CityShor claims to be operationally profitable: Will open up in other cities

We spoke about Ahmedabad based CityShor, which identifies the 'treasure troves of Ahmedabad', all the ‘hidden must-dos’ of the city, only a couple of months back, when they had formally launched their website in April 2013 (the business has been in operation since January 2013). What was uncertain at that point was how they would manage to sustain a business that thrives on and competes with other businesses’ own social media presence to grab eyeballs, when they were using the same mediums to promote these businesses.

Speaking of their growth in the last few months, Co-founder Pallav Parikh tells us ecstatically, that in a short span, the business has managed to become cash positive. On the revenue model, Pallav says, "we primarily have two revenue models i.e. advertisements on the website and advertorials - money that we charge for any follow up features on a business, which has benefited from the first free feature. The larger chunk of our revenue is contributed by advertorials".

In this age of social media, when it is relatively easy to promote one’s business, why are businesses agreeing to pay CityShor for the feature? Pallav explains this with their strategy and supports it with statistics.

"We have been able to increase a café’s turnover to 400%, managed to contribute 85% of foot-falls for a restaurant for few days and were also able to get close to half a million rupees sale to an exhibitor. People tell us we bring in more business than traditional advertising avenues such as newspaper or radio, and we believe it is because unlike advertisements, we focus on only two retailers every day", he explains.

Their strategy, Pallav says is twofold: provide really good recommendation only which has resulted in them becoming ‘a name to reckon with’ in Ahmedabad and secondly make the whole content available on their social media site. "We provide entire article and photographs on our Facebook page. We believe that if you try and divert people from Facebook page or Emails to website, you may get the traffic on your website but less people will actually consume the content”, he says elaborating on their strategy.

Through this strategy, CityShor is able to significantly increase footfalls for retailer’s place, which encourages them to pay for follow up features. As of today, CityShor has over 88000 followers on their Facebook page.

The company has also tied up with radio channel My FM in Ahmedabad, and has a dedicated a daily slot during their peak hour talking about CityShor discoveries. With expansion plans into other cities in the horizon, CityShor has a long way to go, on this much travelled ‘advertorial path’.

While their growth in Ahmedabad is creditable, the founders are likely to face several challenges in replicating this model is other cities (a crucial element in scaling up). Since the revenue model relies substantially on paid follow up features, and the success of the business depends on credibility of their recommendations, finding the right the team in different cities will be of essence.