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Making personalized marketing sophisticated | Umair Mohammed @ Wigzo
191 Plays1 year ago
Wigzo is an automated customer data platform for D2C brands in which Shiprocket has acquired a majority stake. It has grown from an automated personalized email marketing tool to a platform that helps brands to understand massive customer data and use it intelligently.
What you can learn from this episode:
- The evolution of Mar-tech, from email automation to Customer Data Platform
- The journey of finding the right problem to solve
- Raising more funds vs getting acquired
Get notified about the latest releases and bonus content by subscribing to our newsletter at www.founderthesis.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Wixo and Founder Umed
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi guys, I'm Umed, founder and CEO of Wixo.
00:00:15
Speaker
Have you heard of CDP, the hottest new jargon in the field of marketing tech? It stands for Customer Data Platform and it is essentially a unified platform with all data about your customers from multiple sources. Think of a typical consumer products retailer, let's say a mobile phone company. They would have some data coming from their D2C website about their customers, some data from e-commerce marketplaces and some data from their offline stores and some data from service outlets.
00:00:45
Speaker
The CDP platform will allow them to have a single unified view of customers and send them tailor-made messages or content using multiple modes of communication. Wixo,
Acquisition by Shiprocket and Impact on Wixo
00:00:57
Speaker
a modern CDP platform built for retailers who want to do omni-channel and it recently got acquired by Shiprocket.
00:01:05
Speaker
This candid conversation between your host Akshay Dutt and Umer Mohammed, the founder of VIXO, is a goldmine of insights about finding product market fit, marketing automation, B2B SaaS scale-up and how to think about an acquisition. Stay tuned for this amazing conversation and don't forget to subscribe to the Founder Thesis Podcast on any audio streaming app.
00:01:35
Speaker
So Wixo is a retention marketing tool that does two things for a D2C brand. And those two things are A, it improves conversion rates. That means more people who are coming onto your website end up buying because of the personalization, conversion rate optimization. And finally, it enables brands to
00:02:04
Speaker
increase their repeat purchase rate, retain more customers.
Shifting Focus: Retention and Brand Differentiation
00:02:09
Speaker
So essentially, what Wixo does is in the same amount that you've spent on marketing, it allows you to get more sales in the first go and allows you to more repeat purchase and drive a higher lifetime value from your existing customers. Can you share some numbers? What's the revenue you're clocking currently and just some numbers about what kind of impact you've had?
00:02:34
Speaker
So overall, the revenue numbers, we've crossed 10 million ARR, you know, this year and we've grown almost four times since, you know, the ship rocket acquisition back in January 2022. And yeah, I mean, look, I think I've said this before, but you can't stop a product whose time has come.
00:02:59
Speaker
So I just feel that it was also at Shiprock came in at the right time and that kind of software was need of the art. 2020, we saw a lot of focus on acquisition of users, content creation. There was a whole D2C explosion. Exactly. But now I think the brands realized that now attention is getting divided.
00:03:24
Speaker
between multiple brands being present between everyone understanding this d2c game. Social media crowded with not just influencers but also ads, user generated content ads. Brands want to obviously stand out and once they've captured that audience they want to continue to retain that audience.
00:03:49
Speaker
which are actually the only two ways to counter higher CAC. You can't go to Facebook and Google and say, give me a lower CPM. They won't. It's a tool built out for opacity where you have opaqueness in terms of what you're bidding in versus what your impressions are and who your ad is getting shown to, driven by their machine learning algorithms.
Entrepreneurial Insights and Wixo's Evolution
00:04:18
Speaker
All said and done at the end, what I've always believed is that the biggest piece of real estate that a brand has is its own website and communication channels that it owns.
00:04:33
Speaker
like you said, in 2020, that brand now needed to now own the data, own their customers. Platform play kind of became scary. And we had examples of TikTok influencers. Once the TikTok got banned, they couldn't hack it. Some of them couldn't get the same kind of following.
00:05:03
Speaker
having your brand on someone else's platform is a big, big red flag. You can't call yourself a brand. And rightly so, that's why people use the term used in the industry as seller. You're a seller on somebody else's platform. So the journey, I think from becoming a seller to a brand,
00:05:25
Speaker
People understood it that that happens when you own the customer and the customer knows you. Right. And it's your own customer that talks to you in a very different way versus a new customer that doesn't know your brand. And I think that is what drove the need for a product like Wixo, where the ability to own that first party data, the ability to own that data and enrich it and know your customer. Right. KYC. It became such an important
00:05:54
Speaker
facet because in the D2C world actually we are talking about millions and sometimes millions and millions of consumers customers coming onto the website we we go to any brand these days and typically they would say we have 100,000 unique visitors every month we have 300,000 unique visitors that's a lot of traffic that's a lot you know 300,000 unique traffic
00:06:18
Speaker
But then you ask them that, you know, and they say, oh, we are marketplace heavy and not discounting marketplaces. They have a role to play in the ecosystem and a very important role in fact of discovery and elevating the brand. But at the end, your own website is your own real estate. That is where you control the narrative. That is where you control the control, how your products are featured, how your products look.
00:06:44
Speaker
And you own that data, own that customer.
00:06:49
Speaker
So I think that kind of propagated the need for solutions for software like Wixxo. And REST is just, we understood the problem statement. It was the right time. People understood the importance of data. And we were at the right sort of product journey as well, where we could say that we've built out, we've spent three, four years perfecting the product for this industry.
00:07:16
Speaker
Let's just go through that journey of perfecting the product for the industry. How did the idea of VIXO come to you? And this was like your second venture, right? This was not your first venture. So let's start with you becoming an entrepreneur first.
00:07:34
Speaker
So, you know, typically, and I can give you like a very cheesy answer, typically, that gets featured. But it wasn't like that. I was just not into the nine to five. I was just not feeling the job culture. And also, I think I saw an opportunity. And around me, I had some people who were already venturing out. One of my very close associates became one of the co-founders at Carrot Lane.
00:08:00
Speaker
And so I was surrounded by people who were on course for their entrepreneurial journey.
00:08:08
Speaker
And at that time I was like, okay, I figured out a problem, but that I didn't have any technical expertise. I didn't, you know, everyone was starting an e-commerce company and there were a lot of funding happening. So it was a very different time as well for the Indian startup ecosystem because suddenly we didn't know why a Flipkart or a Snapdeal is raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
00:08:34
Speaker
And I was just trying to get into it. Digital was getting adopted. It was a 2008 to 2013 kind of was a very different time for the startup ecosystem. And I remember, so I thought, okay, I didn't have a product.
00:08:50
Speaker
But I had knowledge of e-commerce, I had knowledge of product, I had knowledge of how data functions and thanks to my previous, the current job that I was in, I was able to sort of put all that expertise into play and go to few e-commerce companies. And trust me, when I say this, I was just looking for a few problems to solve. Of course, I knew their problems.
00:09:17
Speaker
surrounded and they were revolved around data. But I didn't know the exact problems yet.
00:09:24
Speaker
And you know that Epiphany, the aha moment, not in the product journey, but in the journey of becoming an entrepreneur. So from a consulting company, I was going out and meeting different clients. And I would say, hey, we'll help you out. We can do this with your data. We can do this. We can create an architecture, XYZ, sort of like a service-based consulting company. And that was the first company. But Epiphany came when I went to this fairly large e-commerce
00:09:53
Speaker
I have narrated this incident I think about a thousand times and I was talking to the analytics team of that company and they say, oh yeah, we do the analytics, we have these dashboards and we do the analytics and we do the RFM, which was really fancy back then. RFM is Recency Frequency Monetary, so it's like a three-axis graph.
