Founder, Little Black Book (LBB) | Founded 2011 | New Delhi
A Delhi girl in a hard-working family
Suchita Salwan was born and raised in Delhi, the city she would later spend a decade writing about. Her mother is a cardiologist and her father a lawyer. Her father’s family runs a chain of schools and a furnishing business, and her maternal grandfather served in the army. “Everyone in my family is very ‘type A’ and works their tails off,” she said in a 2025 interview for The Bellwether Club. She told SheThePeople that both her parents had built their careers from scratch, and that her family has always been her backbone.
She studied economics at Hindu College, Delhi University, graduating in 2010. By her own account she had “a more creative bent of mind” than the degree suggested. Years later she joked to afaqs! that the degree made her “the most unqualified person to launch a tech-media startup.”
Ceremonies, television and the weekend problem
Her working life began with an internship at the United Nations. She then spent about a year at the events company Wizcraft, where she worked on the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, productions with a cast and crew of more than 14,000.
In 2011, at 21, she joined the BBC. She was one of two people running marketing and communications for BBC Entertainment, a channel then newly launched in India. She had no background in television, so she had to learn distribution, programming and social media on the job.
She had a salary, no big liabilities and free weekends, and she kept running into the same problem: what to do with them. The listing sites of the time, such as Zomato, Justdial and BookMyShow, mostly showed her places she already knew, with no good way to find out what was new. She was also tired of hearing people say Delhi was boring. “How do I find things to do in my city?” was the question, she told SheThePeople.
A Tumblr blog and her own savings
Her answer was a Tumblr blog called Little Black Book. Inc42 and Forbes India date its start to 2011; YourStory gives 2012. She wrote about the cafés, shops, walks and corners of Delhi she liked. “I started blogging about the city. An exploration, really,” she told Inc42. To YourStory she described it as “a way to document all that I loved discovering in Delhi.”
The money came from her own pocket. “My initial capital was my savings of Rs.40,000!” she said in the 2025 Bellwether Club interview. (In a 2017 afaqs! profile the starting investment was reported as ₹80,000.) She was clear that this was never a start-up plan. “I did not start LBB with the goal to make it even a fundable business,” she said. Inc42 reported that she was 23 at the time and had, in her words, “no real ambition to become an entrepreneur.”
The blog spread anyway, mostly by word of mouth. Around the end of 2012, by her account to YourStory, she left the BBC to run it full time (Inc42 puts the move in 2013). “I was young then and I knew I could afford to take the risk,” she later told Forbes India.
Six months of walking tours
Leaving the job brought the problem the blog had never had to solve: money. A list of good places to go is not, on its own, a business, and it took time to work out how LBB would earn.
While she worked that out, she earned from the thing she already had: what she knew about the city. She told afaqs! in 2017, “I spent six months taking old, white people on tours to Lodhi Garden, Hauz Khas Village and the like.” She was charging visitors for the knowledge she had been collecting for the blog anyway.
The company itself grew slowly. Through 2013 and 2014, Suchita, three colleagues and a group of interns kept writing, photographing and running events. Forbes India reported that she spent ₹70,000 on a working space in 2013, and that because the contributors were in-house, the content cost almost nothing. “We spent the first two years just figuring out PMF,” she told Inc42, meaning product–market fit. “We were bootstrapped for two years before we pitched to our first set of investors.”
By 2013 the blog had about 10,000 users in Delhi. By December 2014 it had about 80,000 unique visitors a month. Around mid-2014 Dhruv Mathur, a Carnegie Mellon graduate who had worked at Deloitte in the Bay Area and founded getFbPay, joined as co-founder and chief technology officer. That brought in what Suchita, with no technical background, did not have. She also learned to code during this period.
From blog to platform
In 2015 the investors came. LBB’s seed round included Rajan Anandan, Sachin Bhatia and the Singapore Angel Network. Inc42 put it at $165,000; Forbes India at ₹1 crore. Advertising was the main business, from global brands such as Reebok, Pepsi, Airbnb and Samsung as well as local cafés and fashion labels. YourStory reported that revenue grew 500% between March and December 2015.
LBB launched in Mumbai in August 2015 and in Bengaluru the following month. Its apps arrived that November, and the team grew to about 30. In 2016 it raised $1.2 million from IDG Ventures India and the Indian Angel Network, more than double the roughly $500,000 Suchita had set out to raise. Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru together listed about 12,000 things to do.
The next shift was in who wrote the content. In 2017 LBB opened the platform to users’ own recommendations. In 2018 it began letting merchants, many of them small, home-grown brands, sell directly on it. The company was turning from a guide into a shop. She admitted later that real clarity about what LBB was came late: “I don’t think that came before 2018.”
In April 2019 LBB raised a $5 million Series A led by Inventus India and the IAN Fund, joined by the Japanese investors Dream Incubator and the AET Fund, with Blume Ventures and Chiratae Ventures also investing. That took its total funding to about $7.5 million. YourStory reported that LBB then had about 3.5 million monthly users, more than 60,000 local brands and businesses, eight cities and a team of 85. Forbes India named her one of its self-made women in 2020 and reported 4.5 million monthly active users. “Sixty-five percent of our merchants don’t sell anywhere else,” she told the magazine, and “Today 30 percent of our orders come from places we aren’t present in.”
The hard years
Profit stayed out of reach. In the March 2020 Forbes India piece Suchita said, “Becoming profitable is not a very long journey.” Within weeks the pandemic shut the cafés, events and outings that LBB had been built around.
The Ken later reported that LBB’s losses exceeded its revenue in four of the five years to 2021. By its figures, the company lost about ₹13 crore on revenue of about ₹9 crore in the year to March 2021. (Business Today reported revenue of ₹19.44 crore for the same year.) The Ken also reported that a ₹5 crore fundraise in December 2021 raised LBB’s valuation by less than 10%, to about ₹130 crore. In February 2022 LBB stopped onboarding new brands to its marketplace, which by then had more than 3,500 of them, and in April it told staff to focus on fashion content.
A new home at Nykaa, and a new role
On 5 August 2022 Nykaa’s board approved buying 100% of LBB in an all-cash deal for an undisclosed sum. Nykaa is the beauty and fashion company founded by Falguni Nayar. It valued LBB’s content, its creator network and its ties to emerging brands, and LBB was then claiming more than 70 million users across its channels. “Through this partnership with Nykaa, we’re excited to scale to even greater heights,” Suchita said. Nykaa told the stock exchanges that the deal was complete on 10 September 2022.
She stayed on to lead LBB inside Nykaa and spent nearly three years in senior roles there, covering content, brand marketing and Nykaa Luxe. In December 2025, Storyboard18 reported that Bharti Airtel had appointed her Chief Customer Officer, in charge of growth and brand strategy for its consumer business.
The blog she started with her savings no longer exists, but the habit behind it never changed: going out, finding the good places and telling other people about them. That habit took her from Tumblr to a seat at one of India’s largest telecom companies.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: YourStory (January 2016; April 2019); Inc42 (November 2016; AMA; September 2022); SheThePeople (June 2016); afaqs! (September 2017); Forbes India (March 2020); Business Today (August 2022); OfficeChai (August 2022); The Ken (August 2022); The Bellwether Club / LVX (July 2025); Storyboard18 (December 2025)
Cover photo: Forbes India.
