It’s been around 3 months since we launched Zomato Gold in India. And needless to say, the journey has been phenomenal so far. During this time period, 150,000+ users have subscribed to Gold and 2000+ restaurant partners have joined the bandwagon. The numbers, to put it succinctly, paint a happy story – one which we are incredibly proud of. This couldn’t have been possible without the unbridled trust of our partners and users.

Even though we had launched a subscription service in UAE and Portugal before, launching Zomato Gold in India was a different battle altogether. We know everything that works outside India doesn’t necessarily work inside India and vice versa. As a result, we made a few calculated bets. And luckily for us, they worked out really well.

This “luck” was a combination of (real) luck and some tough decisions – and that taught us some valuable lessons – and like we do from time to time, here’s everything in the spirit of sharing back with the startup community –

• Keep it simple
  As clichéd as it may sound, we resorted to the age old saying of “keeping it simple” when it came to creating our product. We considered everything – giving different offers at different type of restaurants, different offers on different menu items, different offers at different points in time, etc. However, in the end, we went ahead with a standard offer that struck a chord across all the participating restaurants as well as users. The key-phrase while designing and launching Zomato Gold in India was “T&C free”. In other words, we insisted that the product will be completely “terms and conditions free” for the end user. And we were able to achieve 99.99% of that vision.
• Quality > Quantity
  Idea of Zomato Gold was not to get ALL the restaurants on board. It was to get the BEST on board. We defined a threshold in terms of rating and restaurant popularity (basis Zomato data) while prioritizing our partner restaurants. So, from 100K+ restaurants in India, we targeted only ~1%. We did so because we were confident this was the right set. We also tried to ensure a fine breadth of restaurants – the idea was to enable a user with a good sample to consider for different occasions before eating out.

This is what our users have to say about our restaurant partners at various point in time –

• Accidents leading to virality
  Zomato Gold was available for purchase on specific days and during specific time slots. And believe it or not, we never planned it that way. We had to impose a limit on the total number of subscriptions due to the overwhelming response that we received. We wanted to ensure that our restaurant partners could accommodate and deliver the promised experience to our Gold users seamlessly. Hence, putting a restriction on the total number of subscriptions was more a reactive than a proactive strategy for us. And the scarcity (again, not by design) led to the product going viral – which gave Zomato Gold the insane amount of initial success that it has seen.

• Identify what could possibly go wrong
  There’s this thing called Murphy’s Law. Since a few months ago, whenever we are on a mission, we always create a Murphy’s List – a list of things that can break. So, we work backwards from there and try to solve for all those cases before we launch a product or initiative. For instance, a bad experience at the restaurant for the user could cause a ripple effect and eventually hamper consumer trust. We addressed it by working relentlessly on training the restaurant staff across restaurants and cities. Despite all the training, we anticipated some teething issues and over-communicated and re-assured our customers at various customer touch points. Consequently, our denial of services (DoS) ratio i.e. instances where the customer has been denied Gold service at a restaurant is less than 0.5% and has been trending downwards over time.
• Too good to be true can exist
  Many questioned us in the beginning on our pricing strategy. Many thought the price was set too low. In hindsight, it indeed was. But our objective was quite clear: we were optimising for trials and not for revenue. We were building “a no-brainer” — a term our product team threw around in the planning stage. In other words, a product that sold itself. Fortunately, all of that happened. Maybe the ultimate litmus test is in fact making the customers wonder out loud “Is this for real?” when they hear about your product. Eventually, the product pricing is 2.5x of the launch pricing, and the conversion rates on the plan page are still holding up (maybe there’s still a tonne of room to increase pricing).
• Your customers are your best marketing bet
  Word of mouth and referrals worked wonders for us. 40% of our total sales were referral driven. Lucrative incentives on either side i.e. referrer and referee helped to drive sales for Zomato Gold. This was further amplified by the smooth experience that the users had when they went out to a Gold restaurant.
• Proactively listen to your customers and partners (on either side of the marketplace)
  In any business, listening to your stakeholders is probably the most important thing. We kept reaching out to customers as well as restaurant partners to find their NPS score.We also asked them the primary reason driving the score. And that made us learn a host of things. Insightful things. 
  

According to our restaurant partners, increase in new customers and improvement in customer loyalty was the biggest driver for satisfaction with Zomato Gold. Additionally, we found that there is a 3x increase in Zomato traffic on Gold vis-a-vis non-Gold restaurants. The increase in inbound requests from restaurant partners (more than 200 per month as we speak) further reinstates the excitement for Zomato Gold in the restaurant owner community.

Which brings us to our two other important learnings –

• Keep building
  Based on this feedback from restaurant owner community, and the inbounds we have been getting, we added some great places to Zomato Gold after the launch – the number of partners on Gold now is 2300 compared to around 1100 at the time of launch. The average rating of the places we added after launch is more than the selection we had online at the time of launch. This made Zomato Gold customers even happier, and we are now trending upwards with our customer NPS of 84%. \m/
• Churn and let churn
  Some of our restaurant partners weren’t providing the best experience to Gold customers, because of lack of intent or professionalism. We measure DoS on an outlet by outlet basis and voluntarily churn rogue restaurant partners on Zomato Gold. Until now, we have proactively churned 70% of the partners that have churned so far. The other 30% churned from the program, because of two reasons – 1) there have been a lot of sealing by the local government for various reasons, 2) some restaurant owners make decisions based on exceptions rather than looking at data (for example, if there was one loss making table due to Gold in a week, they would churn). We didn’t make much effort to save such restaurants from the program – because we knew that this would lead to a poor user experience eventually. These were tough calls, and were taken with a lot of determination – but we knew that we were doing the right thing.

And according to our users, Zomato Gold offers “great value” and that has continued to be remain the key proposition driver. Gold is making dining out a lot more affordable than it used to be. Additionally, gold is helping users explore new restaurants – 83% of our users discovered and visited a Gold partner restaurant for the first time, after becoming a member. Zomato is a search and discovery platform at the core – and we are so happy that Gold is adding to the spirit of Zomato in a big way. Check out what some of our customers had to say –

In conclusion, we can note that Zomato Gold is just getting started. Our team envisions great possibilities in the near horizon for all the parties involved. Exciting times ahead — indeed.

As always, kindly share your feedback/suggestions by dropping us a mail at gold@zomato.com