So, how does Jumbotail work? 

It connects Kirana stores/retailers with the supply side. In other words, it is an aggregator and online wholesale marketplace that connects small scale retailers with wholesalers. Essentially, this happens through the app which drastically simplifies the traditionally prolonging task of retailers having to physically visit markets which would result in other issues such as financial loss due to temporary closure, warehousing, transportation, disputes, etc. This online platform opens up a whole new world to Kirana store owners by eliminating several constraints in the following ways.

Procurement and Transportation

What would initially require retailers to shut their stores for a day or two and result in unnecessary communication, transportation and time/financial loss is now available at the retailer’s fingertips wherein orders can be placed online. And for transportation logistics of the same, the company ties up with vehicles on a monthly lease and has 110 vehicles currently in the running.

Stocking and Warehousing

The start-up provides a makeshift warehouse for regular customers/retailers who face the issue of limited storage capacity amidst stocking up goods in bulk in order to prevent multiple commutations to distant places. 

Versatility

Instead of retailers having to visit multiple places for different kinds of products, the app streamlines the same by allowing access to over 3,500 varieties of products that are placed in its various sections.

Jumbotail also seems to have a clear understanding of its target audience which is reflected through its app’s extremely simple interface and friendly add-on features. For instance, its ‘GoldenEye’ and multilingualism feature simplifies and educates Kirana store owners regarding market trends, purchase patterns, product margins, stocks, etc, without them having to spend much time researching and that too in their preferred languages. Besides, Jumbotail offers to install data packs into customers’ devices and add the same in their invoice post-transaction.

Collectively, through this, Jumbotail aims to re-engineer the Indian grocery ecosystem by providing fair access to markets and increased economic opportunities for millions of ‘mom and pop’ grocery retailers, brands, and staples producers and farmers.

The Early Entrant

70% of India is said to speak non-English language and that’s where Dailyhunt’s product finds its relevance. Understanding the ignored and untapped potential customer, something majority of the start-ups and giants hunt for today, Dailyhunt was the first one in the league to enter the regional content space.

The market environment also played its role as a catalyst for Dailyhunt’s success. The smartphones were getting cheaper and the app stores were taking off back then. Dailyhunt’s ascendance coincided with Android’s rise in India. This gave the company its golden push to capture the market and take an early lead. Not only they created the content which customers understood (news/information) but also what they enjoyed (short videos).

Dailyhunt’s platform provides three major types of content: news, e-books and magazines. The entire content is available in 14 different regional languages and can be accessed through the app or the website. Majority of it is sourced from over 3,000 providers, including some hyperlocal correspondents for news.

Talking about revenue, the major chunk comes from advertisement. It ties up with large news media and publishing houses for content on its platform and shares the advertising revenue on the news screens with them. Second is the revenue generated from e-books and magazines, which is shared with the publishers.

The platform to date has progressed from 2,000 content creators to 50,000, progressing towards personalised content.

A Multi-Faceted App

While it is important to cash on the opportunities with right moves, it is more important to have the foresight to understand the market sentiment and create an opportunity out of it.

The sound of ‘Made in India’ and ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ echoed loud in the country, with local companies jumping on to the opportunity. Dailyhunt was not far behind. It already had a product at place which was created on those sentiments and the market environment further accentuated its popularity.

In September 2020, the company launched a short video making app — Josh — to fill the void created by Tik Tok, Likee, Vigo and other Chinese apps which were banned by the Indian government.

This latest addition to the platform is estimated to have around 85 Million monthly active users with over 1.5 Billion video playing daily. It has managed to stitch partnerships with 200 exclusive content creators on the platform. Local language support is one of the key attractions of this app which saw a massive growth in the first few days of its launch itself. This is especially applauding because Dailyhunt placed its bet on regional languages at the time when it was considered not so ‘glamorous’. The business was driven solely on the sheer demand for such products, with no frills attached.

Dailyhunt entered the Billion dollar club after raising a funding of over $100 Million led by Google, Microsoft and Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubation. Following the announcement, the company raised another over $100 Million as part of a Series H financing round from Qatar Investment Authority and Glade Brook Capital Partners. To date, the company had managed to secure $430 Million from various investors.
The latest round is to scale up Josh and double down on its Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) push. This brings us to the strong technology backing of the app, which has been devised intuitively, driven by AI, and is an outcome of deep machine learning.

Strong Technology at Play

It is pertinent to talk about the technology behind this app and overall Dailyhunt platform, which is one of the reasons behind its sustainable success and product differentiation.

