Seven years ago, we started out as a pure-play information directory for restaurants in India. Today, we are in 22 countries across the world, 15 of which we have launched and grown our business in organically. In the other seven, we acquired the local leaders in our space to eventually move all their traffic over to Zomato, becoming the #1 player in those markets in the process. Today, people the world over use Zomato to look for great places to eat over 90 million times every month. More than three quarters of these visitors are from outside of India.

A few months ago, we made an important move in India – launching our online ordering service. And we’ve really been kicking our competition’s ass in this business with less than 0.1% of their marketing budgets. Why we were able to win? Because we have millions of users who already use us for ordering food over the phone. Now, they have started placing the same orders online using our app. And there is a lot of growth still left; 92% of our users who use Zomato to search for restaurants that deliver haven’t even started ordering online on Zomato as yet. Our ticket sizes are more than double our competitors’ – because our users are not using us for the discounts. They are using us for the convenience, and a product they already love Zomato for.

Our users hold tremendous potential for transaction-based businesses. Getting into transactions was always the natural next step for our business. Online ordering is a natural and logical alternative for our users who, up until now, used to call restaurants to place their orders for delivery. Table reservations fit into Zomato as easily as online ordering did. The time has come for us to focus deeply on transactions in countries where it matters.

We are also going to have to make important changes to our business and make sure we put every dollar and every Zoman behind the things that matter the most. Here are two important things everyone can expect.

Content 2.0

We will be getting smarter with the effort that we put into content. 40% of the restaurants on Zomato account for 92% of our traffic. We will rethink our processes to make sure that the frequency of our data updates goes up in multiples for the top 40% of restaurants.

• In the meantime, we will push our Zomato for Business app as much as possible, so that more business owners start managing their listings themselves.
• The countries we entered in the recent past have not been working with our existing model of collecting content and building community relations – alternate models will need to be identified and implemented. We have a few ideas we will be piloting in a select few regions right away.
• We need to make some fundamental changes to the product to ensure more stickiness and growth. Most of these changes are based on what we have learned from Urbanspoon.
• Over time, as we fully transition to Content 2.0, we will need leaner content teams across the world.

We will split our countries into two types – Full Stack and Enterprise

Full Stack are the four regions where all of the following hold true: a) large markets b) growing very fast c) Zomato is the strongest player in its space.

• These four regions are India, the Middle East, South East Asia (the Philippines and Indonesia), and ANZ (Australia and New Zealand).
• We will be selling our full suite of products in these four regions, since we have very high levels of traffic here.
• Our focus on ad sales will continue to be strong, along with all the other transaction-based businesses. Ad sales has been a very profitable business for us, and will continue to be so.

Enterprise regions are the ones where any of the following is true: a) relatively small markets b) slow growth economies c) Zomato is not the dominant player. All the remaining markets belong to this category.

• In these regions, we will not look at ad sales. We will focus mostly on transaction businesses, with a lion’s share of our effort going into selling Book – our table reservations engine.
• We will focus less on on-the-ground community building and marketing activities. Most of the people in our teams in these regions should be sales people, to help us put Zomato Book in as many restaurants as possible. This means that in these regions, our operations will need fewer people to run the show compared to the past.
• Most Enterprise regions will see all of these changes take effect starting immediately. All these things will also significantly bring down our burn rate and, as we go along, make our businesses in these markets much stronger.

The next few months are going to be hard for all of us. But we’ll stick together, hustle, and not spend time overthinking things or being unnecessarily creative, so we can get to where we want to be.