In this discussion, I had the pleasure of discussing a matchmaking solution for young Muslims that, for once, came off as entirely different than the usual meme-marriage apps out there. InPairs was founded by Zachariah ElKordy three years ago, and has since grown it to becoming the second largest Muslim-owned marriage app in America. I wanted to get more out of this conversation than just the inner workings of his app — how will this affect Muslims meeting online in the near future? Is it a seeming innovative return to tradition, or just the same old? We also talk about the state of Muslim tech innovation. Enjoy!
Abdullah Yousef
Thanks for joining me to talk about this. When I found out about InPairs through a mutual friend of ours –– I thought, as usual, it’s just another Muslim marriage app. I’m sure you’re familiar with the whole “Muslim marriage app tech bro” meme. It seems to be the only lucrative Muslim tech bro project that pops up [in the mainstream] over and over again. Even one of my friends who’s a popular “Dawah influencer” type, and I still don’t know to this day if he was being satirical, went “no, bro, my marriage app is going to be different.”
But when looking at your app, I saw that it was different in that you didn’t leave the “choosing factor” to the user. You put it instead in the hands of a combination of AI and human matchmakers. This may be an unorthodox way to start this –– but I want to give you my interpretation of why I think InPairs has such fast-gaining appeal, not just with the people using it, but also with the uncles, the imams, the masjid managers –– who hop on board to promote and integrate it with their masajid. In the traditional [Muslim] marriage setting, when a young person is trying to get married, it’s not them who goes out and develops, for lack of a better word, a “roster” of options. It’s something that’s presented to them by a predetermined council of their relatives who are much older and more experienced. And I think the reason the older folk who’ve seen it seem to like InPairs is because it appeals to and is quite similar to that aspect of the tradition. You have this elder council of matchmakers who determine good matches, and then it’s up to them to choose whether they want to proceed with it or not. I want to get your view obviously, being the person that built this from the ground up, was it that easy to convince both the youth and elders with that being the playing field you laid out, or was it harder than I and others might expect?
Zachariah ElKordy
So, I think I’ll partially agree with your idea. It definitely is a bit more familiar to some of the uncles. We’ve actually had a lot of uncles and aunties reach out because they wanted to be a little bit more involved in the [our] process and that’s just not the way that we work. When I first launched, like I was just playing around with ideas, it was a Google form, probably, almost three years ago now; I put it on my story and it said “Rishta auntie, but he’s not an auntie, and he’s Egyptian,” or something like that. So “Rishta Auntie” concept is not something that is unique to just Desis, it kind of transcends cultures. Every major ethnic group has a version of it. So, I think that’s why it feels so familiar to so many people.
That being said, people love to call everything haram and police what people do. I think Salams and Muzz are no exception. You’ll have people at each end of the practicing spectrum who are finding some issues with it [that model]. And they’re not entirely wrong, right? At the end of the day, it’s a copy paste of Tinder. But I don’t think that that’s what makes it so bad. I think, really, it’s just that there’s a lack of innovation in the Muslim community, specifically in the US –– not so much in the UK though, they have a million and one different apps and services. But most of the other projects that are out there are either like Salams or Muzz or have nonexistent user bases.
However, Alhamdulilah, we’re now the third largest Muslim marriage app in the US, And not because we’re ‘big’ by any means. It’s literally just because there are no other options. So, I think what the real appeal is with InPairs is it’s a truly new way to find somebody that taps into older familiar methods while also having that stamp of approval from your local sheikh. This is unquestionably halal, nobody can come up and say that it’s not, so you can use it without feeling guilty or like you’re going through a vending machine of men or women. This is how people are feeling about these apps, that they’re just going through dozens or hundreds of people, and it takes out a lot of intentionality in the search process. You recently got married, so you understand, in a way you always have another option. It doesn’t matter if you find your wife, there is always technically another option that you can just as easily tap into when you download an app, swipe, and match with somebody in two minutes.