00:10:17
Speaker
You can plot, you know, you can plot recency frequency monitoring based on these three parameters. So it's, it is a little complex, but so, so they were, you know, showing off business intelligence software showing RFM. And, and I said, what, how do you like utilize this data? I get it. You have amazing intelligence. And he said, no, we download, we download the audience and you put it in a pen drive and you send it to the second floor to the guy who sends out emails. Right.
00:10:46
Speaker
And that kind of sparked like, what if this process was not this manual at all? What if this intelligence translated into a data being, you know, a dashboard being shared with that guy sitting on the second floor or somewhere else even in a different city can access it. The segment has been created by the marketing team and you can just execute it on that segment.
00:11:11
Speaker
Email marketing was already pretty popular then, so there were precedents of how to build out that software. But we started off with a simple email personalization or email tool. We said, okay, our email tool will be different in the sense that all this data analytics would feature inside of the tool.
00:11:33
Speaker
And it would make life easier for the analytics team and the marketing team who eventually executes. And for this, I recruited two people who I, you know, I recruited earlier in my job to build out various projects.
00:11:50
Speaker
I went took this idea to them and honestly at that time it sounded like on paper it sounded like that this would be like a very small tool something that you could you know it was not supposed to be like a data platform or it was not supposed to be big was supposed to be a very
00:12:14
Speaker
basic solvable need that I saw. And as a consulting company also, you know, I was, we were contemplating that as a consulting company, as consultants to e-commerce companies, we should have some sort of tool that we are also, you know, and, and as soon as I had that tool, and I did a few demos to them, you go to the vendor to get that done.
00:12:41
Speaker
to work with two individuals who I only hired as freelancers. And I said, look, if this project goes well, then we'll put it like a company. And they eventually became my co-founders. And so these two people, they went and they coded something in like a month. It was very shabby looking, but it did the job it was supposed to do.
00:13:06
Speaker
And we took that product to a few large brands and they said, oh, we love it.
00:13:14
Speaker
And one of them was kind enough, one fairly large, well-funded e-commerce company. There was a product manager there. And he was kind enough to say, what if he understood that we are young entrepreneurs, we're trying to build something, we have a small team. He said, what if I can help you shape the product as for my requirements?
00:13:37
Speaker
And what if that answer that would be fantastic? That would be lovely because, you know, why it will take certain time. And there was a product managers back then. So, I mean, we were the product managers in a five people team.
Personalization and Conversion Rate Optimization
00:13:50
Speaker
And that kind of just led to that. He explained his, you know, problem statements and
00:14:00
Speaker
And trust me, the first few years of the journey of Wixo were just clients explaining their problem statement to me, me explaining my problem statement to these guys, and these guys coming up with a technical way to solve those complex issues. Can you show the problem statements one by one? Yeah, sure. So email was a big channel of communication. It still is actually.
00:14:29
Speaker
But with WhatsApp and everything, it's considered, but it was like the dominant channel for... It was the only channel. It was the only channel. So, email personalization tool was... So, he said, okay, what if we could populate the email with the real time data
00:14:49
Speaker
from our website behavior. For that, the person needs to be logged in. That was the first problem statement the person needs to be logged in. The second problem statement was we need to somehow store it somewhere and when the email goes out dynamically populated in those
00:15:09
Speaker
It sounded like a problem that can be solved. So this would be like say someone has added an item to the cart but has not checked out. So you could within minutes of that action you could trigger a mail saying do you need help or the stocks are limited and finishing fast or something to nudge him to make the purchase.
00:15:29
Speaker
Yes. So that was the very early version of it. But we wanted more. We said, OK, you send out a million messages, a million emails a day. Do you send out 10 lakh emails a day? What if those 10 lakh emails, when you open, it's a different email or at least the part of the email is different. And when I open the same email, those bulk emails, that part of the email is different for me.
00:15:55
Speaker
Can we connect your browsing history to your email dynamically? And it was a slightly more complex problem to solve because that dynamic portion of the email would actually not go with the email.
00:16:14
Speaker
And what would happen is when you open the email, a call on the server would go that, okay, Akshay is opening the email and based on what we have told for Akshay, then the images will be downloaded from the server. So it was more real time and we had to actually, you know, sit down and build it. It was complex problem to solve. So similarly, the early part of Wixo
00:16:39
Speaker
were all built by the customers. We had a few early customers and we kept on solving those problems that came to us head on. Just go down the journey of these problems. These are fascinating problems.
00:16:55
Speaker
So the email personalization was one. Then second was when we started collecting that data of what Akshay is browsing or what Umer is browsing on the website, we said, oh, we are getting tons of other data as well. Like, for example, device, we will be getting device information, IP information, location information. We're getting tons of data. And we're not just getting for logged in users. We're also getting it for anonymous users. We're not doing anything with it, but we are getting
00:17:23
Speaker
So he said, okay, what can we do? So he said, oh, can you personalize my webpage or my website page in real time? Can you show him something in real time that is more contextual?
00:17:37
Speaker
Uh, and we said, yeah, that should be doable. So we wrote another like, are you talking of making the site mobile responsive? No, no, no, no. So if, if actually comes again, same similar example to email, if actually comes on to, uh, people are usually browsing the website, uh, uh, from their own device, right? It's either a mobile device and auto desktop device. And, uh, and trust me, I've seen that transition, you know, uh, when we started.
00:18:07
Speaker
capturing this data traffic of mobile to desktop was about 50% 50% today it's 90 10 possibly right so there was a
00:18:22
Speaker
The problem statement was when Akshay comes onto my website, I don't know his Akshay because he's not logged in. But I still have captured his basic browsing as an anonymous user. I've captured, he's looked at t-shirt, he's still looked at a yellow t-shirt, he's looked at large size t-shirt. I don't know his Akshay, but I know this is some customer from XYZ place.
00:18:44
Speaker
now this cookie basically yes is helping you to track it right now now this person comes back again tomorrow so the ask was can you show him something contextual based on what he brows yesterday because typically any continue your search for example like on amazon when you go back exactly exactly like amazon and thanks for bringing amazon to this point because amazon played a big role in our journey of the product as well because amazon was
00:19:13
Speaker
was setting the benchmark as to how personalization used to be carried out. If you search anything on Amazon, if you buy anything from Amazon, everything from that point forward is personalized to your taste. Even today, Amazon did not bother to change the user experience because their homepage, if you look at it, if you're a regular buyer, is tailored to your taste of what you have bought.
00:19:42
Speaker
Most of the pages are dynamic. It recommends products based on your history. So we said, okay, we can actually build experiences like Amazon for these, through the data that we're capturing, we can do a lot more than just email personalization, because at the end, email is still two, 3% base of the total people who are coming. So we said we could impact a much larger audience. And that sort of started the CRO, the convergent rate optimization journey of
00:20:18
Speaker
How do you change the content dynamically which is getting displayed? Is this through Shopify integration?
00:20:26
Speaker
we do through Shopify, but we have our own JavaScript and SDKs embedded into the website. So if we want to show, we don't change the existing user experience or flow of the website because that is much harder to do and it breaks the entire process and the teams have spent quite a few hours in developing that user experience, right? So what we do is we typically put an overlay because we have the JS embedded, we could typically overlay
00:20:52
Speaker
uh something on top of the existing so let's just take an example of pop-ups right pop-ups are typically very annoying when you go to a website they ask for okay um but what if we said okay pop-ups could also be contextual what if you you know one pop-up could say hey continue browsing for these three items
00:21:12
Speaker
or get a discount on the jacket that you were looking at, subscribe right now with email. And we saw amazing conversion rate uplift from there. We saw typically a conversion rate on a pop-up like that was about two, two and a half percent. And trust me, these are validated numbers on fairly large traffic websites. We saw it jump towards 14% when it was contextualized.
00:21:38
Speaker
So what was happening is we were able to, using this contextualized behavioral data, we were able to also build a top of the funnel, a much larger audience base for our brands that we were working with.
