Guest Post: Single Muslim’s CEO Reflects on the GDI Conference

Single Muslim CEO Adeem Younis reflects on his company’s 18 year journey.

SingleMuslim.com was created to provide a simple solution to a very complex problem: I needed to get married! Faced with an exotic menu of cousins and ‘connections’ from Pakistan, a country I had never been to (at that time), I knew traditional matchmaking routes just weren’t going to cut it for me. Was it too much to want to find someone who I had more in common with?

My journey really represented the struggle of a generation. How do we break away from traditions that no longer serve us and create new customs that solve the challenges of where we are now, all while staying true to the principles and values of our faith? I found the answer in entrepreneurship and that’s how SingleMuslim.com was born.

Never in a million years did I think 18 years later I would be stood on stage in a room full of industry leaders exploring the latest trends and greatest moves from the matchmaking world. With up to a third of relationships beginning online, the responsibility on the shoulders of those in the online relationship world is immense, and being part of the Global Dating Insights (GDI) Annual London Conference was a brilliant opportunity for the SingleMuslim team to take stock of how far we’ve come and to share our vision for the future.

As I told the audience of industry experts, Muslims are often ignored by mainstream platforms as a ‘niche community’ but what they fail to realise is that there are 1.6 billion Muslims around the world. Not so niche when you put it like that. In fact, Muslim-minority communities and Muslim-majority countries have some of the fastest-growing economies in the world. They also feature young populations who are increasingly more open to the notion of online matchmaking than previous generations when it was seen as a taboo subject. The challenge is how to create a user-friendly platform that is sensitive to faith-inspired cultural proclivities that literally span the entire world. This is what we at SingleMuslim.com have been perfecting for almost two decades: it’s why we have become the Muslim matchmaking platform of choice for British Muslims in all their shapes, sizes and colours.

So, what’s next for us? Having amassed over two million registrations, there are one million messages exchanged on our platform every week and over 60,000 successful marriages so far, and our eyes are firmly set on expansion into new international territories. When I started SingleMuslim most people didn’t even have an internet connection. In fact, many of our first customers introduced the internet into their lives because they wanted to get on SingleMuslim.com! While it seems hard to imagine a society so disconnected from the digital world now, in many parts of the globe, especially Muslim-majority countries, widespread internet access has only recently become a reality. This, coupled with cultural shifts in Muslim communities that perceive digital matchmaking as less of a taboo, mean the market of potential Single Muslims out there has opened up massively.

The potential is huge, and for the first time in our history as a company we are looking outwards for major partners and investors to come on-board and launch our platform to dizzying new heights. Investment might be a small step for SingleMuslim.com, but God willing, it will represent a giant leap for Muslim matchmaking around the world as we help millions more on their journey to a “happily ever after”.

Visit the Single Muslim website here.