So, I think people like that kind of shift into more intention focused matching. Especially as people feel the traditional swipe-based app is on the down tilt, not just within the Muslim community, but also generally speaking. The general appeal is one, it’s new, two, it’s unquestionably halal, and three, we’re, we’re doing our best to try to address the problems as they come up and really focus on the end user and what their experience is like.
Abdullah Yousef
I also feel like the slowness of it helps mitigate what you said about there always being another option. If somebody doesn’t match during the drop, they have to wait a month, right?
Zachariah ElKordy
Yeah. We actually get a lot of pushback on that.
Abdullah Yousef
They want it to be faster?
Zachariah ElKordy
Yeah. A lot of people are frustrated with the number of drops that we have, or the number of people that we’re presenting. We literally just had somebody cancel saying “Hey, I signed up, waited a month, and I only got three potential matches.” That’s plastered all over our website. So yeah, it’s a point of frustration for young Muslims who have been online for a while, because, again, there is nothing like this so far.
Abdullah Yousef
That leads to the next thing I wanted to ask. With every project like this, not just concerning stuff to do with marriage or gender or whatever, but literally any Muslim project for the past 30 years, there’s always inherent skepticism about everything from the methods to the environment you’re doing it in, to why you’re even doing it. I’m sure you’ve been asked this a million times already, but your matchmakers –– what makes them qualified? Why should any user trust your matchmakers to pick the best person out of whatever pool the AI chooses initially? That’s not even considering the skepticism everyone has of AI itself.
Zachariah ElKordy
InPairs, at the end of the day, is a tech startup. Strip away like the message and the userbase and the niche aspect of it or whatever, we’re a tech startup, which means that we’re building like a tech startup. They move quickly, they iterate with everything, they absorb customer feedback and then turn it into products.
When we were picking our matchmakers, we were very, very intentional about how we pick them. It’s our most competitive position, more so than the engineers or the marketers, or anybody else in the team. The reason being is that there’s a lot of different things that we must check off about the candidate before we even consider them to be hirable. One of them is that, at a minimum (you can’t even schedule an interview without this) is that you must have gotten at least two couples married through your direct efforts. Already lots of people haven’t hit that threshold. Two couples doesn’t sound like a lot, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find more than a handful of people in your own circles that have been able to do this.
Within circles of friends that have people who matchmake, if you pick into some of them, you realize they’re not even the ones who are actually pushing things forward. For example, we had one person apply for the matchmaker position saying that she had gotten three couples married. The first one, and this one really stuck out to me, was that she herself was going on a first date with some guy, they met in public in a coffee shop or whatever, and she took a friend with her. While they’re there, her friend and the guy started hitting it off very well in front of her, so she went “Hey listen, this was for me, but I won’t block your blessings, go for it.” and her friend and the guy ended up getting married. And this girl took credit for it.
My point is, we are not just looking for that minimum threshold, we’re also inquiring into how you matchmade these people. What was your role? How did you make it happen?
Abdullah Yousef
Yeah, see, that’s what I was curious about, because this is my view of it: I don’t see matchmaking as a science at all, like something that’s quantitative. But from what you’re telling me, it seems like you are able to quantitate in some sense. And I’m sure that during the interview process, you’d have to detect that this person, didn’t just get lucky by, say, getting people in their social circle married who already liked each other. In any social group, there’s always a few people (usually women) who pride themselves in being matchmakers or having a talent for matchmaking. But if you look into it, or if you were to follow these people around, you would see that it’s something they repeatedly attempt throughout their lives, and they always count their few wins, but they don’t seem to count or remember a lot of the times where their proposed matches were disastrous. If you were to apply that failure rate to any actual science, you would say this isn’t a science. I believe it’s an art; you need to have intuition of the anxieties of men and women, how different cultures interact internally and with others, how different temperaments would react if they sat with each other and tried to talk about something contested. Have you ever had any guys apply for the matchmaker position?
