Little Black Book: From services to events, discover what's around you

Wondering where to go, what to do and how to spend your time and money? From finding the nearest laundry service to a restaurant to a music festival, discovery platform Little Black Book (LBB) comes to your rescue. The online and in-app platform curates community-driven recommendations across categories to optimise your search preferences. 

Founded by Suchita Salwan and Dhruv Mathur in 2012, the Delhi-based start-up has raised Rs 6.5 crore from Blume Ventures and existing partners IDG Ventures and Indian Angel Network. Total capital now stands at Rs 15.6 crore. Among other investors are Google India head Rajan Anandan, TrulyMadly co-founder and CEO Sachin Bhatia and Aashti Bhartia of Jubilant Life Sciences. Brands such as Coca Cola, Airbnb, HTC, Samsung and Nestle have partnered with LBB to reach out to their target audience.

The service functions by layering content on Google Maps. Further, it tracks users’ posts — what one is reading, sharing and saving — and tailors the information based on one’s interests, location and the people they follow. The firm has partnered with Facebook to optimise this experience. 

“Consumers were either using multiple platforms like Justdial, Zomato, and BookMyShow or were counting on word-of-mouth before LBB,” co-founder Salwan said. 

LBB claims to have 30,000 recommendations across 18 categories, which caters to 2 million users per month across six locations — Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune and Bengaluru. It aims to tap at least 100 million millennials. On a daily basis, 200,000 users make local recommendations and discoveries across 15 categories. The firm has tapped 180,000 users via app downloads. 

It raises revenue solely through advertisements, where it promotes services, events and business products of enterprises, including DLF, IndiGo, Reebok and Mother Dairy. “We’ve been a preferred promotions platform for local brands and businesses ranging from restaurants and bars, to yoga teachers, stores and deliveries,” Salwan said.

The entity achieved break-even in eight months of its last fundraising and its monetisation has grown 800 per cent in the past 18 months. The next growth milestone is to triple its reach into the national and international markets and quadruple the run rate within the next 12 months. Realising “the need to move faster than everyone else”, it will utilise the fund to expand into other horizons as travel firms, especially the hotel and flights sector, is getting competitive day by day. 

There’s music festivals, food festivals, art workshops, store openings, new collections and new local entrepreneurs sprouting up every single day. Therefore, the firm needs to deliver faster and smarter to retain its fast-growing user base.