While vacationing in Hong Kong in February this year, Delhi resident Praveer Kochhar had trouble navigating the city’s cultural and culinary landscapes. He was armed with recommendations from his hotel, Hong Kong-focused blogs and Tripadvisor, but the lack of a definitive guide to the city made its exploration cumbersome. Eight months after his return to India, Kochhar, who has worked in online retail and content since 2005, has launched Shouut, a free mobile application that recommends places to eat, shop, drink, stay and visit across India.
“The idea was fairly simple,” said Kochhar, who until last week was also a partner at xBhp.com, an online magazine for motorbiking enthusiasts.”I thought, ‘What if I was in a new city in an unexplored neighbourhood and a local gem of a restaurant could shout out to me through an app that it was close by?’. That’s when I registered the domain name Shouut.com.” Kochhar was joined in the venture by Pulkit Srivastava, a former public relations professional and Rajiv Prakash, who has a background in retail. Unlike TripAdvisor.com, whose recommendations Kochhar finds largely pedestrian, Shouut aggregates recommendations by experts in the spheres of food, shopping, nightlife and travel, as opposed to user-generated suggestions. The experts, called Shouut partners, include city-specific websites; fashion, food and travel bloggers; individuals such as yoga professionals and chefs; and travel magazines.
In Mumbai for instance, Shouut users can peruse recommendations related to food, shopping, nightlife and sightseeing by The Daily Pao, in addition to fashion picks by What When Wear, a style blog by Aanam M. R. Chasmawala and travel and accommodation suggestions by Tripzuki, a booking and recommendations website focused on boutique hotels across the country. Shouut partners in Delhi, where they are headquartered, include So Delhi, an online guide to the capital’s food, nightlife, events and attractions, and tour companies Delhi Food Walks and Delhi By Foot. Travel magazine Lonely Planet is also among the application’s growing list of content partners; they currently have 60.
Like Fourquare.com, Shouut employs geolocation to identify where a user is situated and fetches recommendations nearest to their location. In addition to being a search and discovery app, Shouut will also have a rewards programme. Restaurants, bars, malls, boutiques and other commercial enterprises can promote ongoing deals on the app and provide personalised rewards to Shouut users. The app is currently only available to Android users and will be iOS compatible by November. So far, they’ve aggregated over 7,000 Shouuts from across the country – for spots in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Mangalore, Delhi, Goa and Himachal Pradesh – and are aiming to populate the app with over 50,000 recommendations over the next six months. “We want to be as exhaustive as possible so that anyone new to the country or a city within India will only look to us for recommendations,” said Kochhar.
Android users can follow The Daily Pao on Shouut, which is available to download for free here.