MetroMela…joins the race for city centric community sites

Metromela is a city centric website for helping users find information, share reviews and get deals. This has been rolled out for 7 cities in South & West India - Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, Mysore, Vizag and Cochin. Its founders are a bunch of seasoned professionals, that includes Satheesh Andra, a Venture Partner at DFJ (Draper Fisher Jurvetson). In fact as the about section (board members) indicates, the website is his brainchild. The company is based out of Hyderabad and has offices in Chennai, Bangalore & Pune.

Metromela is currently focusing on three sections– Shopping, Food & Entertainment, Health & Wellness and Family & Kids. It gives out related vendor listings and reviews written about those vendors. The site believes that this approach is a counter-weight to the typical approach of yellow pages, which offers lots of info but no way of drilling down into the relevant ones. They also collect deals, offers & discounts and aggregate it on the site. Users can suggest a vendor to be added, send notification about a deal in their neighbourhood or write their own reviews. There also is a rewards program for users to incentive their motivation (this sounds like a smart approach). The monetization is planned through charging vendors/retailers to reach out to the site’s users and generate leads from them. (the hot deals section contains sponsored links on the right).

This space has lots of competing websites with partial or complete overlap. In response to my question about their competitive advantage, Barkha Shah (MetroMela’s content head) indicated that their’s is the only website where you get an aggregation of expert reviews/guides, user/community review and deals. Their focus is far more wide spread than just shopping, food & entertainment which is where most of the other city-based sites are focused on.