Zachariah ElKordy
We’ve had a lot of men apply. None of them have even been able to get an interview because of the two couple’s criteria.
Abdullah Yousef
See, I know why, because when guys try to be matchmakers, they go for the qualities on paper, like where are they from? What do each of them make a year, where did they go to college, etc. but they don’t seem to have as much of an intuition for the aesthetic matching of a couple that women do. Seems like women have just been born with this talent. And a lot of guys don’t seem to quite grasp it.
Zachariah ElKordy
I think women just like this more than men. When I was single and first moved to DC, in med school, I was trying to get cuffed. And every time I was in a different social circle, the women would play a game of “who do we know that we could set Zach up with?” I don’t think I’ve ever had a guy, maybe once, one guy tried to set me up. And he wasn’t even trying to set me up. I was interested in his friend. And he was incredibly lukewarm about it, he just went “Yeah, you know, she’s all right, go for it.” and that was about it. Men just don’t care.
Abdullah Yousef
Yeah, definitely. I think that’s that’s another big part of it. Because here’s another thing when it comes to traditional matchmaking, right –– like in the scenario that I presented at the beginning of the interview, the aunties or whoever’s setting up the initial meeting don’t know anything about the inward personalities of the girl that they’re trying to get their son married to, or vice versa. But there is a personality component in the survey that you give to the users, right?
Zachariah ElKordy
Yeah, we have a personality test. We ask a few short answer questions as well. What’s interesting is that there actually hasn’t been any published research on how couples with respect to different personalities find each other in terms of extroversion/introversion.
A big part of the reason we ask is so we can get a ballpark based off who you are, like matching strong personalities with softer personalities and trying to avoid two strong personalities. A lot of it is also trying to figure out on our own what kinds of couples work well together and trying to spot our own trends so that we can start to do something actionable with that in the future. I’m sure Match Group has all of this on lock. They know exactly how personality plays in this.
Abdullah Yousef
Yes, but I think this is where you guys have an advantage because a tech company like Match Group might be doing this at a much more advanced level, but they’re doing it in a cynical way with a much more hedonistic mindset. Whereas you guys, a fresh young group, are Muslims who are doing this from a much more sincere place. After you guys match a couple, do you have any way of following up with them afterwards to see if the match succeeded?
Zachariah ElKordy
We get this question a lot, “how many marriages do you guys have?” I think, genuinely, every single app that boasts that number –– they’re either guessing or lying. It’s incredibly difficult to track this kind of stuff. The way I put it is let’s say you spend 20 bucks a month on a Netflix subscription. Have you seen You, the show? Imagine if some account manager at Netflix calls you and asks “Hey, we saw that you watched You six months ago, did you like it?” Like, what? You pay 20 bucks a month. You’re not paying nearly enough for that level of service. For some people, they’d be really flattered, like wow, Netflix is really on the ball trying to figure out my preferences. But for so many others, it’s “why are you wasting my time?”
We used to [in the past], call all of our successfully matched users and get an understanding of how things happened, and we were able to get some rough data points. For example, we know that 90 to 95% of people who match have at the very least some kind of substantial conversation after we match them. We don’t know how many of them materialize into marriages. If somebody cancels, they have the option to tell us “I’m cancelling because I’m in a relationship because of you guys.” Every single time I hear about a couple that matched through InPairs and got married, I will look them up and check their exit reason in our system, and to date we have not found a single instance where they have both selected that “I am in a relationship” or “I’m getting to know somebody” Usually only one of them will do it. If I had to guess though, it would probably be like a couple dozen marriages at this point, Alhamdulilah.
Abdullah Yousef
I mean, really, I don’t think there’s much you can do after that in the first place. This is a question I think is much more general, and it doesn’t just apply to just InPairs because you guys are relatively new –– I don’t think you’ve had much time to track this, but there’s, I feel, in the same way that a finance firm is very much affected by real world events, like stuff that happened recently that tanked the stock market, the stuff you guys do is very much affected by the current gender ecosystem.
