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[pankajchaddah]

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[pankajchaddah]

Presenting Collections: A new way to feed your fancy

As American food writer Mary Fisher rightly said, "First we eat, then we do everything else". It's fair to say all of us spend a good part of our lives trying to answer the "where should I go to eat (or drink ;)) today?" question. At Zomato, we'd like to believe that we've spoilt you for choice more often than not with our exhaustive coverage of restaurants. In the version of Zomato that we released last month, we made a mistake by looking at the wrong data set and taking out the "Top trending restaurants" section on Zomato. What followed was a deluge of emails asking why we removed this feature. That got us wondering about what we'd got wrong. We realised that a lot of our users open Zomato with no idea about what to search for. They just want to go out, and have a good time. This is where the "Top trending restaurants" kicked in. It was a list of popular restaurants in town — something that helped our users browse and decide quickly. We also took a deep dive into popular search queries on Zomato, which revealed that users look for very specific types of places to go — for example, you might be wondering where to take your significant other for a romantic dinner, or where you can find a microbrewery to beat the heat. So we decided to take the solution to this need gap a notch further by giving you a starting point based on popular themes and occasions, instead of you having to structure your thoughts into a search query. From today, Collections have you covered if you find yourself staring at the search bar not knowing what to search for.

From ravioli to romance

Collections are bite-sized lists of restaurants in your city that cover various themes and occasions to make deciding where to go easier than ever. We've worked hard to create Collections based on each city's unique flavours as well as seasonal trends. For example, you can gorge on the best burgers London has to offer, find pet-friendly restaurants in Bangalore that'll let you bring a furry friend along, or even have your tastebuds seduced by a master-chef at one of the celebrity chef restaurants in Dubai. The restaurants you see in Collections are picked by our intelligent algorithm, and then vetted by our in-house team of foodie ninjas to ensure only the tastiest get through.

Looks great, tastes better

Collections package the best your city has to offer into a simple, visually engaging experience. To showcase these great restaurants, we've designed a new card-based browsing experience on our apps that will keep you flipping through Collections for more! When something catches your eye, tuck it into your Wishlist for future deliciousness.

Collections are available on both, our website, as well as on our mobile apps across iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. So whether you're planning to laze at a beach bar in Lisbon, or you're stuck in Mumbai traffic dreaming about cupcakes, inspiration is always within reach. So go on, give Collections a nibble, and feed your fancy.

[pankajchaddah]

We're crazy. Not stupid.

The last 24 hours have been eventful for us, to say the least. We started off with the aim of putting Zomato in front of the awesome tech talent in Bangalore, but seems like it touched more nerves than hearts. In hindsight, we made one elementary mistake with this campaign - we took the ability to laugh at ourselves for granted. It hurt some feelings, and we are truly sorry for that.

What we thought was a cheeky dig at Bangalore spiralled into something we never imagined. We've seen all kinds of allegations flying around, and it was helped in no small part by the stereotype jokes on the parody of our original page (it has also been removed by its creator). Since the focus of the campaign has shifted a few hundred miles off course, we thought we should clarify a few things.

1. This was just a hiring campaign to attract the right talent, and not to offend, outrage, degrade, stereotype, or do any of the terrible things that have been claimed. We’re crazy, not stupid :-)

2. We've said it before, and we're happy to say it many times over. We love Bangalore, and we have absolutely nothing against the city or its people. In fact, this campaign wouldn’t have seen the light of day if not for the awesome tech talent there. We also admit we’re slightly jealous that Bangalore has better weather through the year, and got to enjoy Metallica.

3. None of the parody pages doing the rounds were created by us or anyone affiliated with Zomato. To the creators of those pages - hats off for the effort, but no thanks for the unwarranted sh*t it piled on us, because people thought that we created those pages too.

While we totally understand that this might have been a troll too far, some of the things that were said were mind-numbing. The suggestions that we're trying to create a racial divide in the country, or that we have anything against people from any part of the country, were disappointing. We were absolutely taken aback by people reacting with rape and crime posts; that was completely uncalled for. We admit we got the campaign wrong this time, but to those who gave it a racist, rapist or criminal tone - we are sorry, we are not with you. All said and done, we now know that campaigns like this one probably need more than five opinions before going live. And even though we've been getting some great applications, we've pulled the campaign down in the hope that it'll put an end to the confusion.

[pankajchaddah]