Each language has its own script. One of the challenges Dailyhunt faced was interpreting the font of that particular language on mobile devices. The issue was tackled at an early stage itself. Besides, each language has its nuisance in terms of its correlation of multiple words with other languages. So when people work on data science and machine learning, sentences are broken into words and are correlated. This complexity was solved by the company through supervised and unsupervised data learning technology. In the former, the machine is trained allowing you to collect data or produce output from the previous experience while the unsupervised learning technique doesn’t need training or intervention. This is done because, if the reader doesn’t understand the context of each word, he can’t enjoy the essence or emotion of a content.

Using AI inputs like time, usage patterns, festivals, clusters and social signals, Dailyhunt is able to categorise content. The company claims to be only one in the field to have its own ad-tech online real-time auction bidding engine, besides Google and Facebook. The company’s system has been architected to run a huge data stake and user signals in real time, hence, enabling them to deliver data in real time.

This robust technology serves one single purpose – Creation of a strong digital media platform and an AI driven content discovery environment which will help consumers discover, consume and socialise with content.

Zomato’s Platforms and Initiatives: The Reasons Behind Its Success

The Website

As mentioned before, this was Zomato’s first and core iteration as it ventured into the online food industry. The website portal is an online restaurant directory/listing platform that connects users with all the restaurants in their city or immediate vicinity and cuts the information intake time in half. The site gives people a wide variety of information about what kind of restaurants there are, the food choices, menu pricing, and relative locations. It also acts as a booking platform through which customers can easily book a table well in advance with partnered restaurants.

The site also helps filter out restaurants as per different preferential categories like price point, style of cuisine, customer ratings, dietary needs and hygiene factors. The website as a product or mechanism for the brand is a two-pronged strategy from an entrepreneurial and business standpoint. The plan starts with streamlining the user experience, which drives heavy traffic for the brand and enables it to spread its reach. Simultaneously, as a result of this heavy traffic, the website is the perfect platform for hosting advertorials and offers that restaurants wish to reach their customers with. Zomato uses this to their advantage by featuring ads for restaurants and charges them a commission for it. This brings a lot of visibility for the restaurants in question and revenue for Zomato. It is a win-win strategy and that is why the website is at the core of the brand’s market penetration, acting as a cornerstone for all its other branch-off ventures.

Zomato Food Delivery App

The App, which was launched in January of 2011, served as a strong supporting wing to the business and is second only to the primary website. The basic function of it is similar to Swiggy. It takes food orders from customers on behalf of its partner restaurants and delivers to them via its own fleet of Zomato delivery personnel. Though the fleet is relatively new following the success that newcomer Swiggy had seen using its own fleet instead of using third-party delivery services which Zomato was initially doing.

The app offers a variety of different features that streamline the user experience and has many similar features to the website. Centred around convenience, the app allows customers to order food online from partner restaurants in over 500 cities across India. Additionally, you can also track your order’s status in real-time, avail offers and discounts that a particular restaurant has, book tables, look up restaurant details (reviews, photos, ratings, menus, etc.) and filter your restaurant search with the filter option on the app which mirrors the website.

Interestingly, where apps like Swiggy just get the food to you, Zomato has an added option of letting customers place orders, which they can then go pick up for the full takeaway tradition.

The features of the app aside, it was a smart business branch-off that contributes to the business’s revenue stream. By bridging the gap in the online food ordering industry that exists in India, the brand brings convenience and efficiency to the table, which drives up customer engagement and makes it such a popular platform. As a result of the rise in popularity, and the visibility and traffic these restaurants get from the delivery app, Zomato can charge a delivery fee, which is split between the company and the drivers.

Zomato Gold

This wing of Zomato’s revenue-building scheme is a subscription platform where users and customers can access exclusive deals at restaurants and pubs that are under the Zomato banner. In this, there are two broad categories, one for nightlife and one for dine-out customers. In the dining, segment members receive complimentary dishes from the menus of partnered restaurants and get deep discounts. In the nightlife segment, customers get complimentary drinks from the menus.

The gold membership platform acts as a heavy revenue generator as well as a loyalty-building scheme. The deep discounts and complimentary menu items ensure higher user loyalty for the platform, more footfall for partnered restaurants. Consequently, the subscription fee paid by users and the registration fees that restaurants pay to Zomato to be featured pulls in a steady stream of revenue and brand popularity for the platform.

