This startup wants to change the way people spend their free time

A group of friends in Bangalore, 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 realized 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.

Free poha, anyone?

The startup has three sources to aggregate the events. “We crawl nearly 40 websites to find out what’s happening in the city,” says Jain. 30 percent of Townista’s content comes from about 200 event organizers in Bangalore. For niche segments like photography exhibitions, it has experts from the space who keep Townista posted.

To build its product and communicate with its target audience, Townista ran offline campaigns. As a thought experiment for people to know about Townista, the startup gave out free poha, an Indian snack made out of flat rice, to people and in return, asked them to download the app. This gimmick helped them understand how people perceived the app and receive instant feedback. It also spiked their app downloads by 200 on the same day.

“Since May this year, our product has achieved a good market fit and we have been doubling up the user base,” Jain says. Townista’s downloads have increased by nearly 10,000 in the last three months.

The startup is currently pre-revenue. The main sources of revenue are ticketing and promotions. 80 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. The app is free for users looking for events and is paid for users looking to register their events. Depending on the requirements and the size of the event, the pricing can vary from INR 4,000 to INR 15,000 (US$62 to US$232).

Geared toward informed decisions

Explara is another events discovery site based in Bangalore. It was founded in 2008 and is present in over 20 countries. Over the last six years, Explara has made over US$2 million in ticketing revenues alone. Meetup and Events High are two others available in India.

“The point of having an event discovery platform is to help people find exactly what they need and making the content actionable,” Jain says. He believes that there is no sense in just aggregating all the events that are taking place in a certain locality and putting it up for people to browse. “We find over 1,200 events every week but we don’t want to post all of them on the app. So our content goes through manual curation to make sure that every detail of an event is verified and allows users to make informed decisions,” he adds.

Townista was part of GSF India’s mobile accelerator program in April. The startup raised US$50,000 in seed funding from GSF India around then.

The startup 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.