Introducing the new Zomato

Over the past few months, we've taken Zomato to new shores (Brazil, Turkey, and Indonesia, to name a few, with more on the way) and we realized that our product that worked wonderfully in the countries we're in, didn't quite match up to the expectations of what people were really looking for. What followed was a lot of talking to a lot of people who use Zomato regularly. Understanding how they use it. What they like about it. And more importantly, what it is that they dislike. Here are some things we heard from our users: Can you please make my search quicker and easier? Given the number of listings on Zomato, I have to spend a lot of time figuring out that perfect place to eat. Reduce the number of low-value reviews. Only show what is useful and relevant. Filter out the junk, and make it easy for me to read reviews from the people I choose to follow on Zomato. Can I please make Zomato my one-stop food journal? I would like to keep a record of what I ate, with pictures and reviews. A food journal of sorts. Can I get recommendations for places I might like from the people I follow? Make it easy for me to know what my friends are eating and what they like. There are some reviewers who don't understand the 5-point rating scale. The minimum rating they give is a 3 out of 5. Is there a way to normalize their effect on a restaurant's overall rating? Too many restaurants lie between 3.0 and 3.5 out of 5. It makes choosing very difficult. Is there a way to force rankings for restaurants in a city, like classroom rankings? All these questions and insights changed the way we think about Zomato. We also realized that in order to incorporate these things, we'd have to effectively rebuild the way Zomato works from scratch, without changing the basics that everyone is used to. Starting today, you will see a new Zomato. On the web, and on your mobile devices. We have completely rebuilt and redesigned the experience, and have tried to address most of the issues that have been bugging our users and giving us (many) sleepless nights. So here's what we did:

Q: Can you please make my search faster?

Searching for a place to eat is now easier than ever. While the easily-recognizable search bar stays, it's packing a lot of intelligence behind the scenes. Just start typing what you want - whether it's a restaurant, a cuisine, or a particular dish - and you'll find the suggestions rolling in. So now, instead of typing “<restaurant name> Zomato” on Google, you can get more than you bargained for with the new Zomato search. To be honest, it doesn't sound as cool when we talk about it, so we'd rather you see it for yourself.

Q: Can you reduce the number of low-value reviews on Zomato?

Now, for any restaurant, you will see three tabs for reviews: - Popular: These are reviews that score the highest in terms of value, based on our algorithm. - Following: This filters out everything else and shows reviews written only by people you follow. - All: As the name suggests, this shows all reviews for the restaurant by everyone sorted in a reverse chronological order. We will keep the low-value (junk/spam/fake) reviews away from you. P.S.: If you get junk from the people you followed, please unfollow them.

Q: Where's my food journal?

Any food experience worth having is a food experience worth sharing. We've made it way easier to upload pictures while on the move (and we've also ensured that these features work as advertised :)). Add reviews for places you've been to, add to them with amazing pictures, using our dramatically improved photo filters. Tell the world where you've been eating, and let them follow your food journey.

Q: Can I know what my friends like?

Say hello to the Feed. It's where you can see all the gastronomic activity of foodies you follow on Zomato. If you come across a place that looks interesting, you can add it to your Wishlist straight from the Feed. Over time, add every place that you want to visit to your Wishlist. Then, when you're actually looking for a place, you can just swipe to the 'In Wishlist' section in search results, so you don't need to spend time hunting through hundreds of options.

Q: Can you normalise a user's ratings?

This has been now built into the system, to ensure that an overly positive or negative bias doesn't affect the restaurant's rating dramatically. We will adjust a user's input for a restaurant according to his rating bias. For people who are always tough, their ratings will be adjusted upwards. For the ones who are always overly nice, their ratings will be adjusted downwards. You won't see this directly, but it will affect the aggregate rating that we show for restaurants.

Q: There are too many restaurants clustered in the 3.0-3.5 bracket. Can you prevent this?

Yes, and this is a big change you will have to get used to. Now, we have ranked all the 221,000 restaurants on a normal distribution curve. Here's what the change looks like. This should make it easier for all of us to decide where we should go out to eat. This is the most personalized Zomato has ever been. In fact, the new system allows each of us to create and own a mini-Zomato. There's so much to bite into in this release, it feels like all our previous versions were made to whet appetites for this one. This is the big one; the main course. All this comes with a complete overhaul of the interface of the website and apps. More importantly, we've redefined the UX altogether. We've ironed out a lot of things to ensure that Zomato is super easy for everyone to use. You will also come across a few features we haven't mentioned here, but hey - we want to leave something as a surprise ;) All these good things come with one small trade-off. To get to know you better and save your preferences to make sure that we can serve you what you'd like to see, Zomato will now be a login-only product. There will no longer be a “Nevermind” (that was a subtle Nirvana reference, for those of you who missed it) button at the bottom of the app login screen. But once you're in, you'll know why. We've pulled out the stops to make sure that you will love the new Zomato. So please take it for a spin, and let us know what you think. We are always listening at [email protected] or on Twitter

[pankajchaddah]

Getting the hiring advantage: Actively seeking 'passive talent'

Over the past few years, finding and hiring the right people to grow our team has been a little like looking for a needle in a haystack. As our team grew (now 650 people strong, up from 140 this time last year) along with our global aspirations, we were faced with an interesting situation – a lot of the people we wanted to have on board weren’t actually looking for jobs.

For the longest time, we’ve considered job portals as the most dependable platform from which to source talent. These are people looking for companies, and companies in turn, looking for people.  In other words, ‘active talent’. But what about passive talent i.e. people who aren’t actively looking to make a move? There could be a variety of reasons they’re in this bracket:

1. They don’t have the time: Anyone who’s hunted for a job will tell you it isn’t an overnight process. Identifying a role that excites you enough is time-consuming. Then there are interviews and other formalities that follow. If someone loves what they’re doing, they probably won’t take the time out to look for a switch until they feel a desperate need for it.

