“Like Papa Wallenda said, ‘Life is on the wire, the rest is just waiting.’” – Mike McDermott, from the movie “Rounders”
Four years can feel like a very short time when you are having fun. Earlier this week, when we realized that it has been four years since Deepinder and I started Zomato, our initial reaction was one of confusion. We had to cross check with other significant life events to make sure we were right – and we were. After digesting this information, we decided to do something special and grand to celebrate this milestone, i.e. we decided to create an infographic.
What you see below is the fruit of four years of hard work of many people, and to each and every person, who has had a role to play in this journey; I want to say – Thank you!
The last four years have been nothing short of dramatic for the Zomato team. We started out of a living room and it took us almost two years to actually move into something that resembled an office (barely). We changed our name from Foodiebay to Zomato during this time, and learned constructive things like Deepinder should not be photographed next to small objects (he makes them look smaller or in most cases, eats them). We learned that girls will discuss their healthy eating habits while eating Oreos with iced tea. We tried to find answers to some of mankind’s burning questions, like which cake sticks the best (link to Sabse Chipku Cake).
Along the way, we were able to convince some people that behind the madness, we housed a kickass team that lived and breathed Zomato. They invested in us, and allowed us the freedom to grow from a few cities to ten and, even look beyond India. They allowed us to dream up visions of a Zomato that was there for our customers at all times (hello Zomato on Mobile). We even tried to go to places (err… Ahmedabad!) where only the brave souls venture, just so that no stone (dhokla?)remained unturned in our quest to help people discover more places to eat around them.
In fact, this desire to be the GPS for food, drove us (pun intended) to make product improvements that helped with every aspect of eating out. We launched Zomato’s social platform to bring together the foodie community and improved the UI of the website to get users to the relevant information accurately and efficiently.
Along the way we also helped a number of restaurants thrive as the process of word of mouth, got turbo charged from the Zomato community. Some of these places even ended up becoming our advertising clients and gave us the belief that our dreams of a sustainable business model around our passion for food were not delusional.
The single biggest contributing factor to everything we have been able to do so far, has been our terrific user community who have not only been our brand ambassadors but also our biggest marketing engine. They have believed in the product and prodded us along with suggestions, criticisms and hot tips. Our users, YOU, are the reason we have grown from Zero to Zomato in four years.
Cheers to a wonderful 4 years, and many more to come.
Pankaj Chaddah is the co-founder and COO of Zomato and tweets at @pankajchaddah. The article is reproduced from the Zomato blog.