00:21:58
Speaker
And now came obviously with this product, we had the MVP, we were building continuously building, we had few customers as well. And we were confident that we are
Navigating the E-commerce Niche and Growth Strategies
00:22:09
Speaker
on the right journey. So we approached a few investors. We were very, very fortunate to have some of the best, most amazing investors in the country back at a time when B2B software was not considered that sexy.
00:22:23
Speaker
Trust me, it was the time of e-commerce and consumer and hyper-local apps getting funded left, right, and center. We were the odd one out, like the ugly duckling and fundraising journey. But I've had the pleasure of working with some of the finest investors in the country, some of them
00:22:50
Speaker
I'm sure everyone would know, your listeners would know. Ritesh Malik, co-founder of Inuit. Neeraj Singh, CEO of Spiny and founder and CEO of Spiny.
00:23:03
Speaker
run up by, from, you know, 314 Capital, Mr. Mohandas Pai and his fund, and Cornerstone Capital, we had Satmir from Singapore Angel Network, we had, so Kunal Khattar from, you know, Car Nation and then Advantage Fund.
00:23:24
Speaker
So we had the honor of working with some people who literally backed us just on two things. They understood the problem statement. Yes, a lot of their portfolio is struggling through this.
00:23:43
Speaker
I think they understood the conviction that I went with. Sometimes it was not even a product versus pitch on a whiteboard saying that we will build this. I still remember my first call with Pranav. He was in the US, it was on Skype. Back then it was still Skype and he said,
00:24:05
Speaker
I love the vision that you have put out for the software, for what you want to build. And he told me this on the very first call. He said, will data play a very big role in this? I said, first party data will play a very big role in the first formative peers. But network effect data will eventually come into play.
00:24:29
Speaker
quite later and he said, Umer, data is a very long game. Are you sure you're up for it? Because it's not going to happen in two, three years. And I said, you know, I'm not thinking about exit. And trust me, whenever investors, I mean, I was always trained that whenever you go to a page, investors are going to ask you what would be the exit strategy and what would be the
00:24:56
Speaker
And I always used to say, I genuinely don't know. I don't know why would you want to exit from a company that can potentially be what HubSpot is today, which is a two billionaire company. Why would you want to exit from that company? Right. So that was what was in our mind that we're building something along those lines. 2017 was the year when we sort of said now we have to pick
00:25:21
Speaker
an industry because we don't have the bandwidth to build it for 5, 6, 7, 10 in a different industry. We can't. We're a frugal company. We've not raised tens of millions of dollars. We've raised very miserly. We've diluted quite a bit. So might as well focus on something and kill it. And one of my mentors who was an ex-boss at my previous job and he said, you know, you always pick a niche and kill that niche.
00:25:48
Speaker
So that was, for us, I was again, a tough call, a tough call because we had a lot of interest coming from other industries as well. VFSI was coming to us and say, can you do this for us in terms of personalization? Everyone was putting us in touch. Thanks.
00:26:07
Speaker
Anyone who does email marketing would be interested. Exactly. And the investor group, like the, you know, amazing people they are, they used to make a hell lot of connection with top, top individuals in the country. Right. And suddenly I'm talking to the head of digital banking and ICICI bank, the country head of digital banking. And I don't know what to tell him. I said, my brother won't fit. So we had to say a lot of no's.
00:26:36
Speaker
as well because we said, okay, no, we will pick a niche and we'll have to kill that niche for all practical purposes. We will have to be very, very focused on that particular niche. We'll have to build the software with that niche. And e-commerce was always close to the heart. We were already working with e-commerce companies. It was, you know, the product manager, like I said, was actually based out of that e-com company.
00:27:00
Speaker
And we were very, very fortunate to sort of say, OK, fine, we will just pick one niche, which is e-commerce. And trust me, actually, when that happened, a lot of investors, not the existing investors, a lot of pitches that I was doing took a backseat because they said e-commerce is only, you know, India is running software because e-commerce is only marketplaces.
00:27:26
Speaker
because nobody is going to buy things from people's own website. They are always going to go to a trustworthy source like an Amazon or a marketplace. Nobody is going to buy it from their own website. At that time, even in the US, D2C websites were not doing very big business as compared to Amazon.
00:27:49
Speaker
Not at all. Not at all. E-commerce was booming. Shopify was nowhere to be seen, frankly speaking. The only direct-to-consumer websites that we saw were built on Magento, which was very popular back then. And India had a big developer community, still has, big developer community of Magento. And there was a lot of customization, and Magento was
00:28:17
Speaker
So, but it was not as popular. So everyone said, but underlying currently, we saw that we saw the pain points when he sat with these, these e-commerce website brand owners, we sat with some of the, and we saw those undercurrent pain areas that they wished that they could bring this traffic. I mean, if they have an option of lowering the sales a little bit, but owning the audience, they would choose that.
00:28:46
Speaker
And we also saw retail sort of come and say, you know, I'll start capturing data
Pandemic's Impact and Strategic Acquisitions
00:28:55
Speaker
as well. I'll start, you know, I remember there were startups who would provide those tablets to retail companies who would put a guy there and ask, sir, we have people coming in. Did you not find the size? Whatever. So did you not find the size?
00:29:12
Speaker
and they were capturing that data digitally. So that whole digital transformation, that revolution was taking place. So undercurrent, we were very confident that it's going to change.
00:29:24
Speaker
One of the parameters I used to convince myself because you know there's a lot of self-taught actually when some top-notch investors and you're going you know Bangalore, Bombay, Pichin to raise a large round and people are saying, damn, they were not wrong. At that time, it was absolutely the truth. But I think for us, it was about seeing five years into the future, say in 2022, right?
00:29:52
Speaker
And one of the markers was, if I remember it correctly, retail brands, they started writing pig on their bag now available on zara.com or now available on tommy.com. And that kind of like, you know, you have to keep on convincing yourself that see, brand commerce is not is going to pick up. It's going to go crazy. It's going to
00:30:22
Speaker
You know these brands who are all retail, the $1 trillion or $700 billion back then retail industries is going to transform into e-commerce. E-commerce will see penetration rise up to about 25-30%. So there is a big headway to grow and we were banking on that industry to grow for our software to grow.
00:30:44
Speaker
So all said and done, I understand and empathize with the investors who said no to us, gave us the reasoning of why they were saying no simply because I've seen the other side of the table and you take all those things into account. But as a founder, your conviction is everything. The early stage of a company, your conviction on product, your conviction on the market, your conviction,
00:31:14
Speaker
And it could have been wrong. I could have been wrong and today even brand commerce would still be very small and marketplace would have still dominated.
00:31:24
Speaker
But it's just about predicting and finding the right patterns and trusting your instinct. So I think that kind of happened around that time, 2018, 2019, we kept on seeing upsurge into brand commerce. And 2020 was just like a very different year, right? First of all, the uncertainty around the pandemic and the lockdown, and then the uptick in the e-commerce
00:31:47
Speaker
Every benchmark that we knew, every benchmark that we saw, every single thing was broken in literally months, which we thought would not even pass in 2025. We saw those benchmarks getting broken. We saw brands. And frankly, I would say we were not, I would say it's in hindsight,
00:32:14
Speaker
We underestimated the market, maybe because also of what investors were telling us and we focused on some of the larger pitches and we said, okay, let's go to the larger brands. But meanwhile, a company that I've known for a good four or five years, I've seen their journey from Card Rocket
00:32:35
Speaker
they built Craftly, they pivoted and built Craftly which was a marketplace and then from Craftly they started a smaller division called Shiprocket and suddenly seeing Shiprocket go from 0 to 100 reviews on Shopify App Store in front of my eyes, I was like they're doing something which we aren't.