2. They’re not aware of the options: As a startup, there’s probably a lot more excitement and growth one can offer to a candidate than a large corporate can. But if one isn’t looking actively, it’s likely they won’t dig deep enough to explore possibilities.

3. They don’t know you are an option: There’s a fair chance that the people who might fit nicely into your system are big fans and active users of your product. But it’s equally likely that they don’t see you as a potential employer, because there’s no precedent in their peer group.

4. They simply haven’t given it any thought: To describe it in a word: inertia. This is a combination of the first two points – some people might just be in their current job because they haven’t bothered giving it a second thought, even if discontent and boredom are creeping in. If you can show them what they could be missing (especially at a startup), they might sit up and take notice.

Half the job is done when you have identified the issue. Now, how do you find such people? Here are some lessons/tips/tricks from our hiring experiences over the past few months:

Your users are the best people to put this question to. Be shameless in telling people who like your product and use it often that you are hiring. We almost always have a prominent hiring message on the website and have a steady stream of applications coming in every day. Previously, they just didn’t know it was an option for them. Also, use your social media strength to spread the word that you are hiring.

Network, and then network some more: Be passive aggressive with networking. Incentivise your employees to tap into their networks. Then their friends’ networks and their friends’ network…well, you get the picture

In general, however, getting the right referrals even in small numbers, helps in building effective networks. Moreover, via your friends and colleagues who understand you and your culture, you are more likely to identify people who will be good for the company. [Hint: Facebook graph search works better than LinkedIn or any other tool for recruiting.]

LinkedIn etc.: Social networks (especially, LinkedIn) are some of your best sources to look for passive talent. Especially when you have to ‘hunt’ for the right people; job portals work better for mass hiring, aka ‘farming’. The first question you need to answer before you fire up LinkedIn is what kind of candidate fits the bill? – What kind of profiles, firms, experience, education, and locations are you targeting? Now that you have what you need, start identifying similar profiles and then reach out to every single one. Send a message to connect, keep it cordial, direct, and give a quick overview of what your company does. When people get back to you, talk to them right away – memory based on LinkedIn messages is often short-lived.

In a nutshell: recruiting is always the biggest growth challenge for a fast growing company. We are now a 650-member organisation, and there has been no point in time when we felt hiring was easy. Sometimes we get so frustrated that we toy with the idea of just doing a massive outdoor campaign to announce the fact that we’re hiring. Then sanity prevails. Although we’ve chosen the path less traveled, we know from experience that we are investing time and money in the right people and the right hiring avenues.

Tell me what you think!

[pankajchaddah]

Getting the hiring advantage: Actively seeking 'passive talent'

Over the past few years, finding and hiring the right people to grow our team has been a little like looking for a needle in a haystack. As our team grew (now 650 people strong, up from 140 this time last year) along with our global aspirations, we were faced with an interesting situation – a lot of the people we wanted to have on board weren’t actually looking for jobs. For the longest time, we’ve considered job portals as the most dependable platform from which to source talent. These are people looking for companies, and companies in turn, looking for people.  In other words, ‘active talent’. But what about passive talent i.e. people who aren’t actively looking to make a move? There could be a variety of reasons they’re in this bracket: 1. They don’t have the time: Anyone who’s hunted for a job will tell you it isn’t an overnight process. Identifying a role that excites you enough is time-consuming. Then there are interviews and other formalities that follow. If someone loves what they’re doing, they probably won’t take the time out to look for a switch until they feel a desperate need for it. 2. They’re not aware of the options: As a startup, there’s probably a lot more excitement and growth one can offer to a candidate than a large corporate can. But if one isn’t looking actively, it’s likely they won’t dig deep enough to explore possibilities. 3. They don’t know you are an option: There’s a fair chance that the people who might fit nicely into your system are big fans and active users of your product. But it’s equally likely that they don’t see you as a potential employer, because there’s no precedent in their peer group. 4. They simply haven’t given it any thought: To describe it in a word: inertia. This is a combination of the first two points – some people might just be in their current job because they haven’t bothered giving it a second thought, even if discontent and boredom are creeping in. If you can show them what they could be missing (especially at a startup), they might sit up and take notice. Half the job is done when you have identified the issue. Now, how do you find such people? Here are some lessons/tips/tricks from our hiring experiences over the past few months: Your users are the best people to put this question to. Be shameless in telling people who like your product and use it often that you are hiring. We almost always have a prominent hiring message on the website and have a steady stream of applications coming in every day. Previously, they just didn’t know it was an option for them. Also, use your social media strength to spread the word that you are hiring. Network, and then network some more: Be passive aggressive with networking. Incentivise your employees to tap into their networks. Then their friends’ networks and their friends’ network…well, you get the picture In general, however, getting the right referrals even in small numbers, helps in building effective networks. Moreover, via your friends and colleagues who understand you and your culture, you are more likely to identify people who will be good for the company. [Hint: Facebook graph search works better than LinkedIn or any other tool for recruiting.] LinkedIn etc.: Social networks (especially, LinkedIn) are some of your best sources to look for passive talent. Especially when you have to ‘hunt’ for the right people; job portals work better for mass hiring, aka ‘farming’. The first question you need to answer before you fire up LinkedIn is what kind of candidate fits the bill? – What kind of profiles, firms, experience, education, and locations are you targeting? Now that you have what you need, start identifying similar profiles and then reach out to every single one. Send a message to connect, keep it cordial, direct, and give a quick overview of what your company does. When people get back to you, talk to them right away – memory based on LinkedIn messages is often short-lived. In a nutshell: recruiting is always the biggest growth challenge for a fast growing company. We are now a 650-member organisation, and there has been no point in time when we felt hiring was easy. Sometimes we get so frustrated that we toy with the idea of just doing a massive outdoor campaign to announce the fact that we’re hiring. Then sanity prevails. Although we’ve chosen the path less traveled, we know from experience that we are investing time and money in the right people and the right hiring avenues. Tell me what you think!

