“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Søren Kierkegaard 

Looking back, 2015 was one of our biggest and busiest years yet – expansion into new markets, new businesses, and hyper-growth across the board. We had our fair share of ups and downs over the year, but we’ve learned something important from each one. Here’s a look at the highlights of the year gone by, and what we have planned for 2016.  

We started off the year on a high note by welcoming two new members into the Zomato family – Urbanspoon, which marked our entry into Australia, Canada, and United States, and Mekanist, which saw us become the single largest restaurant search and discovery service in Turkey. In February, we launched Zomato Cashless in Dubai, to enable seamless in-app cashless payments at restaurants. Eight months later, we rolled back the product, having learned that we’ll need to rework it before it can see the kind of user adoption we want. 

A couple of months on, we launched our most anticipated service yet – online food ordering. The business has taken off very well in India and UAE and we might already be the market leaders in some of the cities we have launched in. We will be focusing on growing the business across the key markets we offer it in (India, UAE, the Philippines), and ensuring that we do it in a sustainable manner. We had our biggest learning here in the last few hours of 2015 – we decided to keep the service active on New Year’s Eve, but the massive number of orders brought our servers down for a while and forced us to switch it off. Not the best note to end the year on, but it will prepare us better for the future.

2015 was also a big growth year for us on the B2B front. We introduced three new products that would help restaurants do more with their business, and create better dining experiences for their customers. Earlier in the year, we had Zomato Book (a table management and reservation system) and Zomato Base (a point-of-sale system for restaurants), for which we laid the groundwork when NexTable and MaplePOS joined forces with us. In the second half of the year, we launched Zomato Whitelabel, to enable restaurants to bridge the gap between themselves and their customers with custom-branded native mobile apps. Book is already being used by more than 500 restaurants globally, and in the past two months, 2.3 million guests were seated at restaurants using our system. Whitelabel has also been growing steadily, and more than 150 restaurants already have their customised apps on app stores. We’ve been testing Base with a few partners, and the finished product is nearly ready to be rolled out and into restaurants soon. 

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Going into 2016, we’ve made our mission statement – Never Have a Bad Meal – our core focus. What we envision when we say Never Have a Bad Meal, is a world where everyone is empowered enough to have the best dining experience possible. We’ve been building the foundation to achieve this over the years – first, by providing all the information one needs to make a dining decision, and then by giving users and restaurants a way to share and receive feedback through reviews. The mission will soon extend to transactions – home delivery, and your in-restaurant dining experience as well. 

Another focus area for us this year is making Zomato abuse-free. We often come across needless hate and non-constructive rants in reviews, which helps nobody – restaurants have no idea what they need to improve on, and people reading the review do not get a clear picture of what to expect at the restaurant. We aren’t suggesting that people shouldn’t write about a not-so-great experience they might have had at a restaurant, but we will be taking proactive steps to keep the unnecessary rants at bay. This applies equally to restaurants, who sometimes try to artificially inflate their ratings by soliciting reviews, or trash competitors with bad ratings and reviews. There is a lot of work to be done on these fronts, and we will be doubling our efforts to ensure Zomato is clean, and more importantly, useful to everyone using it. 

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There’s a lot on our plates for 2016, and we’re excited about everything that’s planned for this year. On behalf of the team, a big thank you to everyone who’s helped get us to where we are. Please keep us on our toes by giving us feedback on what we can do better – just like you always have. 

Here’s to a delicious year ahead!