Swiggy wasn’t the first entrant in India’s foodtech market, but it’s now a leading player in this business. So what’s the reason behind Swiggy’s quick rise to the top?
The secret lies in its ability to blitzscale or to grow at an incredibly rapid pace, according to Vivek Sunder, chief operating officer at Swiggy.
While speaking at this year’s Tech in Asia Conference, he said that the problem Swiggy initially faced was how to expand to Tier 2 and 3 cities across India. It would take the company a month to expand to a new city, as it required significant resources and on-ground manpower to create tie-ups with restaurants and delivery agents.
To Sunder, the solution was through the use of technology and crowdsourcing.
“We were already a disrupting company, so I said, ‘Let’s find a way to disrupt ourselves.’ Which is, ‘Let’s create a team to disrupt the way the existing expansion team is working.’ We gave this new team a mandate that they have to recreate what has been done in the first three and half years in three months,” recalls Sunder.
Swiggy focuses on technology and data, and it sought to put that to the test. The company started to launch simultaneously in five new cities where it saw rising demand through downloads of its app or online searches in locations where it wasn’t operating.
“We took that information and went to the users and said, ‘Hey, it looks like you want to use us in your city. We don’t know your city very well. Could you tell us the restaurants that you would like to order from?’” says Sunder.
Swiggy expanded to most of the 550 cities in India where it currently operates by using this five-city launch crowdsourcing model, he claims.
“Long story short, while [our expansion team] added 10 cities in the first three and half years, in the next 12 to 15 months, we added 500 cities. That’s what blitzscaling is,” says Sunder.
To get consumers in these locations to do the legwork, Swiggy tapped into cities with a large university population. Through an internship program, the company was able to attract tech-savvy students from 100 to 150 universities across the country to become their CEOs on campus. Swiggy gave them a budget so they could create a network of restaurants and delivery partners that it needed.
“We didn’t have to worry about anything as we had a bunch of tech-savvy people who were hungry and doing the work for us. This worked very well for us,” says Sunder.
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