Suchita Salwan, Who Turned A City Into A Product
Every Indian metro contains thousands of small businesses that are genuinely good and effectively invisible. They cannot buy media, they do not rank, and the platforms that list them treat them as rows in a database.
Suchita Salwan started Little Black Book in 2011 as a blog about where to go in Delhi, and built it into a city discovery and recommendation platform that now covers several Indian cities.
The blog was a positioning decision
Starting as writing rather than as a directory set the tone for everything after it. A listing tells you a place exists; a recommendation tells you somebody went and thought it was worth your evening.
That is a media product, not a database, and it meant the platform's value was editorial judgement from the first day.
Why small businesses could use it
Because the unit of advertising was small. A neighbourhood store, a studio or a new cafe could be featured and reach an audience that was already in a discovery mood, without a media plan or an agency.
Most Indian advertising infrastructure is built for advertisers who can spend in lakhs. The gap under that has been largely unserved, and it is enormous.
The hardest audience to sell advertising to is the business that has never bought any, and that is most of urban India.
The trust problem every recommendation platform meets
If everything featured is paid, the recommendation is worthless. If nothing is, there is no business. Every publication that has tried to do both has had to answer that question in public, and the answer has to be visible to readers rather than only to advertisers.
City by city is a slow expansion
A local recommendation product does not scale like software. Each new city needs its own contributors, its own taste and its own sales relationships, which is a people business dressed as a platform.
What the industry should notice
That a category of advertiser has been sitting outside the market for decades, and the companies that reach them will not look like agencies. They will look like publications that happen to sell.