Cita Marketplace give everybody access.

Experience a new way to dine with Cita, the premier reservation marketplace.

About the founder 👤

Serial Entrepreneur Arya Toufanian is no novice to the world of business. In high school, Arya wrote a book but shortly realized that with anything you do, you need a platform to succeed. He proceeded to attend George Washington University but dropped out after 3 months after something big happened. Arya and fellow entrepreneur Yofray Ray built a company named ImShmacked. If you were in high school or college anytime during the 2010s you probably heard of ImShmacked. ImShmacked was a digital media company that blew up off going from college to college and recording the biggest parties and events of schools. A lot of incoming college students at the time even claimed that it was how they decided on their school. ImShmacked’s Youtube channel only boasted 8,000,000+ views, so you may say that isn’t a lot in this day in age so where is the money coming from? ImShmacked would return back to schools and sell branded gear, tickets to their events, and more. Arya and his team created an umbrella of different businesses to profit from with ImShmacked overseeing all of them. ImShmacked ultimately shutdown operations due to allegations and a false New York Times hit piece that led to them getting investigated by the DOJ SDNY and FBI. If you’re not already familiar with Toufanian, here’s the scoop…

• Arya’s first company, ImShmacked, closed a series A funding round that valued them at $5,000,000

• Netflix, HBO Max, and other big name media companies are all fighting for rights to a documentary about his life

• His verified instagram account @Aryatoufanian boasted 167,000 followers and a verification checkmark before being terminated in response to the allegations

Discovering a golden opportunity 💡

As motivational speaker Brian Tracy said, successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. This is how Cita came about. Arya was scrolling through TikTok and stumbled upon a video of a food reviewer jokingly stating, “You peasants will never sit at carbone.” A lot of the comments on the video were people stating how they’ve been having trouble getting reservations at these high end restaurants and a lightbulb lit up in Arya’s head, the idea to build a platform that would enable customers to buy reservations to high end restaurants. He started out with just an excel spreadsheet and some reservations he had sold but quickly built a website. In the first thirty days he did just around $10,000 in profit until American Express sent him a cease and desist letter. Amex, the parent company of Resy, which is a platform that also offers features for restaurant owners and operators, such as table management, guest management, and reservation sales. This letter put a halt in Cita’s operations but also gave them time to change the platform to a peer to peer reservation selling platform that relaunched in April 2023.

Welcome to Cita Marketplace 🏪

Cita is a reservation marketplace that currently serves high end restaurants in New York City, Miami, Malibu, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Boston, and Paris. Their business model is simple, anyone can list a reservation to a restaurant that Cita offers and if the reservation gets approved and sells, Cita takes 30% of the sale price which is listed as a “service fee” and the rest goes instantly to the seller's Stripe account. Cita offers users the opportunity to create their own shop where they can post their own reservations, similar to an eBay shop. They even give users the chance to have their own affiliate link they can share and they can earn 10% on select reservation purchases using their link.

How profitable is Cita 💵 ?

In the past 45 days Cita has done $17,500 in revenue with $11,500 in profit without any marketing spend. They possess on average a staggering 70% profit margin, compared to a usual marketplace, in which a good profit margin is 10-30%.

What is the growth potential of this business 🌎?

In one of his many viral TikTok’s, Arya states that “It’s very easy for us to expand, based on the fact that we can kind of jump onto pre existing infrastructure. Based off of like Opentable, Resy, and all these different platforms that already exist in different countries. As long as these platforms exist in third-party countries, we’re able to operate our business quite quickly and efficiently in those countries as well.” Cita can essentially run anywhere where there is already a reservation space and high end restaurants that average people can’t get into, but want to dine at.

Where are they in the funding process💱?

Cita raised over $100,000 in 72 hours only using Arya’s instagram (@Arya.finsta) in a friends and family round via a Capital.xyz SAFE agreement (Simple agreement for future equity). Cita is now pitching angel investors and venture capitalists to begin their next round aiming to hit the $10 Million valuation mark. Arya’s grasp on understanding how to use social media to build startups has helped Cita greatly. In a video on TikTok he states that “There’s no dire need to raise money.” Startups similar to Cita that don’t urgently need to raise money usually get investors throwing money at them to rapidly accelerate growth and scalability while also increasing market demand and business valuation.

🐦 @Citamarketplace