All in all, the multi-pronged approach of streamlining the user experience and cross-promoting partnered restaurants have served Zomato well in becoming not only a viable business model but one of India’s most popular and fastest-growing start-ups to date. More than just being a series of apps and online portals, Zomato has turned its product line into a symbiotic business builder and the foundation upon which it stands today.

With the apps and platforms doing the heavy lifting in building up the brand value and driving customer engagement, Zomato also has a series of initiatives that further bolster the venture of this rapidly expanding start-up. Let us take a look at them and how they contribute to the overall growth.

Hyperpure

Where most of the previously illustrated initiatives were geared towards bringing customers and restaurants together, the Hyperpure venture is specifically designed for the restaurants that Zomato partners with. After all, they are their customers too in a way. Hyperpure is a B2B foodtech vertical that helps restaurants source fresh, hygienic and high-quality ingredients such as meat, produce, beverages, seafood items and so on.

It connects these restaurants directly with farmers, mills, producers and processors across the country to create an effective logistics network. This ensures that eateries can stock their kitchens with quality ingredients in a consistent fashion. It also serves the dual purpose of putting sources such as farmers and producers into business thus providing much-needed income. This approach not only diversifies Zomato’s value chain but also adds value to the brand name itself within the industry circles as a go-to brand to be partnered with, thus increasing the reach.

Zomaland

Counter-balancing the digital-forward presence of Zomato, Zomaland is the physical manifestation of the brand which acts as a food and entertainment carnival. The best eateries, musicians, comedians and games come together under the banner to display the vast connection and network that Zomato maintains in a single location.

Yes, people want convenience but as times like the 2020 lockdown have proven, people also want to have fun and celebrate in the real world. This venture takes the food connection and brings it into the real world, which creates a lot of clout for the brand and footfall for the restaurants that take part in it. Launched in 2018 as a flagship event it saw over 100,000 visitors in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru alone. It has since been hosted in multiple cities and even been registered with the Singapore Tourism Board. Beyond being a fun event to build a brand name, it serves the purpose of widening Zomato’s business network. For a start-up that is a very valuable thing to have.

Zomato Kitchens

Zomato took things a step further and took to the start-up industry by providing kitchen infrastructure to entrepreneurs looking to open their own restaurants by funding them and setting them up in the right locations under the brand banner.

It is one thing to be a start-up, it is another thing entirely to help start-ups while your business is also in the start-up category (albeit a well-established one). This showcases the level of integration and vast network that Zomato has access to as well as the level to which the business scaled up. This venture essentially contributed towards building brand loyalty from the industry side.

All in all, it is quite evident that the reason for the overall success of Zomato is due to the wide array of products that line its market strategy and bolster its foundations. The combination of maintaining a strong core operation in the form of their website and having multiple apps and initiatives playing a crucial supportive role has ensured its place at the top of the mountain of start-up unicorns.

What Makes Swiggy Stand Out as a Product

Much of Swiggy’s success can be boiled down to its approach and format. In a market so over-crowded with industry giants that have had years to set up a business network, the only way to stand out was to execute a maverick move, which Swiggy did in the form of its app. It is a well-known fact that a business that controls the value chain in a market, has greater control over the market itself, hence the entire premise of the app was based around building up and reinforcing an excellent logistics operation.

Building a logistics network is a tedious and time-consuming task that does not yield much customer retention out the gate, which is why most start-ups tend to shift focus to first getting their name out into the market sphere through apps, marketing and outreach activities. Swiggy proved that while this was a big task for a start-up to undertake in its formative years, it was a worthwhile one.

Thanks to this approach, the very concept of the app and how it functioned served as the foundation for the brand’s success. Yes, brands like Zomato, TinyOwl and Foodpanda performed a similar function of connecting customers to their restaurants of choice but in doing so, they completely neglected the delivery aspect of it and left that task to other third-party delivery services or the restaurants themselves. Needless to say, this left the delivery and customer-care end of things lacking in timely deliveries, quality of service and severely limited the restaurant’s ability to live up to the demand as a restaurant can only do so much delivery when the primary focus is on their in-house customers.

The Swiggy app on the other hand completely cuts out all the middle-persons and keeps its sole focus on connecting hungry customers with their food orders. Operating on a hyper-local food delivery system, Swiggy has a vast network of delivery personnel whose primary goal is to get the food to the customers in 30 to 40 minutes. Keep in mind that this was at a time when online delivery as a concept was not too popular with restaurants and much of the competition as well. The reason why Swiggy was able to rise above the doubt was thanks to investors who saw its potential, coupled with a strong combination of a solid logistics network and a streamlined technology backboard to support the vast delivery network.