A group of friends in Bengaluru, who were tired of doing the same thing week after week, went on an online hunt for fun activities in the city. They couldn’t find anything relevant or satisfying. The information online did not help them make any decisions and they went back to their humdrum evenings.
Among them was Paras Jain. He realised that it was a waste to spend 40 minutes looking for actionable content online only to find nothing. He couldn’t help but wonder how many people would be going through the same dilemma every time they want to do something fun. So, in May 2014, Jain launched Townista, a portal to discover events and activities.
Townista’s activity categories range from food and dining, bar and drinking, plays and entertainment to health and wellness. It keeps track of the user’s browsing history and recommends activities based on their social circles. “With smart search, we have managed to trim down the 40 minutes of decision time to an average of seven minutes per user,” Jain tells Tech in Asia.
Townista launched its app in January this year.
The start-up has three sources to aggregate the events. “We crawl nearly 40 websites to find out what’s happening in the city,” says Jain. Thirty percent of Townista’s content comes from about 200 event organisers in Bangalore. For niche segments like photography exhibitions, it has experts from the space who keep Townista posted.
The start-up is currently pre-revenue. The main sources of revenue are ticketing and promotions. Eighty percent of Townista’s traffic comes from its app. It gets an average of 100,000 views every month and have over 25,000 registered users on board.
Townista was part of GSF India’s mobile accelerator program in April. The start-up raised $50,000 in seed funding from GSF India around then.
The start-up plans to launch its app in Mumbai in a week and expand into ten cities in the next year. Townista hopes to be the first thing that pops up in people’s minds when they think of a place to hang out or something fun to do.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.
