador Mrs Ekta Oswal Nahar contributing towards DermaMatrimony.com?
Mrs Ekta Oswal Nahar, the gorgeous lady featuring on the home page of DermaMatrimony.com with her husband, Rakesh has also faced such troubles. Her relatives were pressurizing her parents to marry her off to boys who were barely high school pass or with poor financial fitness just because of her vitiligo. Also, some people were demanding heavy dowry to marry her. Ekta and Rakesh, both have vitiligo lesions on their skin and are happily married to each other. They are supporting DermaMatrimony.com as they believe that it’s to solve marriage difficulties for people with vitiligo and other skin conditions. They have happily allowed us to use their photograph for all our promotional activities. We are highly indebted to them for this act of kindness and compassion.
10. Tell me about an accomplishment you are most proud of?
DermaMatrimony.com has helped more than 20 couples to get married so far. It is really a wonderful feeling to us that our project is bringing long term positive changes in people’s lives and helping them live a better life.
11. What advice would you give to someone starting out?
I am a “newbie” – very much in the learning phase. So, logically, I do not qualify to advise others what to do and what not to. However, I believe that if your idea is going to help bring positive change in people’s lives, then you should go ahead with it and most importantly, do plan the revenue generation strategy in advance because no startup can survive without money.
