MetroMela - Local Information & Reviews on Shopping, Health & Family!
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Metromela is a new startup on the block based in Hyderabad which is catering to the local information services space in India. Though there are a bunch of players in this space like local search engines like guruji, justdial, onyomo, burrp and calssified players like sulekha, indialist, click.in and others. Metromela is trying to be different by providing editorial content, community feedback and deals on one platform for white collared individuals who might be frequent travellers.
Inorder to attract users to their site Metromela is tying up with local hotels and having their deal brochure circulated among the hotel guests. A similar strategy is also followed for local newspapers as well.
Currently metromela provides information under three sections ‘Shopping, Food & Entertainment,’ ‘Health & Wellness’ and ‘Family & Kids’ across 7 cities – Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Cochin, Vizag and Mysore. They will be expanding to 16 cities by next year. The new cities include Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Coimbatore, Trivandrum and Bhubaneshwar.Â
According Pankaj Joshi VP - Marketing at MetroMela they plan to monetize the site by charging vendors for business listing and providing them a platform and tools to promote their brand to a local buyer audience.
As far as current userbase is concerned it is  at about 10,000 users but they are targeting to reach about a million in the next three month! Quite a tall task i must say… Over all Metromela different in its approach to local information listings though i feel they can do with a better home page (its too static for my liking.). Instead of complete images they could have had tabs for each section and the homepage could have been a mixture of most popular and latest vendor listings across cities.
On the strategy level i see an opportunity for Metromela to tie up with OTA’s (Online travel agents) like makemytrip, yatra or even search engines like ixigo and zoomtra to have their local listing appear after a user selects a destination he chooses to fly. This will do targetted branding among first time vistors of a city who are the most in need of the kind of information services provided by Metromela. All in all a decent start but still a long way to go for metromela to get real traction in the local information space.
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Just a Clarification - we expect to reach 1 million target customers in next 3 months through our marketing campaigns. I agree with you that having i million registered users in next 3 months is a very tall order