Founded in July 2015 by Manish Chopra and Satish Mani,
Little App is a deals marketplace that brings to you the best deals in your city. Its no-fuss and friendly search option lets you access the best deals for Restaurants, Movies, last minute hotels, weekend getaway, Salons, Gyms, healthcare and Spas too.
The startup launched the app in the month of July 2015. The app connects the consumers with physical retailers via smartphones in the best possible way. Its customers can browse through a number of deals on “Little” to add that extra happiness in their lifestyle.
It’s the fastest and the most intelligent way of bringing the best deals from the merchants to the customer at the right time, at the right place and right now. The happiness in the Little things like eating out, watching movies, going out with friends, enjoying a dinner with a loved one, an adventurous impromptu trip, a corner chai cup is increased manifolds on Little App that brings to its customers the best deals from the best merchants in an easy and convenient way, with its presence currently in over 11 cities. Little is building the largest O2O supply side infrastructure. Little is available on Android, iOS and Windows Phone.
The company is headquartered in Bangalore, launched the app in 11 cities namely Delhi / NCR, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Goa, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Chandigarh and the tri-city area, Ahmadabad.
Little is available on
Android,
iOS,
Windows for download.
Manish Chopra is the CEO and co-founder of ‘Little’. He is also the CEO of India’s leading online fashion brand Zovi. Manish was the former Chief Marketing and Operations Officer at Microsoft in Indonesia and CMO, APAC for ERP/CRM. He completed his Bachelor’s Degree in Physics from The University of Punjab and later went on to complete his MBA from S.P Jain Institute of Management and Research.
Sujata Sangwan Interacts With Manish Chopra, CEO and Co-founder, Little And Spoke To Him
How was Little started? Around 2015, we saw a lot of traction moving towards the online marketplaces. We went after a huge opportunity at that time in mobile platform in India in the O2O space. We came to know that the O2O was about to explode and along with that smartphone growth was also exploding.
We built a team to build an app to connect thousands of merchants who have services to sell across verticals like health and wellness, food and beverage, entertainment, last minute hotel bookings.
Little is the “Connector” between the customer who wants to have great experiences and awesome deals on those “experiences” and the merchant who is ready to offer the same to the customer. We are an online to offline market place, absolutely one of its kinds where customer has all the empowerment to make intelligent choices using our App. The problem solved here is the lack of an organized national player to make this happen. Little does it with finesse using world class app great deals at the right time and NOW, merchant strength and user experience. The real differentiator is the scale and depth of the merchant ecosystem. Fantastic Deals around you – can only be realized by having the largest ecosystem.
Unique key feature/services India largest aggregator or marketplace of lifestyle moments in Restaurants, Last Minute Hotels and Holidays, Entertainment, Spa and Wellness and a host of other services.
Little’s Merchant ecosystem – by far the largest and deepest in this space.
Personalization on the app – deals that are super relevant to each customer and hence empowers the customer to make great choices.
Ease of use for consumption of deals – hassle free simple redemption and no hiccups. Also the App user interface is seamless, simple and instant.
How is it different from existing ones?Many players have been trying to address this need for the last 5-7 years with fundamentally marginal impact. From group buying companies who buy deal vouchers in bulk and then push them via daily deal of the day emails to small ticket coupon distributors who primarily use Telco channels to spray users with token discounts. These old models don't address the primary need of the merchants for time sensitive capacity utilisation.
Funding status We raised $50 million from Paytm, SAIF Partners, Tiger Global and GIC Singapore.
Monetization model We are a services marketplace where we provide a platform for tens of thousands of merchant organization to reach millions of consumers on their smartphones. We charge the merchants a small fee between 6-8% for providing the platform including the payment facilitation.
Traction details
Last five months on a robust base, we have been growing our revenue by more than 25% month on month. We have proven in the short and rapid scale up in the key cities that we have a strong product market fit that is really clicking in establishing the "hyper-local consumption" behaviour. 66% of all our orders are bought and consumed in very close vicinity of the merchant outlets. In a span of 10 months – how they have already signed on 11,000 merchants who are offering 30,000 deals in 11 cities. This is great traction in such a short span of time. We have 1 Million downloads.
Future plans Going forward, Little will focus on sectors like entertainment, health and wellness, food and last minute hotel booking. And it is also about bringing happiness to customers in a way that the deals are available to the consumer as and when he/she wants it.
Challenges facedHiring the right kind of people quickly was a significant challenge. We need senior leaders as well as young dynamic frontline business development people. Training and retaining them is already a major challenge.