For example, this probably seems like I’m bringing this out of nowhere, remember summer of 2023, when every guy under 40 suddenly knew who Andrew Tate was? I don’t think I’ve seen a level of gender anxiety on both sides like then ever again.
Zachariah ElKordy
It probably had some lasting impacts as well, like I’m not going to lie.
Abdullah Yousef
I feel like that was a crescendo of destruction to that whole sphere [the red pill] of the internet, that was the furthest extent of that stuff entering mainstream culture. Because after that, thank God, it all went downhill, and we started getting steadier, level headed content from more intelligent guys instead. But I remember back then, I kept thinking, I wonder how this is gonna affect the general anxieties that a lot of young Muslim men and women already have towards each other. Young Muslim diaspora, much like most Zoomers to be to be honest, don’t have their own integrated culture when it comes to this sort of stuff, they’re on a ship and strung along, at the mercy of whatever the waves of the internet metaculture around them. What was the sense of the “meta” that you got when you started InPairs?
Zachariah ElKordy
I think honestly it didn’t have much of a bearing. I think, obviously, Andrew Tate had a lot of things that he did wrong, and there’s a lot of takes he had that were horrible. But at the end of the day, he was just appealing to a much more politically conservative audience.
Abdullah Yousef
Yeah, what I was leading into was the fact that, for the past 20 years or so especially, men and women are much more anxious about each other than they were in the past.
Alot of our parents’ or grandparents’ generation, when they came to Western countries, were completely shocked and scandalized by the level of open sexuality that was just out there in the open, right, and how men and women were just brazenly interacting intimately with each other in ways that were just completely unacceptable to do publicly in our cultures. So, they got this idea about how young Westerners are…the same way that a boomer is shocked to find out that you’re paying $15 for a sandwich instead of a buck fifty –– meanwhile young people aren’t going out and having as much “fun” as they used to. They’re not partying as much, they’re not drinking and having as much intimacy, and the data is all confirming this. They’re not engaging in the kind of debauchery that a lot of older people assume they do. They’re even, especially, having less and less long term relationships. Young men today are the loneliest they’ve ever been. So, because of this loneliness and lack of interaction, and so much of this is because of social media, technology, screens and all that stuff –– stuff like COVID too, it’s just filled them with the sense of not not understanding each other at probably the highest rates than ever in humanity.
Zachariah ElKordy
I think there was a shift with respect to men being a little bit more honest, and maybe slightly shifting preferences for what they’re looking for. Obviously, at the end of the day, my job is to help people find love, but within Muslim cultures, there are more generally understood accepted standards of what a husband’s role is, and what a wife’s role is. Andrew Tate was just [incidentally] pushing people into a space of having more honest conversations about what they’re looking for.
Because, you have young men who are very open minded and might even like a career-oriented woman, and they end up with that kind of person, then all of a sudden, that perfect world comes crashing down, because you realize that my God, my wife’s gonna be working all the time like me, we have a one year old with a nanny at home…some people don’t think it through. I think it just forced the more liberal folk to be more cognizant of the fact that they’re looking for a more conservative person than they were initially expecting, and it pushed the people who are already more conservative further into that with respect to like how you’re approaching women of any type, and it’s an instant “anybody who does not meet my criteria is a fitna.” She is [supposedly] creating fitna by not accepting her expected role as wife.
What you end up having is a disconnect between men and women where the men are more honest with themselves. I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative thing. I think that’s important for men to have a better understanding of what they’re looking for, especially young Muslims, we’re in a situation now where more women are educated than ever before.
Abdullah Yousef
Well, to simplify, would you say that this cultural aspect is priced into how InPairs was made?
Zachariah ElKordy
Not at all.
