The roots of Twoo started around 15 years ago. Toon Coppens was a student in computer science at the University of Ghent, at that moment social networks didn’t exist whatsoever. The closest thing to social networks that in that time existed was IRCP or Internet Relay Chat Protocol, or in a more understandable form; online chat groups. People could talk to people from all over the world in these online chat groups. Toon often used these chat groups, but something bothered him. Every single time you started a conversation with another person, you had to ask the same questions over and over again making it very monotonously. There was always the classic question; ASL? meaning age, sex and location. Toon started thinking, he believed there had to be a better way to dodge these repeating basic questions. He came up with the idea to build a basic website/ platform where people can make an account with a Photo of themselves, age, location,… with the purpose to avoid the boring and repeating conversations with people. This platform was named ALS.too, where people were able to build their own profile without any programming knowledge.

Later on, after two years of the original idea, the platform became very popular and the costs increased (mainly due to the need of a lot of servers). Toon, still a university student, had to make a choice; stop with his project or work on further expansion and development. He chose for the second option and this is where Lorenz Bogaert came into the picture. Lorenz was a friend of Toon’s brother who’s an entrepreneur in heart and soul. Toon became more responsible for the technical aspect of the company and Lorenz became the corporate mastermind.

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Later they added extra features including a guestbook, chat function,… and changed the name to Redbox (for Flanders). This platform was surprisingly popular, and they  noticed that people from the Netherlands also wanted to use the platform but didn’t feel comfortable with the language that was used (Flemish-Dutch). Therefore Toon modified the platform to the people in the Netherlands. Using this as a base, he adapted the platform per country to increase the ease of use. A new name per country came along this modification for example Coolbox in England, Gentibox in Spain,… .

After a couple of years, Toon and Lorenz decided to centralize all the separated platforms under the name Facebox to increase efficiency and structure. Fortuitously highly similar with Facebook, as we know today. In 2007, they changed the name to Netlog, which was one of the first social networks on in the world.

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Early 2010, Facebook started to become a major threat to Netlog and the management knew they had to differ themselves in order to still be able to compete. They diversified on the right moment, they started building other online platforms. They simultaneously expanded and built these platforms for 6 to 12 months. After this they faced another key decision; they could continue working on all the different platforms simultaneously or pick the best one and solely focus on it. They decided to analyses the potential of each different platform they were working on, eventually they decided Twoo had the most potential. They primarily focused on Twoo to increase it in quality and optimize it.

Growth

In the past, the growth of Facebox skyrocketed in 2007 when it was renamed Netlog. Also, the company knew great growth rates in 2008 and 2009. This lead to an expansion in employees, specifically the sales team. This because they had an advertising business model back then. At that time, the number of employees had reached the highest point, they needed a lot of different teams.

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In 2010, Facebook started to become a major threat to the company. This had a big influence on the general strategy of the company as described before. In that period of time, the growth slacked because they were required to restructure the organization. They were able to cope with this successfully.

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After Twoo was implemented successfully, they have beaten the competition in only 1 year, they became the biggest discovery/ dating platform. Back then the growth was measured and focused in terms of numbers, the most users.

Now, Twoo measures her growth in another way, more specially based on active users. This, because as mentioned before, they see success for the company when the user of the platform has success. In the coming two years, Twoo intends to double the active users.

Customers

Competitors

The online discovery/dating market is very difficult and sophisticated, mainly because of the fact there are a lot of it. For example, the latest trend on this market are the innovators, who shake up the whole industry. Think about Tinder as an example of an innovator, Tinder is very easy to use, casual and the threshold to use the platform is very small. But, Tinder was acquired by the same group as Twoo, namely Match.com making it a more internal competitor.

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Because of the many competition, Twoo has a lot of direct and indirect competitors. The biggest part of the competition’s platforms are very serious, stark and requires to fulfill a lot of questions and steps before you can start. Twoo addresses this differently, they are creating a relaxed and loose atmosphere on the website. Twoo differs itself form the competition based on speed (you can can create an account in only a few steps), efficiency (it is very simple to make an account and use het platform) and fun.

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The biggest direct competitor is undoubtedly Badoo. This because Badoo’s platform and general strategy are very similar, in the way they want to address users, market themselves,… . They watch each other’s actions on the market continuously, Badoo sometimes copies Twoo, but of course Twoo does the same to Badoo.

Conclusion

We can conclude that Twoo has achieved high growth in previous years and will continue growing at this rate in the future. Twoo breaks the traditional discovery/dating platforms by lowering the threshold to meet new people and start durable relationships. Also, we see that an implementation of a new or adapted business model requires a lot of attention, but if implemented correctly it can change the future for a company in a great way.

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Joost Roelandts, COO of Twoo, biggest tip for starting entrepreneurs is that your team is key. With this he emphasizes that a motivated team is highly necessary in order to succeed. Twoo gives a lot of attention to this factor, they search for the “rockstar” people, who are extremely passionate and good in what they do. Once you have a good and complementary team, the challenge only begins. This because the functioning of the team needs to be consistently monitored. If only one person in a team starts to play politics, this will affect the whole team and this is something you have to watch out for.