00:32:55
Speaker
you know, they're going after some different customer segment, which we are not, we may be missing out on certain, but we kept on our path because, you know, obviously we had fund crunch and we had salaries to pay and we had, you know, and there have been difficult times during the course, as with any startup, right? But we were at a position after the pandemic wins, you know, in our sales, we said, now, I think the investors would understand that we are,
00:33:25
Speaker
We have built a product, it has product market trade, it has adoption, people want this kind of software, they want conversion rate optimization.
00:33:34
Speaker
And we went out looking for fund rates. A couple of bankers came back and said, you know, you're much better as an acquisition because of the dilution and your numbers. And frankly, what you achieved with the... How much had you diluted? By 21. By 21, we had diluted around 53.6%.
00:34:02
Speaker
It was a constant battle to convince investors and therefore you had to accept lower valuations for money. Therefore, the dilution was higher. Exactly. And I think it's just like a vicious circle. Once you've accepted lower valuation,
00:34:20
Speaker
your subsequent valuation will also be lower because the markup you put, something has to shift in the business for them to suddenly get saved. And I think it was as first year entrepreneur, I kind of understood that all our pitches, and today I can see this out loud and to public and all to the entrepreneurs that I was pitching my product to investors.
00:34:48
Speaker
And that was the wrong move, frankly. I now understand that you don't pitch your product to investors. They're not the buyers. Why are you pitching? It's not a sales call. You pitch your product to your buyers, the people who are going to buy your product. To your investors, you pitch the story. You pitch the ecosystem. You pitch.
00:35:17
Speaker
The TAM, you pitch how big you believe and even then a lot of things have to fall into place for you to be able to go from a seed round where few people took a bet on you to a large series sale, like a 10 million series sale where you say, okay, I've now arrived to the product market fit stage. And frankly, we had all of that.
00:35:41
Speaker
But I think, you know, again, the storyboarding was something that I felt I was not doing right. And it was only when we started pitching for acquisition and we started working with bankers, professional bankers. And then we started sort of looking at because the pitch suddenly changed from a fundraising pitch. It became like an acquisition pitch of from a pitch that, hey, I can become a billion dollar company.
00:36:07
Speaker
to something like I can help you become a billion dollar or a five billion dollar business because I am cash proficient, I build things with frugality and we are at a scale and we are scaling rapidly. So the pitch kind of changed and it was at that time I kind of understood what the investors demand.
00:36:31
Speaker
And they don't demand it because it's the ecosystem or they demand it because they are also answerable to their LPs, their GP side. VCs are answerable to their investors for returning the money. And I think they need a compelling story. They need a compelling story to pitch. And they want to believe that story.
00:36:56
Speaker
because a lot of this is risky capital. And I understand today that the conviction doesn't always come from the founder of the product. Sometimes it's like, you know, the founder is great and they have the right product, but I'm not sure about if their time is good because there are a lot of doubts or sometimes it would be like, you know, I love their story. I love that product. I love the problem they're trying to solve, but I don't see how it's going to do 100 million in revenue.
00:37:26
Speaker
Right. And that storyboarding, which I'm talking about that you have to take investor. So if they're giving you a meeting, if they've given you a follow up meeting of looking at your product and understanding a journey, they're already from point A to point B.
00:37:44
Speaker
Point B, they want to know your story. They want to understand where. So it's your job as a founder to take them from point B to point Z, where you take them that journey that it's not, I am going to be on a rocket ship. I'm not pitching you my business. I'm not asking for money. I'm asking, are you the partner I am looking for to go on this journey with me? Will you add that fuel to my rocket?
00:38:13
Speaker
And it's a different patient. And I understand how, again, like I said, then why second gen founders or second gen entrepreneurs. It's easier for them to fundraise because they understand what is required at that level to convince someone to part with 100, 150, 200 crores. Because it's not about the crores or the zeros and the crores. It's about what would be
00:38:41
Speaker
the journey for them to get even a 2x or a 3x return, right? The IRR promise are much lower from an investor's perspective. But even at a 2x, 3x, a successful exit is a successful exit. And I understood that it's a different
00:39:03
Speaker
Journey for you to take that we see to you know, take a VC and say boss Let's go. Let's go on this journey with me, you know, and that's why some of the best Entrepreneurs and the first some of the best minds that I've worked with are great storytellers
Post-Acquisition Autonomy and Innovation at Wixo
00:39:22
Speaker
So, yeah, absolutely agree. I have a question about this acquisition. So this was an outright acquisition, like you are, you have been bought out or you still own, like the founders, do they still own? Yeah.
00:39:37
Speaker
Yes, we still do. Ship Rocket came and said, boss, we don't want to run your business. You run your business. But we believe that this business has a lot of potential because they understood the market in and out. They had been there. Like I said, they were riding that wave much, much better, much, much quicker than us.
00:39:57
Speaker
And the first one i had with the c.e.o. on a zoom call and i know it says this as well and i also say this and it sounds a little cheesy but on that zoom call.
00:40:13
Speaker
when he told me what he's building and then I shared what so I think we both were convinced it was just matching expectation in terms of price and so he he asked me a very simple question that Umar did you come into this business to make money I said yes I would like to make some money you know I would like my family and my future to be secure but that's not why I came into this business and he said look money matters
00:40:40
Speaker
We'll do it. But let's structure the deal in a way that your investors take the exit. You stay because we want you to stay. And for you to have the skin in the game, you have to hold on to the equity. I said, I couldn't have put it better in words. I want to hold on to. So we held on to over 24% of the company. Shiprocket bought out all the investors. Shiprocket pumped in primary capital as well.
00:41:05
Speaker
And slowly they've gone on to increase that a little bit. But the founders and the ESOP still holds upwards of 20%. And the idea is, I said, there is no point. I'm riding a wave. There's no point in selling at this valuation today. You might as well close the shop because I'm not getting anything. I'm not getting anything substantial. And I don't want to be lost in that noise.
00:41:32
Speaker
Right? I want Big Joe to retain its identity. And Sahel was like, you know, I would want the same. And I think he said it, but he's followed through on his words that he's left us completely autonomous. There is a board and board has, you know, Ship Rocket founders and CFO on the board and the board takes certain decisions, of course, you know, like a subsidy.
00:41:57
Speaker
But at the end, Sahil tells me that I want you to do this. But if you want to do something else, you do it your way. Because you built your business from 0 to 2.5-3 million when we acquired you and from 3 to 10, 2.5 to 10 or 11 million error that we are sitting on right now. He said, you know your business, you build it. And when it's big enough, when it's adding that value, then we will acquire the rest of the 20%.
00:42:27
Speaker
And I said, I will not ask for it. I will prove the value. And I did that. So while he gave me the autonomous, the ability to run the company, the ability to call the shots, even if, and he said this very clearly, and I still remember, he said, we'll sit in the room, we'll fight.
00:42:53
Speaker
We'll fight and we'll figure it out. But at the end, I think it was Sahil's vision and his conviction that kind of just gravitated the entire team towards. And I was amazed by not just with the management, the core team.
00:43:12
Speaker
But I was amazed with the team that they had built there. Every single person that I met during that early phase, the ingestion phase, which is supposedly the toughest, supposedly the trickiest, every single person had that common behavior, a common thread that they didn't care about.
00:43:39
Speaker
what was happening or what was not happening or whether they had to work remote or whether the twerks are there or not there and how they're you know but all of them had one single common thread at least the ones that I interacted with had one that they all looked at ship rocket as their own baby as their own company and
00:44:03
Speaker
When that happens, I think that energy is just very infectious. So that kind of energy translated into Exo as well. We were sitting in the same building for a good one year before she brought it to a much larger office. And we took over the entire building now.
Marketing Evolution and Brand Awareness
00:44:20
Speaker
Some broad themes I want to understand. What was your go-to-market journey and how has that evolved? Originally, when you started way back in 2015, what was it then and how has it evolved?
