1. Background
Education: MTech. in Mathematics and Computing
College: Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
Previous Career:
Worked at Bain & Company and continued working there for a period of ~4 years
2. Origin Story
The Spark
While working as a Consultant at Bain & Company, Goyal noticed that a number of his colleagues used to queue up at the pantry to look for menus to order food. This gave him an idea to create an online directory of food menus. Goyal started building a website (called as foodlet.in back then, later changed to foodiebay.com) along with his wife and her younger sister.
The Struggle
Since all three of them had regular full-time jobs, they pursued this entrepreneurial dream on the side. They used to drive around the city and collect menus from restaurants, scan them and put them online on their website.
The Launch
The website was made live on 26th January 2008. During its early days, it received traffic of a mere 25 users per day, but what motivated Goyal to continue working on the idea was that some of the users provided positive feedback about the convenience of having scanned menus online. Foodiebay.com was made more engaging for its users by providing in-depth information about restaurants and events (e.g. menu cards, contact details, pictures, directions, rating, and reviews). On 10th July 2008, Goyal partnered with Pankaj Chaddah and continued to build foodiebay.com, later changing the name to zomato.com.
3. Other interesting points
- They managed to run Zomato without any external funding for the first two years.
4. Quote
"It just needs you to detach from yourself, and bring your soul to work. Also, it is not necessary that you are in the founder’s mindset every day; what’s important is whether the days you are in the founder’s mindset are significantly more than the days you are not. All growth begins with discomfort. Without it, there is no reason to change. We mature when we finally realize that life is not about achieving absolute peace but about effectively managing tension.”
5. Company growth & sources (links)
Personal Story
How did they grow the company?
Sources
