Zomato Documentary: Part 2 - The Rise of Foodiebay

In this video, we continue with Deepinder Goyal’s journey of building Zomato – not the Zomato we all know today but this is the story of Zomato’s origins. Before it was even called Zomato, it’s the story of Foodlet and Foodiebay.

00:00 How Deepinder Goyal met his co-founder Pankaj Chaddah
02:40 Competition and Foodiebay’s growth
05:14 Deepinder and Pankaj quit Bain & Company to focus on Foodiebay
07:00 Foodiebay almost didn’t get investment from Info Edge
09:30 How Foodiebay became Zomato

How Deepinder Goyal met his co-founder Pankaj Chaddah: At Bain & Company, Deepinder used to play foosball with this guy at lunch breaks who would keep beating him again and again. This guy was Pankaj Chaddah. During their lunch break, Pankaj happened to look at Foodiebay’s analytics and realised that Deepinder was struggling to attract traffic to his website. As Deepinder kept looking, the number of users suddenly tripped from 3 to 10 users. He noticed that Pankaj had changed his Google Talk status to ‘go check out foodiebay.com’ – which helped people in discovering Foodiebay. This was the moment Deepinder realised that he really needed a co-founder to help him scale this startup idea and on 10th July 2008 Pankaj joined Foodiebay as Deepinder’s co-founder.

Competition and Foodiebay’s growth: By 2008, Foodiebay was starting to see a lot of competition from food websites like Hungry Bangalore, Burrp, Tasty Khana, Plan for Me, BiteQuest and A Place To Dine. This competition also helped Foodiebay to be a part of the competition story in the online food space that got Foodiebay the media attention that they desperately needed. By the end of 2008, Foodiebay had grown significantly - more than 1,400 restaurants had uploaded their menus on their website and that was just in the Delhi-NCR region alone. Over the next few years, Foodiebay started to expand to cities like Mumbai and Kolkata – while also adding new features like restaurant ratings and reviews and personalised recommendations. They had managed to do all this – while still working at Bain & Company. Foodiebay was still just a side hustle for them.

Deepinder and Pankaj quit Bain & Company to focus on Foodiebay: Once Foodiebay was making more money than the two co-founders were making from their job at Bain and Company, they decided it was time for them to shift their complete focus on Foodiebay. That was the only way they could grow Foodiebay and take it to the next level. So, in 2009, both Deepinder and Pankaj quit their jobs and became full-time entrepreneurs.

Foodiebay almost didn’t get investment from Info Edge: Now, Deepinder and Pankaj want to grow and scale Foodiebay as fast as they could. But to do that, they would need money – more money than what they were making from Foodiebay. Even when Deepinder was actively looking to invest, he had received an email from someone at Naurki.com but thinking that it was just another sales email, he ignored it. Eventually, he did open that email and he was shocked to realise that he had ignored an email from the founder of Naukri.com/Info Edge himself – he was Sanjeev Bikhchandani. He was surprised to see that Sanjeev was in fact a user of Foodiebay. So, Deepinder decided to set up a meeting with Sanjeev and within 72 hours of that meeting, Info Edge had invested $1 million into Foodiebay. This was Foodiebay’s first outside investment in 2010. Info Edge continues to be Zomato’s biggest stakeholder to date.

How Foodiebay became Zomato: In one of their early conversations with Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Sanjeev asked them why they had chosen the name Foodiebay. Sanjeev even raised some objections about the name – first, adding ‘Food’ in the name made their business a lot restrictive and then the big one was ‘ebay’ – this could turn out to a legal issue if global e-commerce website Ebay noticed Foodiebay. So, Sanjeev urged them to come up with a different name. That’s when they decided to used the word ‘Tomato’ to come up with ‘Zomato’. And just like that – Foodiebay became the food delivery giant that we all know today – Zomato.

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