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Serving Notifications To A Billion Eyeballs | Neel Kothari @ iZooto
222 Plays3 years ago
There are 2 ways to build a startup - one is through cash burn and the other is by bootstrapping it- the harder but sustainable way. This episode is a masterclass in building a startup the harder way.
Akshay Datt speaks with Neel Kothari who built iZooto, a push notification platform that touches the lives of billions consuming news on the Internet!
Know about:-
- Concept of “owned audience marketing”
- Customer retention & future engagement- personalizing messaging at scale
- Making it contextual to the content
- RSS feed integration & developing own content recommendation engine
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Transcript
Introduction and Zencastr Shoutout
00:00:00
Speaker
Before we start today's episode, I want to give a quick shout out to Zencaster, which is a podcaster's best friend. Trust me when I tell you this, Zencaster is like a Shopify for podcasters. It's all you need to get up and running as a podcaster. And the best thing about Zencaster is that you get so much stuff for free. If you are planning to check out the platform, then please show your support for the founder thesis podcast by using this link, zen.ai slash founder thesis.
00:00:27
Speaker
That's zen.ai slash founder thesis.
Neil Kothari's Entrepreneurial Journey Begins
00:00:32
Speaker
Hi, hi, everyone. I am Neil Kothari. I'm the CEO and founder for Isuto, a push notification platform based out of Delhi.
00:00:50
Speaker
There are two ways to build a startup. One is through cash burn, which requires you to raise a lot of money and onboard deep pocketed backers. And the other is by bootstrapping it, which is arguably a lot more difficult, but also a lot more fulfilling and sustainable. This episode is a masterclass in building a startup the hard way, by bootstrapping it.
00:01:12
Speaker
Like any IIM graduate, Neel Kothari also started his journey with a management trainee job in a top corporate. But his desire to learn and grow led him to join a startup in the mobile VAS space, which is in itself a fascinating story. That experience eventually led him to start iZuto, which touches the lives of more than a billion people who consume news on the internet. Listen on as Neel tells Akshay Dutt about how it all started.
00:01:40
Speaker
During those three years also in Airtel, one is I always saw myself as extremely entrepreneurial. I was not a typical employee even at Airtel. I was always very entrepreneurial, would go out of my way to make sure that things happen, move things, had the cuts to walk up to anyone, talk.
00:01:59
Speaker
figure out things on my own etc. So I was looking for an opportunity in a smaller company where I could be an important person. So in my mind, I wanted to be among the important person in the organization and I was okay with a smaller company.
00:02:15
Speaker
Somehow, in my mind, I could never weigh the risk of going to a small company, honestly. I always thought that I will be able to navigate even if there are financial
Lessons from Rung7 and Personal Growth
00:02:23
Speaker
risks. I was not exposed to the financial risks of working in a small startup or a smaller company. Within that, IM tag also helps. You know that you have a market value because of that.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah, I somehow in my mind, I always knew that if this doesn't something as smaller at this kind of entrepreneur, if it doesn't work out, I'll go back to a job. Atel was to Atel. One of the things with Atel at that time was that every other day you would get a call from some, some consultant that are also recruited. So I, in your head, you know that you can find a job outside. It's not a big deal to find a job. And this I'm talking about 2009.
00:03:03
Speaker
2009 is when I joined a startup in a travel space. They had just raised, at that time, they had raised $2 million in seed, which I thought was a lot of money. And this was a company called, it never got launched, it was called Rung7, R-A-N-G, 7.com.
00:03:22
Speaker
It was one of the Indian, I don't know if you know the Orbitz story in US, airlines together invest in a travel portal. The background to that is that travel portals, Expedia had become so powerful that they were Expedia or some of the other guys were selling some 30-40% tickets of the airlines. And then because they had so much of demand power, they would go out there and tell airlines to pay them more.
00:03:50
Speaker
or they will shut them down from the search engine. So then all the airlines and US got together and created a company called Orbits where airline said we will own equity and then eventually Orbits got listed.
00:04:04
Speaker
So slightly complicated structure from an equity perspective, but it was very powerful. From a thought perspective, it was very powerful. So we attempted to do the same. I was one of the four people who was a co-founder. I was not the main guy for sure. And four of us got together and it was led by a guy who had spent a lot of time in Orbits in the finance function, in the strategy functions. So he knew how to get this done. So he tried replicating the same model in India.