[pankajchaddah]

Food for thought: solving hiring problems at Zomato

While making our first hires five years ago, we had one thing in mind – focus on identifying and hiring the right people. Of course, like all startups, getting the right people on board has been our biggest challenge. The growth of the business, the personality of the brand and the firm’s culture all depend on the people who work with you and carry things forward. The team we have right now is our biggest achievement and scaling it up - an even bigger challenge. We’ve always had two areas where finding great people hasn’t particularly been a cakewalk – tech and leadership. So rather than sticking to traditional methods for hiring, we decided to experiment a little. We came up with two programs to scale this wall ahead of us – Trial Week (for tech) and the Leadership Program (obviously, to find leaders). Our Call for Leaders focuses on getting in touch with people who have founded and led their own ventures in the past. It’s simple - entrepreneurs develop a unique skillset, which makes them solution oriented, focused decision makers, and highly adaptable. We’ve hired entrepreneurs in the past, and it’s worked very well for us. They’ve experienced ups and downs, and they understand what it takes to overcome challenges. The rarely complain about stuff, and are always in the state of fixing things which are broken. Each new market presents predictable tasks- hiring and managing a team, finding office space, sorting out regulatory paperwork, etc. But, if that was all that went into building our business, we wouldn’t have to set the bar so high for our team. Each new market requires a leader with the mental flexibility to problem solve any and every challenge set before them, whether it is tailoring our product to different cultures or aggregating millions of data points around restaurants during monsoon season. Our other hiring challenge- getting the best and brightest in tech. Over time we realised that a 2-hour interview may not be the best way to test an engineer’s technical skills (or the culture fit).There is only so much you can learn about someone during an interview and time is limited. It’s not unusual for qualified candidates to panic, and ultimately we end up missing out as much as the candidate does. We thought of a "Trial Week" to solve this issue. The program is mainly geared towards students, although graduates with a serious passion for engineering could also apply. Selected participants were invited to spend one week working with our tech team in Delhi on live projects. We made the program accessible to all by taking care of their travel, their stay in Delhi, and, of course, their food ;-) This trial works both ways- it’s the best way for trialists to experience the work culture at Zomato firsthand and it allows us to see who can solve real problems in a fast-paced work environment. The trialists we see fit, in terms of skill and culture, are offered full-time positions at Zomato. Even with these new initiatives, hiring the right people still isn’t easy. We will continue to innovate our hiring methods as we scale. There's a lesson in it for all of us - when you’re up against a wall, you break through it.

[pankajchaddah]

The food cart is now bigger and loaded.

If there’s one thing we’ve discovered – rediscovered, actually – about ourselves over the past year, it’s that we’re always looking for ways to out-do anything we’ve done before. When we took our baby steps and launched international operations in Dubai in September last year, we thought we’d done the biggest thing yet. At the turn of the year came London – and we thought we were doing something pretty big. In July, we launched five cities simultaneously to celebrate our fifth birthday. And we thought that was something. This time, it’s three different kinds of big: 1 - Today, we are launching our services in three new countries, Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia. And seven new cities in all. Brazil is undoubtedly everyone’s dream destination for next year, and we have no intention of watching the game from the bench. We’re in São Paulo for now, with 11 more cities (to complete all the 12 world cup venues) coming very soon. We have Jakarta covered in Indonesia, and in Turkey, we’ve got Istanbul and Ankara on the map. That puts us in 35 cities across 11 countries now with plenty more to come. 2 - Since we love nothing more than a challenge, we’ve done something we’ll be doing a lot more of as we go along – rolling out Zomato in more languages. In addition to the English version of the website and apps, you can now use Zomato in Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, and Turkish (in Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey respectively). Looking back, this was a tough cookie to bite. 3 - And last, but not the least, we’ve just raised another round of funding. USD 37 million – our biggest so far, and the biggest ever in the restaurant search space – from Sequoia Capital and Info Edge. It will allow us to push our geographical boundaries even further and enable us to take something you love to a lot of other people in various parts of the world. We intend to launch Zomato in 22 more countries over the next 2 years. Which 22 countries? Let's leave something for a surprise :) We thank Info Edge for all the ongoing support since the last few years. Zomato certainly has gained tremendously from the faith Sanjeev and team has shown in our team and product since the early days. We are also excited to partner with Sequoia to take this little food cart further. Sequoia's vision for Zomato completely aligns with ours and it is going to be exciting to work with them to build the future of dining. Incidentally, we opted for this investment over a lucrative, big-name strategic buyout. But that’s a story for another day. == The next few months will see Zomato prepare for scale. As we have done a few times, take a few steps back for a bigger leap. The product will change quite a bit, but we will make sure that you love us even more. Thank you for all your support so far. Please keep using Zomato, and please keep telling us where we suck. That, according to us, is the only way to build something phenomenal.

