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Home , Nevzat Aydin, Online food ordering, Talabat, Yemeksepeti

STORY OF A RISING DELIVERY START-UP: .COM

Food delivery startup Yemek Sepeti has experienced success in the online industry in , securing close relationships with more than 7,000 of the most popular across the country. The company has become the go-to destination and mobile app to order lunch or dinner, holding a 90 percent market share and delivering 150,000 a day. It has opened operations in as a gateway for the entire , and late last year General Atlantic, one of the world’s leading growth investors, invested $44 million to fund their expansion.

Yemek Sepeti is part of a startup ecosystem that has been rising in Istanbul for nearly a decade. Over the past two years alone, the Turkish shopping site markafoni was acquired by the global media company Naspers for over $200 million, and eBay bought the Turkish auction company Gittigidiyor. Silicon Valley juggernaut Kleiner Perkins invested in Turkey's Gilt Group-like Trendyol.

Turkey's leading online food-ordering company recently sold to . Delivery Hero, a German-based online food-ordering firm, acquired Yemeksepeti for $589 million on May 5. At just 15 years old, Yemeksepeti has 370 employees and reportedly delivers more than 3 million meals per month. Surprisingly, , the CEO and co-founder of Yemeksepeti.com, paid out $27 million in company sale proceeds to 114 of his employees. That's an average bonus of $237,000, given to employees who are used to making $1,000 to $2,000 per month.

While Yemek Sepeti has navigated unique market conditions, such as the country's once slow broadband adoption, its story of battling for new consumer adoption to hyper growth is familiar to any entrepreneur or investor in the US. And its role in the growing startup ecosystem, suggests more opportunity to come. At the company's founding, Turkey had no broadband or DSL -- all Internet was dial-up. They and their potential restaurant clients had only one phone line, requiring one to log off in order to make phone calls. With no marketing budget, no financing beyond their savings, compelled to live with their parents, and spending many days wondering if they were crazy, they discovered that orders slowly moved upward: 150 per day by the end of their first year, 450 their second, over 1,000 their third. Receiving some recognition in the press, they didn't begin marketing until 2006 when Google AdSense was introduced in Turkey. Based on their extensive knowledge of customer history, they proved to be intuitive and outstanding search engine marketers, converting nearly half of people who visited their site.

2006 was also a significant inflection point for the startup ecosystem more broadly in Istanbul. In that year telecom was privatized, beginning a boom in mobile access, and a dramatic increase in adoption of home computing. "Before this, the orders we had were mostly lunch, people ordering from work computers,” Nevzat explains. “But now with people having lapstops with them at home, dinner orders have become over half our deliveries."

2011 became a second inflection point as Turkish audiences went from email, browsing, and chat to becoming online buyers. "We are still in early days of people using credit cards online, so our transactions are mostly cash on delivery or mobile point of sale, but that is changing. is on the rise, and we believe 20 percent or more of our sales could be credit or debit card based in the next two years."

Today Yemek Sepeti has expanded its services to 46 cities in Turkey, and now offering three new services: an eCommerce site to order regional delicacies; a -like crowd-sharing restaurant review site that will eventually offer online reservations; and a procurement website for restaurants to order supplies. Opening operations in Dubai last year was a clear next step. It also operates across the region, including the , , , , and , as well as e-Food.gr in , which processes 300,000 orders monthly. This crosses over with markets where Delivery Hero is already active by way of its acquisition of .com in March 2015.

Sources: https://pando.com/2013/03/26/building-a-delivery-startup-in-turkey-with-epic-traffic-scant- funding-and-no-broadband/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/04/delivery-hero-turkey/