Why we rebuilt Rishta Auntie

Rishta Auntie is back!

We spent the last few years rebuilding the app around one question: How do South Asian singles who are serious about marriage get more clarity before they invest weeks in the wrong match?

Where we started

We launched the first version of Rishta Auntie in 2022. It was an MVP, which is startup speak for the smallest thing we could ship and still learn from.

It passed 1,000 downloads. For a small, bootstrapped team, that was a real start.

The number mattered less than what came with it. Real South Asian singles were using a real product, and we could see where it helped and where it got in the way. No survey teaches you that.

We’re two Pakistani-American founders, both married. We know the weight this process carries, for the person and for everyone at the dinner table.

What 2022 taught us

A few lessons kept showing up.

More profiles didn’t fix unclear intent. Showing people more options did not make it easier to tell who was serious about marriage, who was still figuring it out, or who was simply browsing. More profiles still left a lot of guessing.

Compatibility needed to show up earlier. When big questions about faith, family, lifestyle, and timelines come up weeks in, a dealbreaker lands very differently than it would have on day one.

Profiles said too little. Most profiles, ours included, could read like a biodata with a selfie attached. That’s useful for a shortlist. It says much less about how someone communicates, what matters to them, or how they might fit into your life.

Guessing wears people out. If you’re ready for marriage, vague profiles and chats that go in circles get old quickly. The real question becomes simple: is this worth my time?

We didn’t have a good enough answer yet.

Why we started over

We could have kept the 2022 app alive with new colors and a few extra features. Instead, we went back to the product.

The rebuild started with one belief: South Asian singles already have plenty of profiles to look at. What they need is more clarity around compatibility and intent before anyone gets emotionally invested.

That belief became the Rishta Compass, our proprietary compatibility framework.

The Compass uses personality insights and compatibility information from your profile to show where two people may align and where there could be friction.

It won’t tell you who to marry. Nothing should.

It gives you better signals early, so the first real conversation can start somewhere useful.

What Rishta Auntie looks like now

The new app is built to answer more than “so what do you do?”

You start with a marriage-focused profile, with prompts that go beyond small talk and make intent clearer from the beginning. You can add video and voice to show more personality than a job title and a few photos ever could.

You take a 26-question personality quiz based on Myers-Briggs (MBTI). Your result appears on your profile and feeds into the Rishta Compass.

Selfie verification adds another identity check before someone starts matching.

By the time you meet for chai, you should know more than their biodata.

What’s next

Most of our energy now goes into improving the Compass and smoothing out the parts of the experience that still feel clunky.

We’re also continuing to learn from the people using RA. If something in the app annoys you, tell us. We read it.

Fixing marriage is above our pay grade. Making the first few weeks less confusing is the job.

For the longer version of why we built this, read Our Mission.

If you’re a South Asian single in the US or Canada and serious about marriage, download Rishta Auntie on the App Store or Google Play. Build a real profile, take the quiz, and see what your Compass says.

Check us out at rishtaauntie.app for more information, and be sure to follow us on Instagram.

And if someone you know is deep in the modern rishta process, send this their way.