[pankajchaddah]

Building a global business? Here's the most important ingredient.

This is the one god you need to please if you are going to build a global business. No kidding.

[pankajchaddah]

One year of living out of the suitcase

They say time flies when you're having fun. And the only measure of how much fun we've been having, is how quickly the past year has gone by. A few days shy of a year ago today, we took a long, hard look at what it takes for a company (read: us) to go global. We'd be lying if we said there was nothing to lose, and that we could venture into foreign markets with reckless abandon. After many a sleepless night of planning and debate, we took the plunge. Straight into the deep end of the pool. Our first stop? Dubai. By September, we had our first international section ready to launch, with a total of 3,500 restaurants listed in Dubai. In the next couple of months, we added Abu Dhabi and Sharjah to the list of Emirates we were present in, taking our international presence to three cities. Our next international launch was slightly closer to home, with our Colombo (Sri Lanka) section going live soon after. By November, we were getting restless again. We'd proven to ourselves that we could set seemingly insurmountable challenges, and then manage to complete them. We knew we needed to add more countries to the map and grow quicker. Since we are ardent believers in "go big or go home", we decided to go bigger than we'd ever gone before. Our London launch was one of the toughest yet, but it proved yet again that we had it what it takes to take on the big boys on the playground. By March, we'd also set up operations in Doha, which had been in the pipeline for a while. Around the turn of the year, we'd sent a few people out to explore a various potential markets for us. The Philippines and South Africa were two of the highlights of our scouting efforts, and we set our sights on launching in Metro Manila, and in multiple cities in South Africa. The third week of March saw our Metro Manila section going live with information for over 9000 restaurants in the city. Just about two weeks later, Zomato Johannesburg was live, with 2000 restaurants listed. While calling it 'world domination' makes us sound a little like evil super-villains, it's no secret that we'd like to further grow our geographical footprint. In July this year, Zomato turned five. And since no birthday is complete without a little celebration, we decided we'd launch five new cities to mark the occasion. We grew our presence in South Africa by launching a section for Cape Town, while also adding Birmingham and Manchester to the roster in the UK. Two of the five cities were also in a whole new country for us - Auckland and Wellington, in New Zealand. Undoubtedly, one of the most amazing aspects of growing so quickly has been the effort the team has put in. Right from collecting data in extreme weather conditions, burning the midnight oil to make sure all information gets listed, making product customisations to suit local preferences, to launching and driving marketing and PR in new locations. We're also very proud of how diverse our team is; our team is now made up of people from over different 15 nationalities doing a kickass job globally over the past year. It's been an exhilarating ride so far, and we're sure the best is yet to come. As I write this, we are scrambling to get our operations set up in Brazil and Turkey. It isn't easy, but what's life without a challenge? After all, building a global company is just an itch that has to be scratched.

[pankajchaddah]

Three problems we are trying to solve at Zomato

Our engineering team is always cranking to improve our services and make your food hunt easier. As a small update, here is what's keeping us awake at night these days:

Building a dish database

Wouldn't it be great if we could search for restaurants serving a specific dish? For example, it would be great to be able to find the best places that serve a Tenderloin Steak. The only way to make this happen is if we have structured data for every dish served in a restaurant. We've already made some effort in this direction the manual way - by typing out a few thousand menu cards in every city that we are in. However, given the churn rate of the restaurant industry (about 25% restaurants shut down every quarter), it is getting difficult for us to manually keep pace with all the new menu cards that come our way. We are trying to create intelligent OCR systems to supplement our existing dish ontology. Misspellings (in the menus) and from the OCR mechanism just make it all the more complicated.

Spam control

Two years ago, this wasn't a problem. Why? Very simply, a restaurant's rating Zomato didn't make or break its business back then. Nowadays, it does make a difference, to a certain extent. Since a lot of restaurant owners also realise this, they try to game the system by planting fake reviews on the platform. We have, over time, learnt how to identify most of these cases, but some intelligent spam tactics skip our automated filters. Our filters currently range from simple data analysis and pattern matching to user behaviour mapping over a few months. However, we realise that we constantly have to keep track of what is making its way onto the platform to help maintain its neutrality and usefulness to our users. Also, we need to evolve these systems to outsmart everyone who tries to game the system (despite following the rules). It's an ongoing effort, and I don't think we will ever be able to say this problem has been solved for good.

