Identifying discounts and offers on alcoholic beverages nearby with Vgulp

Deal and discount bring smile to our faces, and the smile becomes bigger when we get discount while gulping beer with friends. Next time when you are planning booze with friends in Bangalore - don’t forget to check Vgulp, a portal which aggregates deals across bars, pubs and wine shops. Currently, the startup offers deal in areas like Kormangla, HSR Layout, Bellandur including others.

Vgulp, based out of Bangalore, creates list of wine shops, bar and pubs in a given location with details such as address with Google map integration, nature of deals and happy hours. Speaking about thoughts behind the venture Anand Janardhanan said, “While hanging around with friends I felt the need for an online portal that carries details of discount and freebies offered by wine shops, pubs, bar etc. At the same time there are a lot of good wine and dine places that don't have enough walk-ins or awareness, and they resort to putting a lot of deals - that there are no takers for. So we decided to bridge that gap. In the process what we realized is most of the places fall into the category and almost everyone is okay to put deals out there, because it's comparatively better to offer discounts on drinks, rather than food.”

Founded by Anand Janardhanan and Ajeesh Udumbath Vgulp charges businesses for putting up a deal on its site. Pricing depends on characteristic like nature of the deal, and the timeline one wants to run it. So far the company is being bootstrapped and run by founders, however, it plans to hire people on the business development and technology front. In terms of traction Vgulp has given access to 1600 users, and around 4000+ more are in the queue to get approval.

In next six months the startup aspires to expand into major cities of the country and improve the product on social, analytics, mobile, administration and gamification fronts. “Besides India we have identified partners for our international expansion in three countries - UK, Spain and Singapore,” added Janardhanan . Vgulp aims to reach 50000 users in the next two months and to raise venture capital funding to scale further.

At present liquor industry is about $3 billion in India and growing at 12-15% year on year. Given that one out of every five Indians consumes alcohol, the opportunity is big for startups in this vertical; however, already we have horizontal deal aggregators like Groupon and Mydala. It would nevertheless be interesting to watch how Vgulp fares up in future.