Once upon a time, a team of entrepreneurs, braving all odds reached the sets of a popular TV show
Brevistay won wide fame and acclaim ever since it’s founders pitched on Shark Tank India Season 2. The founders got a lot of feedback from the Sharks, but one particular feedback stood out. The OG Shark Anupam Mittal (Founder shaadi.com) asked Team Brevistay to study the concept of Love Hotels in Japan.
The team sat together and figured out that Love Hotels are essentially outlawed in India but many shady websites are trying to imitate it online and scamming millions in the process. The team decided to launch an April fool’s prank on these lines in order to sensitize it’s customers regarding the potential damage these scams can inflict on them and the society at large.
Let the games begin
So the mandate was set, domain name was bought and inspired by Anupam’s idea we started building https://www.shaadi-se-pehle.com. The team built a sleek website and the process flow was designed to look as real as possible. The user could select a hotel room in the required city, choose the preferred male or female love partner, pick the feasible time slot and progress to the payments page. The payment would obviously not go through and would lead the user to the reveal page. The reveal page contains a piece of advice from Brevistay’s CEO Prateek, cautioning the readers against the perils of such websites.
Too real too soon
The prank performed as expected and we received a lot of bouquets and brick bats depending on the number of pages scrolled by the user. In the first few hours https://www.shaadi-se-pehle.com/ saw Fifteen thousand visitors out of which almost 92% visitors scrolled through all the webpages. The remaining few immediately concluded the website to be real, hence the brickbats.
The users spent good two minutes on the website, out of which majority time was spent on the page containing the images of the models. Meanwhile our customer support team received queries from the cities which were not mentioned on the website, asking when are we starting the service in their respective city.
Shut up and take my money
Another interesting insight that we got was that a lot of users clicked on the Prepaid Booking through UPI instead of Pay at Hotel Booking. This demonstrates how easy it is to nudge people to make online payments upfront. People easily fall for the websites which imitate popular e-commerce websites and offer a smooth process flow and promise something from the dream world.
No wonder the thugs of Jamtaara are so successful in their pursuit.
Uncharted Territories
The prank was working as expected and the feedback has been great people widely shared it though Instagram and whatsapp, but then something unexpected happened. We started getting queries from individuals who wanted to list themselves as love partners on https://www.shaadi-se-pehle.com/.
No one saw that coming.
All’s well that ends well
We politely entertained all the queries and had to make some effort to explain to the gullible users that it was essentially a prank and they should never fall for websites advertising such services on the internet. Also demand for such services in our poor country drives thousands of underage children into human trafficking and we sincerely hope that https://www.shaadi-se-pehle.com/ will spread the required awareness in the masses.