Lower server latency for our geographically widespread traffic

This isn't something new, and a few companies have already done this very efficiently. Most companies our size don't even care about this. However, we want to serve all our traffic (in the Philippines, as well as in London) from servers that sit close to our users' physical locations. Lower server latency = users get to food faster. Replicating all our infrastructure in various locations on a master-slave basis and then keeping everything in sync is not easy for us as of now, and this is something we are trying to address over the very short term itself. Do any of these challenges excite you? Do you think you can help us solve these issues? If yes, we are looking for you. Email me at [email protected]

[pankajchaddah]

Our take on the Lemp incident

First things first, what has been written in the blog, should not happen to any customer. Doesn't matter how the customer behaves in a restaurant/bar, it just shouldn't happen. This is not the way hospitality businesses should treat their customers. Now, we have been getting quite a few requests to delist Lemp from Zomato. What we think is that delisting Lemp would be the stupidest thing to do. Zomato is a neutral platform where consumers write about their opinions and we respect that. Our job is to tell our users if they should go to a particular restaurant or not. Delisting restaurants defeats that purpose. For restaurants which are very poorly rated, we want our users to see their ratings/reviews and decide not to visit that place. A few other things some people have been saying about Zomato: Zomato displayed wrong information about the Lemp event on the website Zomato only displays what is sent to us via email by the restaurant owners or their PR firms. So essentially, all these offers are validated offers from the management itself. However, whether the restaurant eventually honours the offer is entirely up to the restaurant. In this case, what has been outlined in the blog against Lemp is that the manager even confirmed the offer on the phone, but refused to honour it on the premises. There is nothing anyone can do about such behaviour. Zomato deletes negative reviews (and/or lets restaurant owners delete reviews) This is the silliest thing we've heard today. From our point of view, we run a neutral platform, and letting restaurant owners pick the reviews they want to display on that page would violate that neutrality. For us, customers come before ad dollars. Lemp was a paying advertiser for a long time, for about more than a year. But you can see a slew of negative reviews on their page which are as old as Lemp itself. Those reviews were never deleted and have been there forever for everyone to read. Anyway, in light of the incident and to honour the sentiments of our users, we took the ad down. As I said, customers before ad dollars. Having said that, our moderation team does delete reviews (and no, restaurant owners cannot tell us what we should do). What our team does is that they manually weed out fake reviews (planted by restaurant owners, and their competitors) and also remove low value reviews. Sometimes, they also remove reviews with a personal vendetta against an establishment - such reviews are easily identifiable because the reviewer admittedly says that he/she hasn't been to the restaurant anyway. To put some examples behind this, reviews such as this get deleted: "Fuck this place. I don't like it. This place sucks. I will never go here again." "I haven't been to this place, but I just read the review below. I think this place sucks." "Awesome. Cool. I think this place has the coolest restaurant owner ever. The waiter, Bob, is one of the nicest people I have met." We also delete reviews which are from the same IP address, and also use user behaviour pattern detection to flag fake reviews and ratings. However, in any spam control, there are a few false positives, but that is a cost we pay to keep the system clean. === Next steps for us: we are implementing a widget on our reviews page for a restaurant where you can filter reviews which are 1/2/3/4/5 star rated specifically. Currently, you have to scroll through a chronologically stack of reviews to find out why some place is not good or worth visiting. We hope that this helps our users make a wiser choice, the next time they visit Zomato to find a perfect place to eat/drink.

[pankajchaddah]

New t-shirts for our tech team

We just got a set of new geeky t-shirts made for our tech team. Here's what they look like: If you are a techie and want one of these, do drop in an email at [email protected] with your name, address, and the t-shirt that you would want us to send to you. We only have a few, so, first come, first served. Cheers, and happy eating, and coding.

[pankajchaddah]

Zomato needs some more hustlers

Guys, Zomato's hiring. Who do we need: People who are bored of their current jobs, and want accountability and ownership. What will they need to do: Pick up some of our biggest challenges as a company right now and tackle them while working with some of our best people. Problems exist across functions: Hiring, Sales, Content, International Expansion, Product Distribution. (For the trolls: we are doing very well as a company, these are anticipatory growth pangs). Some roles which need to be filled right now:

AVP Recruitment (2) - Needless to say, hire the best people across the globe, so that others can't find them

VP Sales (2) - Based in Delhi, Mumbai; prior sales experience must

AVP Content (3) - Manage and improve our massive content acquisition team spread across 7 countries (as of now)

Business Heads - Some Indian Cities, Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil and Russia

AVP Product Distribution: work with OEMs and partners to expand Zomato's digital reach across platforms; this role needs a tech background

Interested? What will the future look like for you?: Ideally, every 6-12 months, once you have solved the problem you were working on, you should move on to the next big challenge for us as a company. That could be in a different function altogether. You should be good enough to figure out the next big problems yourself and also be capable to work on them independently to solve them. In the longer term, given the pace at which we are growing, you should find yourself heading an international market at Zomato. In short, we are already 270 people strong, still small, and are planning to grow to around a 1000 people by the end of next year. So, we are looking to create a pipeline of senior management which will help us get there and also manage the mud pie once we get there. Want in, email me at [email protected] PS: If you apply, think long term. Building a company is not a joke, it's a story. PS2: You should have a minimum of 4-5 years of experience; we want people with a little more perspective than usual

[pankajchaddah]

Zomato is now in London!

