How do you order your food? Call the restaurant, place your order, call again to check the status, then call again why it didn’t get delivered, and then call it again to know when will it get delivered, and finally give up? If it describes anything close to your experience of ordering food online or offline then relax! Bigbite is here to bring peace into your lives. Here is an interview with Himanshu Garg, the Co-founder of BigBite.

1. Tell us about your professional and educational background.

I graduated from IIT Delhi and then worked for an MNC for a year. My partner Sajal is an IIT Roorkee & London Business School alumnus.

2. Give us a bite on BigBite? When was it founded? How did you come up with the idea?

Well, when two voracious foodies combine, a bigbite is what you get.

Sajal was a regular user of similar food portals when he was in London. When he came back to India, he realized that there was a clear market gap in this space in India. Meanwhile, fed up of non existence of a portal that was extensive enough to give me the convenience of online ordering, I too was brewing the idea deep in my heart. We met through a common friend, discussed the idea and voila, rest is history.

We started working on bigbite in August, 2011 and launched the site in March, 2012. Presently, bigbite.in is the market leader in the online food ordering space in NCR with maximum number of restaurants on board, which are growing at a rapid pace. We aim to reach 2000 restaurants in NCR within 6 months.

3. What is your team?

Apart from Sajal and I, our team consists of three sales people, two tele-calling/data entry guys and two developers, one of whom is our friend from IIT Delhi itself.

4. What is  the current status of the company in terms of orders per day and customer loyalty?

We have over 500 restaurants on board already. As for now we get enough orders to keep our team busy. But as we have some aggressive marketing plans lined up, the team size will increase to keep pace with the orders. As far as customer loyalty is concerned, online food ordering is still not mature in India and most customers we get are experimenting this awesome way of ordering. Nonetheless, there are customers who have got the hold of the concept, are loyal and bring repeat business.

5. Is it a bootstrapped start-up? If not how did you manage to secure funding?

We began as a bootstrapped start-up but are no more in that state. Our team has grown to 10 full time employees now and we are planning massive advertising and promotional campaigns next month.
We haven’t gone out seeking for funding yet. For now, we are self-funded with substantial support from our respective families.

6. You don’t take any extra charge for delivery and the rates on menu are also the same as in restaurant, how are you making profit then? What is your business model?

We charge a percentage of each order’s value from the restaurant.

7. Few other sites also provide similar services, how is your service different? 

Though the basic business model is same, we provide an entirely different experience to our customers. Our focus is Delhi-NCR region, we know the region very well and we already have substantially more restaurants than our competitors.
Moreover, our service is more personal than other incumbent players’. We give utmost attention to the customers’ requirements and constantly keep them informed about the status of their orders right till the point the order reaches them.

8. What are the challenges you are facing at BigBite? 

Out of a sample scale of 100, more than 70 are small restaurants. These restaurants are not well organized and professional in terms of communicating with customers and maintaining their inventories. So, we have to be one notch up in keeping the data of restaurants updated and helping them follow up with customers in a more professional manner.

9. What are your future plans for BigBite?

In near future, we plan to deepen our reach in the Delhi-NCR region through even more exhaustive restaurant coverage. Furthermore, we have a series of customer awareness campaigns lined up to educate people who are new to this mode of food ordering.
In long term we want BigBite to be India’s best and most exciting portal to order food.

10. What is your advice to other young entrepreneurs?

Patience and hard work are not overrated. Just hang in there and keep your ground.

11. How can readers contact you and contribute to BigBite?

We would like to call all the foodies to be a part of the community centered around the goal of making online food delivery fun and easy.
Readers can reach us at himanshu@bigbite.in / sajal@bigbite.in feedback, career inquiries or any other business propositions.

Follow Bigbite on:

Facebook: @ bigbiteindia

Twitter: @bigbiteinfo

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