00:44:34
Speaker
I think go to market was very one is to one sales for us. But I think now we have started, you know, sort of, we built a lot of content, we built a lot of case studies, we built a lot of inbound journey as well, the product price has increased, of course, because the complexity has increased, because the things that the product does has increased. But at the same time, we also have sort of tried
00:45:04
Speaker
are best to make that journey as efficient as possible for a customer getting onboarded. Is it a self-service onboarding or is it a managed onboarding? It is managed and I'll tell you the reason for that as well and how we are evolving as a product. So you said give me an elevator pitch and I paused very early into it. And the reason I paused is because today the elevator pitch is different.
00:45:31
Speaker
because we have transformed from a retention marketing tool, which we started off with, to a fully-fledged CDP. Now, a CDP is a customer data platform. And that has happened over the last one year, where we built infrastructure where we are not only servicing e-commerce companies, now we are servicing larger retail clients as well. So the like so? So a CDP is like, say, Salesforce.
00:45:59
Speaker
Yes, kind of like Salesforce, but not as well. So it's more of a CRM, to be honest, where this entire data set of customer products reside. And you can make those correlation, those personalization, those segmentation, everything to do with customer.
00:46:20
Speaker
what they have bought, when they will buy, what is typically repeat purchase look like, how can I find patterns into my data using customer level data, right? And the data could come from a boss machine, like a point of sale solution where, you know, you're buying on the retail store, it could come from the website, it could come from the app.
00:46:41
Speaker
It could come from a POSS machine. How will POSS machine give you customer data? Like through the credit card number, you can add it. No, no, no credit card. Usually if you look at it, people now, almost all the retailers ask for a mobile number. So typically a mobile number would get stored and you know, you would get. So that becomes a unique identifier for that customer.
00:47:06
Speaker
Okay. So that unique identifier would become, you know, and would, so the CDP typically will ingest fast data as well from that phone number, will ingest e-commerce data as well from transaction, will ingest behavioral data from website and apps of people browsing anonymous or logged in, will ingest loyalty data from loyalty solutions, right? Will also ingest data from ad platforms like Facebook, like Google,
00:47:35
Speaker
We'll normalize the data. And the way I look at it is, if you look at the Wizzo journey, the value proposition, I always say it's like a pyramid.
00:47:47
Speaker
And why it's a pyramid? Because the bottom layer is data collection, assimilation, normalization, cleaning, building all of that data, depository, building unique identifiers, putting all of that. So if a phone number is a unique identifier and you have 2200 retail stores and an e-commerce website,
00:48:12
Speaker
Has the person purchased from multiple stores? Has the person purchased from your e-com store? Is he an e-com buyer? So that, all of that combined into a single video. Did you also be able to tell if he's been targeted by your ad on Google Facebook?
00:48:29
Speaker
In certain cases, yes, when we get that feedback from or we know that this customer, but we can help brands not just, you know, we can help them build personas, not just for targeted communication, but for targeted ads as well. Right. So a jeans lover, for example, a jeans lover who lives in
00:48:51
Speaker
you know Ludhiana or a gene sliver who lives in Delhi in your data because you have a store in Delhi Fundamentally could have very different behavioral patterns right or shopping patterns or average basket value
00:49:07
Speaker
So all those pattern identification can only happen once you have broken the data silos and you have brought all the data into a single warehouse and normalized it. So the base layer is data. Then comes your segmentation, cohort building, analysis, intelligence, right?
00:49:26
Speaker
the second layer of the pyramid. The third layer of the pyramid is the personalization. The personalization is where you are able to send, like I said, personas. You're able to do one is to one communication. There is a phrase that we use in the industry called segment of one. Each customer is a segment. You have to treat each customer like a segment and each customer will have its own individual pattern, own individual analysis. Akshay opens emails at nine o'clock in the morning.
00:49:55
Speaker
that data should be there in the CDP. So he should be getting that email from you between 8.30 and 8.45, so that it's right there, top of the inbox, when he, you know, typically start reading his emails, right? He used to read emails, but now he reads only one email in a week, but he's very active on SMS recently. So suddenly your focus should shift. So all of that is CDP's role, that finding patterns into the data.
00:50:21
Speaker
And then this is the data layer where we house and all of that. And finally, from there, you can either do personalization, you can do 360 degree profiling, you can do hyper-targeting of ads, you can do business intelligence or data analysis that you were not able to do earlier, right?
00:50:45
Speaker
You're able to use your customer data platform to show that person an ad on Facebook. How does this get connected? Because obviously Facebook will not connect through the phone number, right? If you have a customer profile through a phone number. No, no. So Facebook doesn't do that. Facebook only works on cohorted data, right? So your system will create that cohort, will push that cohort to Facebook. Facebook will identify these. And that cohort will be like, say, this is the location.
00:51:14
Speaker
Yeah, Gene Slubber from Delhi, for example. Right. So Gene Slubber is from Delhi who purchased between 3000 and 5000. Let's say that's the cohort. You push that data, Facebook will not only find those people will also find local audiences on its platform.
00:51:32
Speaker
What is the information you're sending to Facebook to target this data, to target this pool of gene lovers in Delhi? Are you sending demographic data and location? Location, demographic, you know, category affinity like gene slubber or for example, e-com newbie or heavy e-com spender, those kind of data point. And Facebook finds that data and builds a local like audience and that audience performs almost twice as better
00:52:02
Speaker
if you were doing cold prospecting, right? So your cags automatically are reduced.
00:52:07
Speaker
Why does it happen that if I look at a product on Amazon, I will be followed by ads of that product across multiple websites? So that's what Facebook, you know, does. Data signals from Amazon, data signal from Facebook. Say Facebook knew that you were checking out a product, so it would make sure that you are followed. That's basically targeting. That's retargeting 101. But this is something which Amazon is doing or Facebook is doing? Like I saw the Amazon. Amazon is doing this through Facebook.
00:52:37
Speaker
Amazon would be running the ads, showing the right product. Amazon is able to send Facebook some information that this is the user to whom this product has to be shown. Then Facebook identifies it. Like this to cookies or like how does Facebook know I'm that same person? Through Pixel, through cookies.
00:52:58
Speaker
But what we are doing is also important simply because the cohort or the personas that we are building, they might not necessarily be active on the website. So there is no cookie information. So that information, and especially on retail side, there is no cookie at all in retail. So the question then comes. What is Pixel? You said Pixel is used for tracking.
00:53:23
Speaker
So it's a small piece of code that gets fired when a person visits a particular page. So a Facebook pixel or a JavaScript, it's a small piece of very small code that goes into the on your HTML web page. And when you visit that page, it loads. That's how Facebook knows, OK, this is that person. In my data set, this is Akshay. I know him.
00:53:50
Speaker
So I will retarget. Amazon says, okay, take this money, but show people who are visiting and Facebook say, okay, okay, fine. I will show whoever visits your page. So there is a typically 70, 74% match rate from Facebook. So that means Facebook has already identified 74% people who are coming onto your website. And then Facebook would be like, yeah, I will show your act. Don't worry about it.
00:54:15
Speaker
And you enable D2C brands to do this at the same level as Amazon is able to do it.
00:54:23
Speaker
So this can be done easily via Facebook. D2C grants can do it through their ad accounts as well. But what we do is even a step further. We say, OK, in your data of people who have already purchased from you, we can find out and build certain cohorts of people that we can push to Facebook and build a lookalike audience because this is more relevant data. Cookie data
00:54:49
Speaker
If your ad targeting is not good, that means the relevant people are not coming to the website. That means no matter what you do, no matter who you show your ad to, that audience is not relevant, your ads will not come up. But these people have already bought from your brand. They are familiar with your brand.
00:55:06
Speaker
So building that persona inside their data, that is a key aspect of what we are enabling these brands to do.