“Life is a game of inches….the six inches in front of you” – Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday The evening of Nov 20th, 2012, sipping tea in our office, we were discussing the beauty of London during Christmas. Naturally, the conversation steered towards restaurants in London and how much fun it would be to spend Christmas in London while eating at some of the best restaurants in the world. Somewhere in the middle of the casual banter, someone jokingly said, “This Christmas, Zomato is coming to London”. This was followed by complete silence…and some goosebumps. The line was so powerful, that everybody wanted to bring Zomato to London, this very Christmas. Ohwhichbytheway was only 35 days away. We have a habit of pressure testing Zomato and our people by putting big challenges, six inches in front them. So, we decided, that this Christmas, Zomato is coming to London. This meant, we had to collect data for over 15,000 restaurants on foot in extreme cold, upload all the information, scan all the menus, and quality check everything before we could say London is live. On top of that, all the product and design changes that were needed to make sure that we were ready to compete in a market such as London, where we are going against some of the biggest, most respected players in the world. We gave ourselves 35 days. Zomato needed to be in London. 85 flights, about 1500 night outs, endless hours of brainstorming sessions, and after painfully missing the deadline by a good two weeks, Zomato is now in London. We have over 14,000 restaurants listed on Zomato London already and are still chugging along, uploading content for almost 500 restaurants everyday. Our team of six people is out everyday making sure we are covering every single alley in one of the biggest cities in the world. Just for reference, the number of restaurants in London is close to 50% of the entire Indian market. Currently, the London section is by invitation only, but if you ask nicely, we will give you access. Please go here to request access. Our investors, friends and family asked us very important questions about the London launch. Here are a few samples: Why London, why not pick an easier market with fewer competitors? Because we are not scared of a fight. More on this later. What will differentiate your product from others already out there? The leather at the bottom of our shoes, rather – the lack of it. The same thing that works for us in India – we actually go around town and collect content on our own. We scan each and every menu card and put it up online for users to view for free. We geocode restaurants on our own and do not rely on erroneous public maps information to tell customers where they should go. If a restaurant exists, we want to see it for ourselves and then provide that information to people. Overall, we are a better product, with content that actually matters. Not everyone has the time to read 1000 reviews for a restaurant – but everyone wants to know what is served and how much will it cost. Will you be able to get better penetration and coverage than your competitors who have been there for ages? As of now, we have 14,000 restaurants listed on Zomato London. With about 3,000 more to go, our coverage is almost double of the next biggest player. We have always believed that a better product wins and are putting our money where our mouth is. Does this make business sense? We don’t know. But here is our theory, Risk Execution = Rewards. We are willing to play this game and bet on ourselves. What's next? Stay calm and execute in London. Just like we did in UAE- where we are one of the top few websites in the country in less than 6 months. We know London won’t be that easy, so we need your help. If you love Zomato, please help us reach out to as many people in London as possible. We need you to make this work.

[pankajchaddah]

Improving the ratings system on Zomato

It’s been more than four years since Zomato started. Over these years, we have served about 55 million visitors on Zomato through our website and mobile apps. Zomato ratings have over time become the de facto look up system for our customers to decide whether they should  visit a particular restaurant or not. Given the traffic on Zomato, a lot of restaurant owners, or their agents (PR companies), or competitors try to game the system by giving out unfair positive or negative ratings for restaurants on Zomato. This leads to a huge amount of what we call “rating spam” in the system. This eventually leads to a poor customer experience on the website, eventually making Zomato lose credibility in the eyes of the customer. However, with all the experience we have with us, we have made some significant improvements to our system to weed out spam and unworthy votes from the system. Broadly, we have classified user behaviour on the website on the scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is ‘dubious’ and 10 is ‘trustworthy’. So, overall, from today onwards, any ratings from ‘dubious’ users do not count towards the ratings aggregates shown on Zomato; whereas we are allocating more weight to users who we deem to be ‘trustworthy’. There are still some things we need to improve and think about. For example, the votes count next to the ratings shows the total votes received for the restaurant. Not necessarily the votes being considered towards the aggregate. We are not sure yet if we should be that transparent. In our opinion, more transparency leads to more spam, which is something nobody wants (e.g. Google never reveals its search ranking algorithms). Also, there is a lot of science going behind classifying users between ‘dubious’ and ‘trustworthy’. This is a mix of manual and algorithmic grading. Our users who we have met in real life (we meet a lot of our users over lunches :-)), are automatically given 10 on the trust scale. I am hoping this will go a long way towards improving the authenticity of ratings being shown on Zomato, and help our valued users discover more great places to eat around them.

