The going-out industry has long been the “Wild West” of the Indian business landscape—vibrant and high-energy, yet fragmented, unstructured, and surprisingly starved of specialized technology. While aggregators have mastered the art of selling tickets and driving discovery, the actual on-ground experience across venues has remained chaotic and underserved.
Enter Nayan Mishra, co-founder of ZillOut. In a candid conversation with Indian Startup Times, Nayan shared his journey of transforming this chaos into a streamlined tech ecosystem that is now powering going-out experiences across 16 cities.
From Failed Scalability to Industry Disruption
Every entrepreneur has a “Day Zero” story. For Nayan, it began during his college days with a peer-to-peer rental platform. While it earned a spot in the prestigious IIM Bangalore incubator, the venture hit a wall: it wasn’t scalable.
However, failure is often the best market research. During the lockdown, Nayan identified a glaring gap.
“The going-out ecosystem lacked real on-ground tech infrastructure,” he noted.
The vision for ZillOut (derived from the modern energy of stepping “out” of your “zone”) was born not just as another app, but as a B2B backbone designed to bring structure, visibility, and control to venues managing high-energy, high-chaos environments.
Empowering Venues: The ZillOut Edge
Most consumers are familiar with giants like BookMyShow, Swiggy scenes or District by Zomato. However, Nayan points out a critical distinction.
While these platforms focus on aggregating users, ZillOut focuses on empowering venues.
“Our mission is to reduce a venue’s dependency on third-party platforms and help them own their customer experience end-to-end,” Nayan explains.
By building intuitive infrastructure designed for real on-ground teams, ZillOut enables venues to:
- Directly interact with their customers
- Facilitate seamless, in-house transactions
- Streamline the entire guest journey from entry to exit
This execution-first approach has helped ZillOut scale to 500+ brands and reach over a million users, largely driven by venue-led distribution rather than traditional customer acquisition.
Building with Speed, Learning from Reality
With a team of 55, including a core group of 10 members who have been part of the journey since the early days, Nayan’s leadership philosophy is rooted in speed, ownership, and real-world feedback.
Instead of chasing perfection, the team focused on getting the product into real environments as quickly as possible.
“Build fast, deploy early, and learn directly from the ground,” Nayan shares.
By staying close to end users and observing how the product performs in live, high-pressure scenarios, the team continuously refines the system based on real problems rather than assumptions.
This approach has been critical in shaping ZillOut into a product that works not just in theory, but in the chaos of real-world operations.
Interview by : Kashish Srivastava