Regional Market Strategies and Cultural Adaptation
00:55:17
Speaker
Target the right people at the right channel with the right content. So if Akshay looks at an ad or Akshay looks at a WhatsApp message, it should not be generic.
00:55:27
Speaker
It should be personalized to Akshay's taste. What he has recently viewed or added to the card. Like I said, each customer is a segment. So it's called segment of one.
00:55:43
Speaker
And that's the hypothesis on which we have built our CDP. So that's why I pause when you said elevator pitch, because I was confused, should I give the new elevator pitch, or should I start from the retention tool? So today, it sounds to me like you're...
00:56:01
Speaker
target customer would have changed, right? Like initially you might have been targeting say like a Bombay Shaving Club and a P-Safe and these kind of D2C brands which are like say in the 5200 CR top line, those would have been your early customers to target, right? What is it today?
00:56:25
Speaker
Definitely, the product, the CDP, it's an expensive proposition and it only works for people who have larger data sets. Typically, retailers. Today, you'd be talking like a Marks and Spencer. A Marks and Spencer. Fab India is an existing customer.
00:56:43
Speaker
You know, typically, you know, Indian terrain, for example, a six shoes. These are some of the examples of the companies that we have enabled help. Using your product for India or globally? In India.
00:56:59
Speaker
Not globally. Is your product global? Can ASICs use it? Absolutely. About 40% of our revenue is coming from the US. And simply because the great part about this product is, and this problem statement that we have tried to solve, is that it's universal for e-commerce. It's not India, US. Sure, US would be on a slightly different tangent, so the pitch has to be slightly tailored towards it.
00:57:28
Speaker
you know for example India, CAC, customer acquisition cost is a major problem right and LTV increase is has to be your pitch because then only they will make money on that customer.
00:57:40
Speaker
Right. So for Indian founders, your pitch is that your cost to acquire each customer, we will bring it down through helping you run more effective ads. And once a customer lands on your website, we'll improve the conversion rates. And for customers who are already converted, we'll improve the repeat purchase behavior through more personalized marketing. Absolutely. Absolutely.
00:58:03
Speaker
For US, the LTV problem is not there simply because the AOBs are very high. Average order value. Yes. Typically, AOB in US, and again, this differs from industry to industry, but if it is about 700,000 rupees in India,
00:58:20
Speaker
It's about $100, that means about 8,000 rupees in US. So it's about eight times higher. And again, like I said, it differs from industry to industry. But the biggest difference is that AOVs are very, very different.
00:58:34
Speaker
So in India, if you're spending 900 rupees to acquire a customer and then selling them something for 1000, you've not even broke even on the cost of goods sold. Probably, possibly, the COGS of that product could be 300, 300, 400 rupees. So you've not broke even on the sparks as well.
00:58:55
Speaker
But in the US, if you're spending $10, $15 for a customer that spent $100 with you, you're most likely broken even when you've made money on that sale itself. So in the US, the pitch is not about LTV or CAC. The pitch is bringing ease to their life.
00:59:21
Speaker
you know, automating those processes and meantime, getting them more sales. Right. Okay. So because US is a mature market, so they would already be doing personalization. What you're saying is that your efforts and investments in personalization can be better charged by using a product which is built for personalization. Okay. Better personalization, better outcome, more automated, less hands off, you know,
00:59:48
Speaker
you don't have to let quicker integration quicker go to market those kind of things you know that pitch works well in the US and versus India. US also has this knack of
01:00:05
Speaker
And again, this is a very big trade secret that I'm sharing this on the podcast with you. But US market typically has this inherent notion that if the product is cheaper, for example, then it's not worth it. Yeah, okay. Right, right, right. They don't respect a product which is too cheap.
01:00:30
Speaker
Yeah and and I'll tell you you know we face this because typically from an Indian mentality when we started selling and I started selling I was on a sales call the first sales call that I did on US I was sitting in my home and at night and I was doing this sales call and the person I still remember him his name was Joe so he came on to the call
01:00:55
Speaker
And he said, okay, you know, you've convinced me everything is great. I just want to ask you one thing.
01:01:01
Speaker
that was the catch. And I said, there's no cash. And very reluctantly, because at that time, our product was priced at about 30,000, which is about $400. And I had pushed $1,200, which was very out of character for me because I was not convinced that we would be providing a value of $1,200. So we went with the very Indian sales mindset.
01:01:26
Speaker
And this person says, no, what's the catch? You've given such an amazing demo. Your product can do 10 things. Why it's $1,200? Why it's not $4,000? I was like, I will charge you $4,000 if you give me $4,000. And I remember he said, OK, where do I put my credit card? And I didn't have a place for him to put his credit card because we were not prepared. We thought that this will be like a bank transfer.
01:01:54
Speaker
No, and we thought, okay, this will be very typically, like, we'll send you the proposal, okay, we'll get back to you, then we'll have to do 10 followers. And no, he was like, where do I put the credit card? I said, I will send that to you after this call. And I somehow scrambled on payment gateways and in less than 24 hours, I was able to send him like a payment link. And he said, this will be auto deducted, right, which is a big thing there, because they don't want to pay your invoices again and again every month.
01:02:22
Speaker
So it has to be automated. And I was like, no, Joe, you'll have to at least do it one more time. And I had 30 days to figure out how to make it recurring. But these are all amazing stories. I have a lot of anecdotes like these. But I think fundamentally for me, what has been really, really learning experiences
01:02:53
Speaker
that different markets, while need of the product remains the same, the way it functions remains the same, we don't change any aspect of the product at all for US market. It's the same dashboard, same, the pitch becomes fundamentally very different, very different.
01:03:12
Speaker
And the value proposition becomes different. The way we approach the customer becomes different. The way we pitch to the customer becomes different. And that is a big learning experience for me that same product, two different markets and two different approaches and two different pricing.
Strengthening Brand Presence through Events
01:03:28
Speaker
That is my because, frankly, you know, and now I have this, I always tend to go to a market like, for example, Middle East or Australia. And I tend to not disclose a lot of things about my product, because I know that I would have to sort of, you know, be fluid about the pitch in the first few. You need to figure out what they want to hear before. Exactly. Exactly.
01:03:56
Speaker
So CDPs are all the rage and for even large US e-commerce and retailers and they're all the rage here as well. And that's not why we are doing it. I think typically... That's the natural evolution for you. Yeah, exactly. That is the natural evolution for us. We have the marketing bid sorted out, all things marketing sorted out with Wigso. But at the same time, and I can disclose this now that we have
01:04:24
Speaker
also quietly built out various other functions that can be enabled from the data platform like the business intelligence which comes built in with the this thing there are certain dashboards graphs that we are able to build populate power just with a simple connection from their POS and e-commerce website.
01:04:44
Speaker
And how do you run your sales today? How much of it is inbound? How much is outbound? And how does outbound happen? Like how big is your sales team? Just help me understand a little bit. So we have around 12 people in our sales team. About 70% is outbound and 30% is sorry, 70% is inbound, 30% is outbound. 70% inbound is amazing. How did you achieve that? Like through content?
01:05:11
Speaker
Not through content at all, all of it, but a lot through branding, marketing. What do you do? What do you spend your marketing dollars on? So mostly try to be at the events that are happening. So try to be at the top of the mind, so we do go round tables. Like Martic events, D2C events. Correct. We have our own event. So in fact, a year back, we launched our own event.
01:05:42
Speaker
It's called D2Cverse and we started that off with just that simple mindset. Let's get 5-10 brands together under a single. Let's give them dinner and drinks and let's get them to sign the contract while they're selling.
01:06:02
Speaker
I would use the word serenaded, but sure. But it turned out to be something much larger, much bigger, and all hats off to the team behind the Wixo marketing team.
