Fancy a deal?

In today’s competitive market, neither can merchants afford to lose their customers nor do customers like to be fooled by vendors. To provide maximum bang for the buck to both parties, Manish Chopra and Satish Mani co-founded Little, a mobile application that acts as a marketplace for deals being offered by restaurants, hotels, salons, gyms, spas and others. “While our application alerts customers, it helps merchants put up last minute offers and exit excess inventory,” says Chopra.

The start-up has already been able to raise funding from a group of investors led by One97Communications (which runs mobile commerce venture Paytm), SAIF Partners and Tiger Global Management. Chopra and Mani who earlier co-founded Zovi, have divided the merchants in four verticals namely- food and beverages, lifestyle, entertainment and hotels. “While we have small vendors such as cafes on board, we also host bigger merchants like Pizza Hut, PVR, Mainland China etc,” adds Chopra. With a current presence in about 11 cities, Chopra claims to have about 500,000 customers currently.

The company provides a merchant app as well through which they can keep track of their revenue and validate voucher codes. Little charges a merchant fee ranging from 4-12%. With about 10,000 merchants on board, the startup is getting considerable repeat business and new ones through word of mouth. “We want to sign up more merchants and get into cities like Mysore, Lucknow, Indore, Vizag etc,” says Chopra. Even though the co-founders and its investors are gung-ho, only time will tell if it grows from little to large in the crowded offline-deal space.