What’s in a Zomato?

The seeds of “Zomato” were planted in 30-year-old Deepinder Goyal’s mind as he was lining up in the cafeteria of Bain and Company in New Delhi, during one auspicious lunch break five years ago.

At Bain, one of the largest management consulting firms in the world, he noticed that his colleagues lined up to view the stack of menu cards in the cafeteria during lunch hour as there was a rule that you could not take the menu cards to your desk since people generally ended up losing them.

“Looking at the queue, and to save the trouble for everyone, I just scanned these menu cards and put them online for everyone to use. This small intranet website started getting a substantial number of hits from people within Bain. That is when we realized that we can build a business out of scanned menus. That is how Zomato was born,” Deepi, as he is fondly called, recalled during a recent visit to Manila. He is now the CEO and founder of Zomato, which he started in his apartment after leaving Bain in 2008.

Zomato is the ultimate foodie’s online directory of restaurants. To this date, Zomato is present in seven countries, and was launched in Manila last March 21. It provides extensive information including menus, pictures, user reviews and ratings for over 9,500 restaurants in Metro Manila and a total of 94,000 restaurants worldwide. Its mobile app, one of the most popular apps across various countries for food and drink, has seen over two million downloads across different platforms. 

“Manila loves food,” Deepi, who has Mathematics and Computer degrees tucked under his belt, correctly observes. “And that shows as we currently get about 10,000 people visiting us every day to look for delivery/dining/nightlife options. A large portion of these visitors, understandably, visit us from Makati, Quezon City, Mandaluyong and Taguig (BGC area).”

According to Deepi, Zomato has an in-house content team that sources, moderates and updates all the information (except user reviews and ratings) on the website and refreshes it every 90 days.

“We are not afraid to hit the streets and go door-to-door to collect menus, pictures, map coordinates and other information straight from the restaurants. We welcome user generated data; however everything on the website is highly moderated by our in-house team. We are the only website in our sector with menus for over 95 percent of the restaurants listed with us. We make sure we give the user all the information required to decide if he wants to go to a restaurant or not, and we give this information for every restaurant in the city,” he elaborates.

What’s his stance on user reviews — quality or quantity?

“Over the last four years, we have come to realize that the quality of the reviews outweighs the quantity of the reviews by far. We have built social layers on the website to encourage more users to write genuine reviews about their experiences and have seen a great response with more meaningful significant reviews coming in over the last couple of months.

“Another interesting observation when it comes to reviews is that consumers normally use forums to write reviews when they are extremely happy or extremely disappointed with the service and/or food. Hence, it was absolutely essential for us to build the social layer, which would push the quality of the reviews and not just the quantity,” he points out.

Zomato keeps track of fake and competitive reviews as much as possible by looking at the origin and timings of reviews and removing them if it is confident of them being spam or fake. “But no spam-control can be perfect and we keep improving our systems whenever a smart and determined spammer forces us to,” Deepi stresses.

So far, it’s been an “exhilarating” journey for Deepi. His Zomato has not only grown, it has multiplied.

“The last four years have been nothing short of exhilarating for me, both personally and professionally. From zero to 11 million users per month, two million-plus app downloads, over 250 young and enthusiastic Zomans spread across 15 offices across seven countries, 94,000-plus restaurant listings and over 2,000 clients. We expanded to the UAE, UK, Qatar, Sri Lanka, South Africa and the Philippines only over the last few months. After the initial success of our Dubai section in the international markets, we gained the confidence we needed to further our international expansion, and haven’t looked back since.”

So you see, all you need is a seed of an innovative idea to come up with something as fast-growing as Zomato.

(You may e-mail me at joanneraeramirez@yahoo.com.)