01:06:17
Speaker
You know, they conceptualized it brilliantly. We very recently did one in Bangalore where we saw a fashion show. Who does a fashion show for D2C brands? Nobody. Nobody does a fashion show. We actually curated it and we partnered with some other startups as well who were able to bring in content creators to walk the ramp. Content creators with millions of followers walked the ramp for brands. We had D2C awards as well at the same event. It was very glamorous, glitzy.
01:06:47
Speaker
We got around 200 plus founders under a single roof in Bangalore, which was... So those kind of things make sure VIXO is at the top of the mind when they think retention, when they think marketing, when they think market and they think data. And I think that has worked really well in our favor. Second is word of mouth, referral market.
01:07:13
Speaker
So, when a founder loves us, the first two other founder friends for us puts a good word in their groups chat, they are in, share some of the tidbits with us, say it's a bad girl who is also looking out for something, say bad girl who is also looking out for something. The third and most important is our network effect, which is through people who have been trained on that order.
01:07:40
Speaker
So people who get, you know, typically e-commerce and retail see a lot of people shifting jobs and from, you know, one company to another. So when someone loves us, loves our team.
01:07:53
Speaker
Typically, they would be like, okay, you know, I'm leaving the job here, but I'm moving to this organization. When they go, the first thing that they do is, you know, get everyone together. I had amazing experience with them. Team is fantastic. Product is fantastic. Solid results. Let's do it.
01:08:13
Speaker
Yeah, like Salesforce has that developer community, a very robust developer community, which helps a lot of companies to choose it easily. In fact, on the same lines, actually we launched a course as well called Retention Hero, which was narrated by Arjun Vaidya and Trisha Vaidya, the founders of Dr. Vaidya's
01:08:35
Speaker
they narrated the course and the content was developed by us so that everyone who wants to learn retention marketing gets trained and learn it on our content because eventually it's going to keep it you know in their mind that so those are the kind of active you know activations that we have done which has kept VIXO as a brand without being too loud you know without being in the face advertising you know without saying oh
01:09:03
Speaker
you run your WhatsApp marketing with us and sending ads on Facebook and running ads on Google. We were slightly more elusive in our advertising, where we were advertising it, but not on the face of it, not with an ad in your face running around behind you. It is more that if this product is relevant, we should be on the top of your head that this is a company that solves these problems.
E-commerce Focus and Specialized Solutions
01:09:35
Speaker
And so far it's been great success both in India, in the US or any other market that we have done. So far we're opening up Germany as we speak. I know Germany is going to difficult but e-commerce is booming. So that's all I care about.
01:09:53
Speaker
So e-commerce is extremely on the rise in the entire Europe. And so 40% you said is US. Yes. How much from other countries? About 10%, 12% is from other countries and rest of it is India. Who are some Indian DTC brands that use you? A lot, man, a lot. Even on the top of my head, like PC, for example, uses us. I remember it because you said PC.
01:10:23
Speaker
You know, we have the likes of the snitch users that we have and me before they were acquired by GlobalBees. All GlobalBees actually, the GlobalBees role of e-commerce portfolio, you know, works on Wixo. We have likes of Rubans, accessories,
01:10:47
Speaker
No, I mean, are there other like full stack platforms? Okay, these are Indian or from other countries? There are some Indian, some people use other country, softwares as well. Some have made inroads. I think it's just, all these softwares are great. I'm not, you know, discounting any software. I think the only difference is
01:11:07
Speaker
that, like I told you in 2017, we said no to a lot of... So instead of building a horizontal product where we could serve BFSI and we could serve this and we could serve that, we said we focus on one industry and the way we build the software around it. So we understand the challenges or integrations are also on the lines for this particular industry. We talk to the ecosystem, right? So for example, ERP in retail or e-commerce.
01:11:36
Speaker
There are very few ERP players and we integrate with them, right? So it's a very important integration for a large retailer or a large e-commerce brand that you integrate with their ERP so that their reconciliation from their orders is also on point. Or, for example, logistics partnership. Rocket is one example, but we integrate with, directly integrate with other logistics partners as well so that if they're using any logistics partner, they can give that same experience of post-purchase experience.
01:12:05
Speaker
So what you're saying is you're built for e-commerce, the others are more horizontal players, the competitors. Exactly. And today, for example, they could work with the hot star and they could work with, you know, like an OTT platform or a bank. Whereas I won't be able to pitch to a hot star. But when it's the two, these two products between e-commerce, I would say I would win in certain areas because I would talk the same language.
01:12:30
Speaker
my data ingestion would be with the same data set that they would have. I would have very quick integrations with their existing platform. It's just not the e-commerce, but it's the loyalty, the other integration, all of that data. And I would give them the dashboard or the KPIs which talks in their language as well. So for example,
01:12:53
Speaker
Like your alternatives would be something like say a clever tap, more engaged, which are generic engagement platforms. I wouldn't use the word generic. I love these founders and I love these platforms. I think the word I would use is like horizontal.
01:13:11
Speaker
Yeah, so where they could go after a hot star and say, you know, this is our biggest customer in India or a Swiggy and say, this is our biggest customer in India. Whereas we would say, okay, let's go vote and that would be our biggest customer in India or a fab India or a Nike.
01:13:29
Speaker
their brand commerce and their retail data, that would be a barter, right? So those would be the idealistically biggest, you know, customers for us. So that's the fundamental difference. And I do believe that they see that difference as well. So, you know, not me personally, but people have sat down with founders of, you know, I have had multiple discovery called with Sequoia, who's an industrial and clever tab.
01:13:57
Speaker
or, you know, Sihail met, I think, Mongej's founder and they don't see Vixo as typically direct competition. Sure, sometimes they go to the same client at which. It happens. But it's not like, oh, typically it's, you know, it's a very intense competition. Yeah, you would never go to a food delivery app. We would never. We don't go to them. We don't go to them.
01:14:26
Speaker
And will we expand tomorrow as a CDP? I'm not sure. Today we want to... They're still enough here. Yeah, they're still a lot to do here. And trust me, the conversations that we've been having, some of these brands, especially on the retail side that we've been having, they're sitting on 200, 300 crore revenue
01:14:49
Speaker
They're sitting on 70, 80, 100 stores and they have no clue of how to assimilate data. And this is not that. I'm not saying in a demeaning way. It's just that the products haven't existed. That's all those problems. So for an offline brand, you know, offline brands may not necessarily have much use for email marketing, for example. So what are the other ways in which you help them?
01:15:15
Speaker
Who said, I think, so there are two things, email, WhatsApp, SMS, you know, so it's about, it's not about use, because it's not about a clip to buy for retail, right? But it's about communicating with their customer, because I'll tell you what, today, brands are competing for attention.
01:15:45
Speaker
So it's the same thing as to why a retail customer would have an Instagram page. So why would not a retail brand send out emails showcasing there? Maybe the person doesn't look at their Instagram post because he's not active there. He doesn't look at their Facebook page, but he would open the email because the brand sent, hey, we've launched four new jeans. And if it's personalized on your taste, then it's even better. Chances of it opening.
01:16:14
Speaker
So all these brands, they want to be at the top of the mind. They want to be at the top of the, you know, they want the customers to remember and they're fighting for that attention. Because trust me, whether the person buys it from e-commerce or buys it from retail store, I always say this D2C is not a channel.
01:16:41
Speaker
D2C is not a channel. D2C is the mindset that has been shifting. Direct-to-consumer is the mindset. Even retailers now understand that even if they're asking people to come to their retail store, that's also direct-to-consumer. So they have a direct connection on WhatsApp, on email, on SMS with their audience.
01:17:05
Speaker
Yeah, I would say like probably Fab India is like the D2C pioneer in a way. Exactly. And when we look at their team as well, and they have a fantastic team who are so hungry when it comes to what can we do next? How can we elevate the customer experience?
