Craigslist, JustDial are toast. Raise a Toost to find what you need

Not very long ago, you were in a fix in a new city if you wanted to hire a plumber or a driver, or get a good dentist to pull out a mean molar. When Craiglist and later its Indian avatar JustDial came up with exhaustive listings, we suddenly had enough and more options at our fingertips. But now, there are far too many plumbers, drivers, and dentists online and that has become the problem.

How do you know a plumber listed online isn’t a serial killer? What if the dentist with a handful of diplomas listed next to his name turns out to be a sadist who likes to yank out firm incisors? And the driver could be a rapist, as Uber found out too late in Delhi.

One safety check against such misfortunes is to ask a friend to recommend a service or a business. But how do you know which friend to ask? What if she doesn’t want to discuss her loose tooth with you?

Toost, an Android app launched today in India, claims to have answers to these questions. In near real time, it can find you a service provider your friends trust. It does that by using your phone graph [from your phone’s contacts, call flow, and location data] to tap into your friends’ circle, as well as friends of your friends, and mine out recommendations in and around your location.

“We all rely on word-of-mouth to take decisions on almost every product and service we use. If a friend recommends a business to you, you trust that. Toost brings that trust element to the mobile ecommerce ecosystem,” says Rohit Raghav, co-founder of Toost’s parent, Phone Warrior.

For the busy bees

Phone Warrior, founded by technologists Chandan Gupta and Vaibhav Padlikar two years ago, has a popular spam filtering app by the same name. Within a year of its launch in January 2013, the app had 500,000 installs and a database of 50 million people and businesses. That’s when US-based venture capital fund Lightspeed Venture Partners invested an undisclosed amount in the startup as seed capital.

Padlikar moved on and Rohit Raghav joined Phone Warrior as a co-founder in January 2015.

Today the startup revealed that Lightspeed has injected another dose of fresh capital in a pre-series A round to boost Toost – its new product.

Toost is more an extension of Phone Warrior than a pivot. “Our vision was always to make local search simpler, better, and reliable,” Raghav tells Tech in Asia.

Thanks to the parent app, Toost now has a ready database of 750 million people and businesses right at its launch. That’s their number across the globe. Of these, about 5 million are businesses and service providers in India, with Phone Warrior gaining traction fast in the past year, since its seed funding. “We have around 5 million installs across our apps. Toost has over 1 million installs,” says Raghav.