[pankajchaddah]

PR101 for startups

A lot of startups ask me for advice on PR. That seems like one of the biggest buckets of marketing for any new company. My general point of view here is to tell people to create a great product and that PR will take care of itself. However, it is really necessary to avoid some pitfalls which result in startups wasting their time and money - two of the most important resources for a budding company. In general, I think startups should not outsource most of the things that they need to do. Whenever you outsource something, the other person will not love and care for your product the way you do - especially if you are not paying well, something which startups rarely can do. So at the end of the day, even if you don't have the skills (or the network) to do something, doing that thing with passion will result in a better outcome than outsourcing it to someone with skills who does it half-heartedly. Now let's get to PR. My basic premise here is that journalists are good people - they are always looking out for something meaningful and interesting to write about. So as long as you have something important to say, people will listen. Getting someone else (PR firms) to say what you want to say is half the battle lost. Nobody can broadcast your passion for your product. You have to speak out for yourself. We have tried working with a few PR firms along the way. Only one of them added value to Zomato. Why? Because that PR firm was a startup and doing a good job for us was really important for them. So they put everything they had into working with us. But, it is very hard to find such PR firms. Almost impossible. We also trusted some of the most well known PR firms with our brand communications only to receive less-than-mediocre results in the end and in some cases no results at all. Most of the these PR firms have a number of clients (sometimes 10 clients per person in their firm). They just cannot do a good job because they are spread too thin. It's probably the economics of the business which do not allow them to do a good job. But startups cannot afford a bad job for the sake of economics. There is something they have to do to get the message out there. There is a word for that - DIY. Let's go through some of the jargon you will get from a PR firm when you ask for a proposal. Below is the summary of ~20 such proposals we received over the last 3 months:

Seamless promotion and reputation management of your brand

Build thought leadership in the domain

Offer strategic internal and external communications consultancy

Spearhead our brand journalism strategy to stay on top of mind

Create opportunities with blogger community in the region

Build KOLs  (Key Opinion Leaders) for the Brand

…and this list goes on! Most of this means nothing, and at the end of the day, what gets delivered is one press release per month. That too, is sent over emails in the public domain to journalists, with a lot of them marked in the BCC. All for some ridiculous pricing. PR firms typically charge for creating a press release (25-40k per release), media management (40-60k per month) and media monitoring (5-15k per month). Dear startups, please write your press releases yourself. Look up a format on the free world wide web and start chugging on a notepad. Let your passion come out in the press release. And there is no such thing as media management (it's just a few emails sent to a few people, followed by a phone call if someone writes back) - something startups should do on their own. And don't even get me started on media monitoring. It's as simple as setting Google Alerts for your brand - that is what all PR firms do anyway and then send you a jazzy alert on their own. Brand communication is something that is important to a budding startup. It has to be nurtured over time, and the first step towards doing it the right way is to roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty and to do it yourself. By doing so, you will be cutting down on a lot of unnecessary recurring spend on PR firms which deliver appallingly minimal results. You will also develop a strong culture of owning what you communicate about the brand as it is meant to be. For a start, the founders should take care of this themselves. In the longer term, get someone to do this. It's not easy, but here are a few traits to look out for in that person:

Belief in the product: You need a person who lives, breathes and feels the product to talk about it. A yardstick that we often use when we focus on building our PR team is to see if the person talks about the product and handles any query as if he/she owned and built it. Couple that with creativity in building PR opportunities, excellent writing and communication skills and you have The One for this role! This is something you will never get out of a PR agency. No matter how long you have them on board for, they will always refer to it as “their product” instead of “our product”.

Persistent and gets things done: It is a challenging role like no other so you would need a person who would go to the last mile to deliver results. The probability of rejection is much higher in PR than in the Marriage business. You would need someone who can handle rejection on a daily basis. One who strongly believes that hearing back an answer (either yes or no) means that we have taken the first step in establishing a relationship with the concerned person or publication. Following-up is equivalent to breathing when it comes to PR and only if you are persistent can you handle it perfectly.

Should wear your brand's t-shirt proudly: He/She should be the person you would proudly ask to wear your brand's t-shirt and go to a jam packed conference. This person is your key to the outside world; just make sure your choice is right. His/Her personality is seen as your brand's personality.

PR is not about just building a media database and sending press releases, it's about talking to people (journalists) and having something meaningful to say. Also, do not mass email a press release. You hate spam, and everyone else does too. Personalise what you have to say, and make it relevant to the person you are writing to. Communicate with journalists like you do with your friends. Keep your emails focused on what you have to say and what might be relevant to them. If you are doing something that interests them, they will definitely respond. Follow up if you have to (and meet them if they are up for it), but respect other people's privacy. Do not bombard them with phone calls everyday. I agree that you will need a list of relevant people to talk to at the start. Again, Google is your best friend here. Look for topics in your domains and find people who cover those topics. Also, you would find a lot of media databases publicly and for free. One other thing you can do is to make a list of bloggers who might be relevant to your product. There are several blog aggregator sites with blog rankings to prioritise your efforts here (Labnol – IndianBloggers, Indiblogger, BlogAdda etc). While there is no guarantee that by doing all of the above your brand will be talked about every day but we have observed that over time it yields better results than any other way of going about it. The biggest take-away would be to keep calm and execute. What do you think? Do you think we could have done something differently?