01:17:27
Speaker
See the kind of cohorts they build amazing it gives us and our account manager so much learning working with such a mature and that we then involve these learnings to other B2C brands as well where we feel that you know you can do this not exactly you know but the learnings are very important.
01:17:46
Speaker
Right. Sometimes a simple holy campaign, which is not even sending out a coupon code. It's just a holy campaign. It works wonderfully well. It's just wishing holy. Why? Because it was sent out to the right audience. And the system said that these are the right people for this kind of campaign.
01:18:07
Speaker
So those kind of learnings, if you can translate and get more brands, it would solve not only the problems that we mentioned earlier, but it would solve a major problem of spam.
01:18:20
Speaker
And that's why, if you ask me why Wixo exists today, is not just because from a brand perspective, sure, it's allowing them to personalize, but it's from a consumer standpoint. We are not a consumer company, right? We're a hardcore B2B tech company. But from a consumer standpoint, why is Wixo important? It's because it declutters your inbox with irrelevant messages. Right. Yeah. Every message is customized to you. Yes. You know, one brand at a time, we are decluttering staff.
01:18:49
Speaker
Yeah, amazing. So let me end with this question. What's your advice to D2C founders? You know, I mean, someone who's like say an early stage founder may not necessarily be a VIXO customer, but what is the way in which he should think about building a D2C brand?
01:19:06
Speaker
I think there are two journeys that our D2C founders should look at. From becoming a seller and then from seller to brand. And it's a journey, you have to take it. You have to become the seller first, you have to sell the product that you have somehow managed to bring together and then sort of take it through the next level. But my only advice would be
01:19:34
Speaker
that this is a completely new era that we have entered. Where intellectual properties are owned by brands, it's their IP which is getting created and IPs are getting created at an unprecedented rate.
01:19:50
Speaker
So, find out why your IP or your intellectual property or your product is unique and find that differentiator. Either find a hard stamp or find a differentiator of your product.
01:20:06
Speaker
work on towards solving problem. If you've done that, then there is now an ecosystem available, infrastructure available, and thanks to companies like Shiprockert, thanks to companies like Faster, Checkout, thanks to Vigzo, and countless others, right? Unicommerce, for example, or the likes of Logic ERP or Logibricks. The infrastructure is available to D2C founders.
01:20:34
Speaker
that you could then go from, you know, if you go on from zero to one yourself by hustling, by finding the right fit, by finding what product sells to which audience, then one to ten journey becomes much easier. Because there are now partners who can tell you how to go to that journey, how to embark on that journey, what pitfalls you need to avoid.
01:20:56
Speaker
Where do you need to go to funding? We have now debt funding, a big part of e-commerce because, you know, the companies like club, like advantage. Yeah, working capital is not such a challenge now. Exactly. So it's such a evolving industry that if you are a young brand founder, don't think about building infrastructure because that is being done.
Future Growth Predictions and Media Exposure
01:21:22
Speaker
And I'll tell you,
01:21:23
Speaker
10 years down the line, that was not the case. 10 years down the line, founders would be like, oh, we'll hire a development team to build this for us. But today, that's not the mindset. You can just plug in everything and launch your D2C site in days or weeks. And that is the key. Quick go-to market. Fail quick if you have to.
01:21:49
Speaker
But find out what sells, what is your key to product. Focus on getting more people into that funnel of awareness, education and purchase. And if you do that, I think rest everything will come to you automatically once you've done those basics right. Because now the infrastructure is built, now we have enough
01:22:13
Speaker
content, enough people, enough experts, enough products that can help you, enough companies that can help you into building a fairly large direct-to-consumer brand. And people who say that market got saturated or this and that are just not true, not at all. I can tell you we are adding about 2 million, 3 million new consumers every month who have never shopped
01:22:40
Speaker
online and they're getting added to the pool. So this is what the customer data platform is giving you this data across all your brands. Across all our brands. Two to three billion new shoppers are getting added each month.
01:22:57
Speaker
There is a great penetration which is happening on the TO2 side because thanks to the COT, thanks to even UPI, for example, is a big push from getting users to securely pay. And there is now inherent trust on certain players in the market that that user displays.
01:23:25
Speaker
And now they're like, my money is secure because it's coming from a known source, or I've shopped from this or mine. And that network effect is going to translate into much bigger by over the next two to three years, five years. We would see close to 300, 350 million active econ shoppers. And that's our prediction. And tier two, tier three time would have a big, big role to play.
01:23:52
Speaker
in the Bharat audience is going to be online all the time. I'm just curious, did you see a shark tank effect? A massive shark tank effect, massive. In the sense that some of your customers were featured on shark tank and you saw the... A lot of them.
01:24:10
Speaker
A lot of our customers, in fact, you know, one or such brand is House of Chicken Kari, who's on this season. Rubans also was on this season. There is a big uptake. It's like a free TV ad, you know, a five minute, a five minute slot. So some of the brands that we work with. How big is the effect? Like, how much does their revenue or visitors increase by?
01:24:35
Speaker
dude like sometimes it's crazy like you know people would come on to they would sell out the inventory in in two three four hours of airing the episode airing and and that that's not all i mean this is india and i'm sure we'll see a much profound effect going forward in us we have a shark tank us brand
01:25:02
Speaker
that came in Shark Tank US and they had to re-prepare all the inventory levels because their episode was going to be re-aired after a year. Re-aired, not... And this still sold out in two and a half hours.
01:25:22
Speaker
So that's great. So I think that intrigues me a lot because that intrigues me to that there is a big opportunity sitting for D2C brands where they are reaching to a completely new audience.
01:25:40
Speaker
through TV. How do we enable this for 50-60,000 brands that we work with? How do we enable this for brands? How do we unlock this opportunity?
01:26:02
Speaker
And some of the things that are still in the works, you're working behind the scenes to ensure that it's accessible. Because today, the problem is not... Obviously, Shark Tank has received some 10,000 1,000 applications.
01:26:19
Speaker
and only fifty or some odd featured and a lot of the D2C. In the first episode you saw Jhaji store which was season one brand. We work with Jhaji store as well and we are very proud whenever it used to come on the
01:26:37
Speaker
Shark Tank, I used to tell my wife, you know, this is what I had to work with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously, yeah. I mean, being on TV still has that big massive appeal. Yeah. So I think that some of those opportunities we still have to unlock as an ecosystem. I think this will be very interesting times. What Shark Tank has shown is that it's possible.
01:26:59
Speaker
And now just we have to replicate it, but you know, in a unique way, just not copy the format and just, you know, do it again, because that's not going to be appealing. You have to do it in a more unique way. And, and we have to, you know, figure out the next where the next growth phase is coming for.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:27:18
Speaker
for D2C brands, a lot of them are going omni-channel, a lot of them are opening kiosks. Some vertical marketplaces are getting opened, which are catering to specific niche, you know, so marketplaces are bundling. Like baby products or? Exactly, like baby products, like organic, like, you know, one green is a curation of all
01:27:38
Speaker
organic, then we have a combination, which is a combination of deals on various beauty products, has retail as well. So sampling also, product sampling also, you know, through Blinkit, through big basket, through quick commerce, through traditional commerce is also a big, big opportunity. So there is a lot to unlock here.
01:28:05
Speaker
We keep on seeing some amazing startups come into this space. We keep on talking to the founders. Some of them are doing exceptional jobs and, you know, tracking some of these value functions for D2C brands. And I feel that we are just at like, we're not even at the inflection point right now. Trust me, we're not. We would be there in a couple of years.
01:28:29
Speaker
Yeah, we are still at a stage where we are figuring 10 things out. And this would be as big a story as the US e-commerce. So you are possibly bigger.
01:28:47
Speaker
And that brings us to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to the show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in the show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at adatthepodium.in. That's adatthepodium.in.