Swiggy vs Zomato: Deepinder Goyal explains why his company fell behind, ‘When your own friends…’

Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal in a recent podcast with Raj Shamani opened up about why competitor delivery platform Swiggy went ahead of his company and how he stepped up to negate the losses.

Founded in 2014, Swiggy quickly became a household name when it disrupted India's delivery market by providing food deliveries from hundreds of restaurants under one umbrella, thereby abolishing the need of the customer to pick up their own food or call up the restaurant every time if they wanted a food delivery.

On the other hand, Zomato, which had been around since 2008 as a restaurant discovering platform, began to lose its edge as delivery became the new ‘cool’ thing to do, especially with the discounts Swiggy used to provide during its initial days.

When asked about what Swiggy did right that Zomato could not do, Deepinder Goyal answered, “I think food (it was) delivery logistics. They actually started it. For a couple of years, I was resisting it thinking that this model can never make money.”

Justifying the reason behind his thinking, the Zomato founder said that he thought that Swiggy's “economics were very off”.

“It was very hard to justify back then that this would make money. I'm sure even Swiggy founder didn't know whether it would make money. But the customer love was real. So, at some point, there was no choice for us but to do it,” Deepinder Goyal said.

He said that Swiggy's customer retention proved their love for the platform.

“When your own friends are saying that ‘I am not doing any more orders from Zomato, I will do it from Swiggy’, you know that you have a problem at your hand. Then we had to figure it out,” Goyal said in the four-hour-long podcast.

Shark Tank controversy with Swiggy

Deepinder Goyal also addressed the recent controversy on Shark Tank, where he came for one season as a judge and was allegedly removed in the next season due to Swiggy's objection, which sponsored the show.

“I heard that from the Shark Tank team. They were talking to me for the next season and I was like I could do it for one weekend like last time. Then we were still talking.”

However, things took a sudden turn after that and the creators of Shark Tank “backed out”, Goyal said.

“One day later, they called us and said they couldn't do it. I said, ‘That's cool, buy why?’”

The Zomato CEO then revealed that he was told Swiggy had raised issues with him being in the show. “They told us that we can't have you.”