I’m not pushing my own thoughts or narratives or opinions onto people. We’re helping people find their significant other. The only times that we’ll like push our own thoughts are if –– for example, we had a lesbian woman sign up, and she said she wanted the most effeminate looking man that you can find. Like, I’m sorry, I probably can’t help you. There’s a few brothers who sign up looking for second wives. Like, again, like, all respect to you, do your thing. But there’s other resources for you.
Abdullah Yousef
I want to ask you about this too –– you did two nationwide masjid tours, two Ramadans in a row. What did you see that helped you with InPairs? Like in terms of all the different differences –– because it’s impossible to classify American Muslims as their own homogenous group. The Muslims in the Midwest (Chicago, Detroit) are very different from New York Muslims, California Muslims, etc. Did you get the sense of there being a lot of differences between how they’ve developed things over the years as Muslim communities? What did this inspire when it comes to what you do?
Zachariah ElKordy
It kind of just follows a general theme, the more Muslims there are in an area, the more the diversity with respect to ranges of practicing.
For example, in Jersey, you’ll have everything from what’s considered a very liberal masjid all the way down to a very, very, conservative masjid. And so that was really cool with InPairs to be able to, for the first time, put both of these types of masjids into the same playing field and give them a reason to work together, to find some common ground (marriage). Because at the end of the day, they’re serving different communities. There are other places like Atlanta, for example, where just generally speaking, more people are heavier practicing. It’s a much smaller community.
In a place like Amman, a Muslim city, everybody is within a couple of miles of each other, right? And so, there is a significant overlap between everyone there. Between SoCal and Miami though, you’re going to have very different Muslim communities because the socio-cultural influences are night and day between these places. It’s not just Muslims being affected by other Muslims, It’s Muslims who are integrating into the Southern California culture and lifestyle. It’s the same thing in Florida or Michigan or Dallas or wherever.
That being said, I found that in a lot of these places, masjids, especially the larger masjids, have all found some common ground with each other. I can go into most masjids in the US and have a decent understanding of, what I’m going to feel, how I might be received by the community. It’s all within a certain range. And having been to a lot of masjids outside of the US, it’s very rare that I’ll find that same feeling as I do in an American masjid.
So I’m Egyptian. And Egyptian masjids serve their particular purpose, they are for the Muslims who go knock out their ibada, you know, whether that’s for an hour or just coming in for a quick five minutes for Isha. And then you leave. You have no “communal” connection to your masjid. The only reason that you pray at your masjid is because it’s in your neighborhood complex, it’s the closest one and all your friends go there. The significant cultural impact that local masjids have, you can see throughout the community. I think my favorite counterexample to this is ICPC in Patterson.
People love that masjid. I had heard about ICPC well before I went there, just because the kind of Muslims and young people that it’s bred have a lifelong love of the masjid. And whether that’s because of, you know, the sheikh or the people –– it’s a largely Palestinian masjid –– maybe it’s because it feels familiar and homely. But you don’t really get that in a masjid outside of the U.S.
Abdullah Yousef
I have a few friends who all come from medical school backgrounds, and sometimes it’s tech, sometimes it’s not, but usually, for some reason, they end up hopping into things like this. Most still practice medicine, but they end up getting these ideas for different online Muslim projects. I saw that that was the case for you as well. I thought about it for a while and want to get your perspective, it’s quite a big jump.
From what I can see, if you’re somebody who has a natural inclination towards medicine, you’re trying to solve these physical human problems and ailments –– you have that intuition, especially as a Muslim where we believe that the physical doesn’t just exist on its own, physical ailments are tied into the spiritual, emotional and mental ailments that we experience as human beings in the short trip that we have before the afterlife –– you’ll want to veer into solving those problems as well.
I don’t wish to presume, but did you have that feeling at all? You see something that the diaspora are experiencing, in this case trouble finding mates, as some sort of mental or emotional ailment that’s spreading culturally, and you feel like you have to jump out and solve that too?
