Shouut wants to make life offline better with expert advice and offers

Facebook Events are a great way to visit new places, meet new people, and gather new experiences. But that's not Facebook's prime focus. Shouut on the other hand makes 'discovery and experiences' its only business.

The app and website focus on getting the best offline deals and recommendations from over 1,000 towns and 150 experts consisting bloggers, travel writers, publications and experience providers.

Shouut aggregates experiences from the likes of So Delhi, Lonely Planet, The Daily Pao and Kunzum Travels. The app lets you choose from flash sales, offers, travel, experiences and discovery. The flash sale feature works a little like treasure hunt. If you're near a store that has a limited time offer, you will be notified.

Shouut is partnering with Reliance Digital, Shoppers Stop, Croma, DLF Promenade and Benetton among others for this feature. However, the flash sales will only be available if you're within a specified distance from the corresponding store.

The backbone of Shouut's recommendations, called "Shouuts" are 250 character descriptions of places and events by experts such as publications, bloggers and writers among others. They shower recommendations and experiences at places you're travelling to, or even near home. So, if you like someone's recommendations, follow them to receive their Shouuts in your feed. Over a period of time, your feed will have an endless supply of things to do over the weekend or just activities to take part in after work. Or at least, that's the idea.

Shouut's founder, Praveer Kochhar isn't new to the idea of helping the experienced share their recommendations with people looking for advice for their next journey. Before Shouut, Kochhar ran Xbhp — a decade-old site for motorcycle enthusiasts to exchange experiences and advice. With Shouut, he is bringing a similar human touch to a wider audience. There is more interaction with the ability to follow experts and tailor your time spent outside the office.

In an attempt to gather more users, Shouut has pledged a sum of ₹1 crore to fund discovery experience all over the country. Anyone can go to the Fund section and start a Kickstarter-like campaign for an event or trip. Kickstarter lets users start campaigns to raise funds for projects or businesses, and people interested in them pool in money to pre-order the services or products till it reaches a goal amount. Similarly, Shouut lets you turn your idea of a discovery experience into a campaign that could get funded by Shouut if it manages to gather enough interest.

Shouut clearly wants to be your one-stop-recommendation site for dining, shopping, partying and anything you'd do in your spare time. As a lifestyle app, the ambition driving Shouut is exciting, but as Kochhar says, "the idea is take our sales, experiences and discovery back offline. With e-commerce sites and everything else going online, Shouut has an advantage by working closely with the space relatively neglected when compared to the world wide web — the offline world."