A booking-flow decision, not a sales tactic
Every neighbourhood in GoWith Places has a cap on how many venues surface per category in the booking flow. Bandra West is six cafes. When the seventh applies, the seventh waits.
That's a product decision, not a scarcity trick. A booker who sees thirty cafes in a bottom sheet picks none of them — they close it and text 'let's decide there'. Six is the number where a picker still feels like a picker.
Why saying it out loud works
Because it's true, we get to say it in the partner pitch: 'We surface six cafes in Bandra West. Four are taken.' No countdown timer, no manufactured urgency. Just a number the partner can walk down their own street and verify.
What happens when the slot fills
The seventh cafe onwards enters a waitlist. When one of the six pauses long enough — three weeks with zero meets, or self-pauses via the portal — the top of the waitlist gets an email. When paid placement launches later this year, the waitlist becomes the first cohort of paying partners, and the six free spots stay free.
“Never show a logo of a venue that has not signed. One fabricated scarcity claim gets repeated at every counter on the street, and the programme dies.”
The dashboard shows the number
Every partner sees the neighbourhood cap and the current count on their portal home. That's what makes the urgency legitimate — a number they can watch move up as the surrounding cafes join.