Zachariah ElKordy
A few different things pulled me in different directions. It started when I started med school, just doing exactly what I was supposed to do, getting my grades, getting my research done, doing my MCAT, etc., So having that safety net of being in medical school made me realize there’s a lot of interests that I have outside of medicine, and there’s a lot of things that I want to do. So, I spent a lot of time trying to discover what it was that I liked and what it was that I was good at, because the entirety of my life I’d only really been doing things that would get me into medical school.
My first year of med school, I lived in Egypt because it was during COVID, and I moved to Egypt for a few months because everything was online. I did my first fundraising project because I was getting introduced to a lot of people, they were like “hey, you’re American, you got money.” And I was like, “no, I don’t, but I can get you some.” And so over that year’s Ramadan I raised $80,000 for impoverished villages, something like that, and I realized oh, this is cool. I was able to build this entirely, and by the end of it, it wasn’t just one village that I was supporting. It was multiple villages in different communities. I would go myself and I would see what it was like, and exactly how the money was being spent. I was very diligent about that process, and I think medical school gave me that kind of diligence of being able to see things all the way to the end, making sure it was done with high fidelity. After that I co-founded the American Muslim Medical Student Association, which is now the largest network of Muslim medical students in the US. Most recently, we had our conference in Chicago and there were over 750 Muslim medical students. There, my co-founder Bassel and I were able to see this gap between a lot of young Muslims and their faith when they started medical school, because it was such a difficult life. You spend so much of your time practicing to become a physician that sometimes you lose the plot. And so we wanted to find that there is some inherent overlap between Islam and medicine
There’s never really a good excuse to take a dip in your faith, unless it’s the natural waxing and waning of your deen. But we wanted to make it easier and have Muslim med students realize it can be much more accessible than they think, and now you’re not just a better Muslim, but also a better physician.
Abdullah Yousef
Yeah, you don’t want to ever lose the human element of it.
Zachariah ElKordy
Exactly. And all of that made me realize, okay, I’m good at taking things from nothing, building it out, seeing where they go. That’s really what prompted me to take the plunge into full on entrepreneurship. I’ve been able to do all these things for other people and for Allah. Let me do it fisabilillah but also make some money off it. I was having a lot of people who were coaching me, but also asking me to help them find somebody to marry. I remember in just one week, I had five people reach out to me about that. I was doing an overnight shift in the emergency department, and I just put on my story “hey, if anybody’s trying to get cuffed, send me a DM.” And I’d help sew up a gunshot wound then go back and ask somebody in my DMs what their height preference is. And that kind of morphed into what it is now. That was three years ago.
I think I would push back a little bit on the idea that this happens with a lot of Muslim medical students. I know very, very few who will take time off the traditional route to pursue other things outside of medicine, like what happens in the Bay Area. There’s a little bubble there of Stanford, UCSF students where it’s almost expected that they’re either not going to complete residency or not complete medical school. Like 50% of students will take time off to work on something or so. It’s from the skill set that is afforded to you by training to become a physician. The one that I’ve appreciated most has been entrepreneurship.
Abdullah Yousef
Must just be what I’ve seen then. Now, the Salams app news…that was incredibly disappointing. I remember I posted about it like everybody else did, my initial thought was, really, this must be so disheartening to any Muslims in tech who are actually developing something because they believe in it, trying to take that route of creating something and contributing, as opposed to fattening up some cash cow. Or there’s a much more harrowing thought that you might start off that naïve but then end up becoming becoming cynical and once it becomes successful enough, you think you can just cash out because what’s the point, I know you’re much deeper into that environment than I am, I’m much more in the online writers area of online Islam. What was the big reaction you saw from fellow Muslim tech people; entrepreneurs, investors, founders when they found out about this? Like, was there a big shock, or did they just expect it all along?
