Zomato Planning to expand its Biz
Zomato Planning to expand its Biz

Zomato, a young Indian restaurant search platform has expanded from 13 Indian cities to eight foreign cities, including London in less than a year where it will slug it out with Yelp, TripAdvisor and local players.

Deepinder Goyal, Zomato’s said, “It took 24 people 35 days of walking around for ten hours a day to collect the data on London’s roughly 18,000 restaurants. Four people in the London office will continue walking the streets to ensure Zomato’s data remains fresh”. Zomato will be available in Jakrata also by the end of July.

Zomato offers complete menus—updated every 90 days—for most of the 98,000 restaurants in its list.  Zomato send people to visit restaurants in cities to know an updated menus and information. They collect menu cards, address and phone details.

Goyal says Zomato is offering a higher level of service: For every new city, Zomato’s founders and senior staff accompany local hires to collect information from restaurants. The staffs are rapidly expanding. Goyal plans to hire 200 employees to its 250 this year, most of them in sales.

Zomato’s losses came to $1.83 million on revenues of $2 million in its latest financial year, mostly due to expansion. Goyal says Zomato is breaking even in India and will soon do the same in Dubai, even though he hasn’t yet started selling ads on mobile and has only filled 15% of available ad space on the website. But Goyal is less worried about boosting revenues and more concerned with finding good talent.

According to Zomato, its app has been downloded 2 million times, and its combined web and mobile traffic for the past month was 14 million. (For some context, Yelp attracts some 100 million unique visitors every month.) Zomato’s mission is narrower, says Goyal, “Our mission is to be the Lonely Planet of food,” he added.

 
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