Zomato Start Up Story

Evolution of Zomato :

Starting initially with a team of 4 members the founders themselves were involved in collection of data. For the first 18 months after the launch of the website, the two co-founders were still in their jobs. At this time as they had not thought of generating any commercial value from the venture, the biggest challenge they faced was not money but time. While Gunjan was maintaining the website gradually work was increasing. Deepinder and Pankaj used to go out on day long drives to collect restaurant menus in Delhi. They had also employed Ashok who would go around Delhi collecting menus. Simply collecting menus and data entry took huge amount of time.

As Pankaj put it in his words during an interview with the Arabian Gazette – “While Deepinder and I were working at Bain & Company (management consulting), we noticed that a lot of our colleagues would use the stack of menus collected over time in the office cafeteria to order food. This set of menus was neither updated nor exhaustive, so we just asked ourselves: “What if these menus were available online?”

Some of the initial data collected were primarily from take-out outlets for which physical menus were freely available. After collection of about 1100 menus and 18 months later the team finally found their first success – A paying customer, willing to pay for the listing. That was the time that Deepinder and Pankaj finally decided to quit their jobs and spend full time into the venture. The venture which started as Foodiebay.com had commercial scope.

“Finally when we got a paying customer, we realized that what had started as just for fun had real commercial potential and it was then the Deepinder and I decided to quit and spend full time for Foodiebay”.

Initially about 15 Lacs was spent by the founders themselves to fund the transactions. There was no formal planning or organizational structure and the team decided among themselves about allocation of work dynamically (changing...