Zachariah ElKordy
The situation is incredibly nuanced. It’s easy in a tweet or an Instagram post to eliminate that nuance. And to some extent, we’ve also used this as an opportunity for growth. The result is that now we have the second most popular Muslim marriage app in the US that isn’t in the hands of The Match Group CEO, who spent two years at Palantir. Palantir obviously has a history of using data to better target Palestinians.
Abdullah Yousef
There’s a lot more [about Palantir] that I probably can’t even elaborate on in this interview. But yeah, the rabbit hole goes very deep.
Zachariah ElKordy
It’s incredibly unfortunate that this is now where over 6 million Muslim users’ data is now in the hands of. Palantir also uses social media apps to further their goals. So now you have not just consumer data, but very personal private data that’s easily accessible to them. Obviously that’s super bad. Beyond that though, we just want to provide an alternative to the Salams platform now, which is why we’re willing to take a huge cut to our own profits and revenue so that we can provide something like that for other Muslims. I do think it was within the right of the owners to sell, but there are a lot of other people that they could have sold to. They could have sold to a Muslim company, like Muzz was right there. I’m sure Muzz made some offers as well, or I’m sure they were open to making an offer to buy them out, their biggest competitor.
There are people who are upset with some of the language that we’ve been using to describe these people. I don’t think that it was the wrong thing to sell. I think they sold to the wrong person, I think that they sold at the wrong price, and I think they weren’t transparent enough with the sale. I know people who have put together offers to purchase Salams. The reason that they were able to do that is because Salams sold so cheap. They sold for (this is public information) they sold for $12 million. This app, 6 million users, the second biggest app of its kind in the entire world, sold for just under $12 million.
I don’t like this was the cash price. I don’t know if there’s stock in the deal too. But the cash deal was ridiculous, just $11.6 million.
And I think the reason that that is so disappointing for me as a young Muslim founder who’s building in the Muslim space, at the end of the day, I’m building a product that’s value aligned and provides significant value to our community, but we need to be able to provide incentives to young Muslim entrepreneurs to build in the Muslim space, and then get a paycheck out of it. Otherwise, they’ll just do something like that. I think that’s the reason that we haven’t seen any innovation in the Muslim community, there is just no end game. The expectation of the Muslim community is that you spend all your time to provide the best service for zero money.
Abdullah Yousef
It’s ridiculous. It’s the digital version of the Muslim who volunteers for his masjid, they get super involved, and then everybody gets super upset when they pull out when much more important things in their life take precedence.
Zachariah ElKordy
Yeah, it’s incredibly frustrating. We’ll get comments like this all the time on our videos. “So, like why not just make it free?”
Abdullah Yousef
That’s why I didn’t even bother asking you about this, because not only should you guys be compensated well for doing this, it’s also good barrier to entry, you don’t want unserious people on the platform. I don’t know how much you charge, but it should be a good amount.
Zachariah ElKordy
This is really validating for myself, we only charge between 20 and 35 bucks, depending on the plan that you get, there’s no a competition. There’s a new competitor that does the exact same thing that we do, (maybe not really, they’re not Muslim, they’re just in the general dating app space.) and they’re charging $90 per month. So for us to deliver the exact same service for a fraction of the cost is crazy.
The reason that it was so disappointing to see that Salams sold for $11.6 million being one of the most successful Muslim apps, just generally speaking, is that where does that leave everybody else who’s building? Like, you can put in a decade of work, and at the end of it you sell for just $11.6 million, and you only take a fraction of that because of investors and co-founders and different equities and this and that.
There’s just no incentive for Muslims to build for other Muslims. This was a company that should have sold for almost a hundred million dollars. Um, so, they should have also been very clear about selling.
Abdullah Yousef
Okay, last question. Where do you see InPairs a couple years from now?
Zachariah ElKordy
Great question. So, we’re actively building, we look at every single reason that a user cancels, we look at every single reason that a user rejects somebody else. Our goal is to be the standard for how young Muslims are finding somebody online. You can try out Salams or Muzz or whatever, but once you’re actually ready to get married, you can download InPairs. The goal within five years is to be the premier app in the U.S. and then maybe having expanded to an additional market, the U.K. or Australia, France, Germany, wherever it makes the most sense.
