How would you approach launching Zomato in a new country?

Launching Zomato in a new country

Zomato is an online food delivery app, where cloud kitchens/ restaurants can list their menu and buyers can choose from all the available menu and place their order by making the payment.

What problem is this solving - ordering outside food at the comfort of your home, lots of available food options, food delivered at door step

Market research -

We need to understand the user behaviour in terms of likeliness and frequency of eating outside  both at a national level and then split into regional level.

We also need to understand the internet quality, smartphone coverage, digital payment availability and adoption and tech savviness of the users

We also need to understand the local sentiments, eating habits and most widely used language in the country/ region

Also, we need to understand are there any existing players already available in the market and what is their approximate market share of the total user base

For this discussion, let's assume the country has a good smartphone coverage overall, but differ in terms of regions. Internet quality and tech savviness differs from region to region

Also, a common official language is spoken across most parts of the country

Apart from this, there are currently no existing players in the market

Value proposition (for buyer) - An online food delivery app created in your own language where you can order and eat outside food at the convenience of your home without the need of going outside.

Benefits - Convenience, Unlimted options to choose from, Affordability, Faster delivery

Value proposition (for restaurant) - Larger audience reach at no extra cost, increase in ADO, no commissions for order transactions, no need of delivery partners from restaurant side

Benefits - Convenience, Affordability, Higher revenue, Lower cost, Higher margins

Strategy -

Launch MVP in one Tier-1 city, starting with few densely populated areas and then extend to rest of the city. This will be followed by gradual scale up across the other Tier-1 cities and then rest of the country based on the user demographics.

The app needs to be in native langauge both for the consumers and for the restuarant partners and assisted by an AI bot to answer queries or help navigate through the app flow

Buyer onboarding - Partner with telecom companies, to do zomato launch announcements on their website, data offers for placing orders etc.; Partner with google, meta to show zomato ads on their websites; Bill boards, TV advertisements, targetted email invites for early access, etc.

Partner onboarding - Reach out to big to medium scale restaurants in the initial phase, offer zero commission in the initial phase, targetted ads, sms, email notifications to targetted restaurants, etc.

Driver onboarding - Partner with local drivers who are interested in earning money per order delivery either by building 1P or partnering with 3P fleet

Launch plan -

Pre launch -

• Align with marketing team on the launch plan and marketing channels and plan
• Align on the in-app banner, promotions, etc. with marketing team
• Align on the ops/ support team wrt training on the objection handling and driver sourcing and training as well
• Align with engg team on the deployment prerequisites
• Pilot testing with 1-2 restaurants and early adoption users
• Monitoring dashboard in place

• Production deployment for all MVP location users
• Production sanity
• Public launch announcement
• More in app notifs, sms, push notifs, email notifs, etc.
• Influencer/ Celebrity campaigns

• Metrics monitoring -
  • % app downloads
  • % logins
  • # restaurants registered on the platform
  • % users who placed atleast one order
  • % users who placed multiple orders
  • % On time orders
  • DAU/ WAU/ MAU
  • D7/ D30 returning users
  • ADO
  • AOV
  • ARPU
  • Revenue
  • Margin
  • Consumer NPS
  • Restaurant NPS
  • Driver NPS
• User feedback
• Post mortem
• Continuous improvement