Abdullah Yousef
All right that’s great, I think that’s pretty much everything I wanted to ask. There anything else you wanted to add?
Zachariah ElKordy
So InPairs, even though I am confident what our value of the product is, I know that this is worth much more. The reason that it’s only $20 is because I want to build something for the Muslim community. At the end of the day, I’m going to be a physician. If I want to go and make my money and not be like this dude that got a 50k paycheck after 10 years, I can make 10x that through one year of working as a doctor, and I’ve taken three years to build InPairs. The opportunity cost for me to build InPairs is literally in the millions of dollars. So, I think ultimately, the point I want to drive was that Muslims need to be in a position where they are willing to be maybe a little bit more supportive of younger Muslim companies. Because there’s a reason that so many of them fail. I can say with confidence that the failure rate of Muslim tech startups is much higher than non-Muslim tech startups.
Abdullah Yousef
Yes, that’s a much bigger cultural question that sadly we don’t have time for, but I’m sure either one of us is going to get into later. If you don’t have anything else, I want to end with this –– this is for everyone reading this interview. I have quite the audience. I’d say they’re an acquired taste. There’s a very wide range of people who read me. I don’t like bragging, but there’s Imams who work at places like Yaqeen Institute who read Qawwam Magazine all the way down to some guy in a cramped apartment in Pakistan. Some just like it for the meme pages and the artwork.
So, I’m sure I’m going to get many messages going “Bro, why are you like talking about this? Like, why are you addressing this stuff? I thought you were beyond the slop of talking about the marriage question and gender and all that stuff.” And I just wanted to say that, there is no escaping this and I’ll tell you why. See, like I told you, I got married, and for a while since then, I’ve had no taste for talking about any of this stuff like I used to before. I don’t know if you took a glance at my Twitter, but to this day I’m pretty much known for for accidentally starting off a bunch of hilarious and catchy discussions and catchphrases that stayed part and parcel of the Muslim online space, for better or for worse, when it comes to that whole discourse that happens online when it comes to anything to do with gender roles or marriage. That was all before I got married when I was a little younger. As a married man though I couldn’t think about it anymore because, well, I felt great, so I don’t need to think about it.
But now we’re expecting a child soon. And it’s so funny saying this because I’m going to be changing this kid’s diapers soon, but I’m already thinking that he’s going to get married one day, and once again I find myself thinking about this question again, because now I have I’m going to be responsible for helping him find someone. I’m no longer the person that’s looking to get married; I’m going to be at the doorstep of some girl’s house to talk to her father about my son who wants to get married to her.
And, you know, I don’t know when that’s going to happen exactly, but I find myself getting more and more into these discussions again because now I’m preemptively concerned for him. He’s not even born yet and I’m thinking about this stuff. It just made me realize that If you’re taking like this regular course of life as a Muslim, there’s no escaping these essential questions of life. I feel no shame talking to anybody about this if I know that they’re sincere. And, I’m not just saying this to flatter you, I can tell that you’re very sincere about this. Hopefully everything we discussed gets a lot of people who follow us to think in a much deeper way than just the surface level on this stuff.
Zachariah ElKordy
Genuinely, I can assure you that unless the Muslim community in the US starts to really kind of double down on a little bit of innovation, your kid, my kid, they’re all going to have the same issues. InshAllah within 20-30 years we’re at a point that we’re able to provide Muslims in the US with more suitable alternatives than apps that are owned by The Match Group CEO.
Abdullah Yousef
Seems like a good time to wrap this up –– thank you brother.
Zachariah ElKordy (on X @ZachElkordy) is a medical student, entrepeneur, and founder of InPairs and the American Muslim Medical Student Association. Find out more about InPairs @ inpairs.io