00:04:34
Speaker
And here indigo was on board, spy state was on board, Goya had signed as well. The most interesting thing is Air India signed up, government signed up. But King Fisher said no. And because he said that I'm going to do it myself. So we were in a room with Vijay Malia and he said that, sorry, I'm going to do it myself. And the entire concept is that it has to be done by an independent party. It cannot be owned by, from a funding perspective, it cannot be owned by an airline.
00:05:05
Speaker
But it just did not work out and we ran out of money. We were able to launch a portal and we were able to do some bit of PR as well. But times were such that we were just not able to execute the whole thing. We chose wrong technology partners. We were not able to scale up the team. We were not able to close the convo. Though we had the agreements with these airlines, but these airlines did not support as much as we thought.
00:05:33
Speaker
So it just did not work out eventually and we had to shut down and I moved out. It was for the first time in my life during those, I think I spent some 20 months over there. By the time in last few months, I actually started feeling a little insecure.
00:05:50
Speaker
because I knew what the bank and cash balances are. And my insecurity was not for me personally, but we had some 30-40 employees at that time and 50 employees. And we had to make payments to the vendors and stuff like that. And those are getting delayed. And some of those vendors and commitments were made by me. And then I had a team of seven or eight people at that time.
00:06:13
Speaker
So yeah, I started feeling really insecure at that time because of low cash. And I thought this is not something I can really take. I can work hard, I can work very hard, but I cannot take this insecurity.
00:06:29
Speaker
And first time, I also had a bit of realization that the financial security is so important to run a business.
Navigating Challenges at SpectraNet and VoiceTAP
00:06:35
Speaker
Financial security in life is important, but even to have a business which is financially secure, it's extremely, extremely important to take right decisions. Otherwise, you end up taking very, very bad decisions because you're just fighting for that cash. So, yeah. So, I left that organization after spending some 2022 odd months, went back to telecom.
00:06:56
Speaker
for another couple of years. There's a company called SpectraNet. I don't know if you've heard of SpectraNet. Yeah, it does the internet. So I was the product head over there. I was designing the pricing and how the product and how to sell in what markets, etc. SpectraNet is interestingly run by my batch classmate from school.
00:07:20
Speaker
So it was very easy for me to just call him up and say that I'm coming from tomorrow. He said, come. We figured out something. So yeah, Spectronet, I spent almost two years at Spectronet. Normal, boring job, a lot of work.
00:07:37
Speaker
But very little progress, per se. They're in a very difficult category. So, yeah, it was very, very slow. Because they were competing against like, much bigger competitors like Airtel and Alliance and Tata. Absolutely. Absolutely. And very, very different challenges. Very, very different challenges. I never imagined while in Airtel because you were the leader that you would have challenges that my network goes to the A block but doesn't go in the B block.
00:08:07
Speaker
So only sell to the A block and we won't be able to serve the B block because my fiber is not there. Atel, we never had those conversations that my fiber is not there. I mean, Atel would lay the fiber for the entire city. So smaller internet players have, I think it's a very, very difficult industry. You have to do so much of Kpex and then hope for revenue.
00:08:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So, KPEX doesn't guarantee revenue. You lay down the fiber in one area and then hope that people will sign up.
00:08:40
Speaker
If they don't sign up and the fiber is waste, you've already wasted the Capex. So it was a very, very difficult industry. It was a normal job, a lot of hard work, very little results, revenue would trickle. Every time you did a lot of efforts, the impact would be only this much. A very, very slight impact. So it was a tough job. Eventually I decided to move out after two years, again, the startup bug of becoming an important person in a small company.
00:09:09
Speaker
One of my previous boss who had joined, who had joined, who was part of a VC firm, he introduced me to a company called VoiceTAP. VoiceTAP Technologies. They were, this is 2012, I guess. VoiceTAP Technologies and VII. So. VoiceTAP had this product of learning English and like learning stuff through voice, right? Like. Yeah. Yes. Yes.
00:09:37
Speaker
So that's where I met Vivek. That's where I met Sachin, who are my co-founders right now. So that's where I met Shrikant as well.
00:09:46
Speaker
So VoiceStep was doing well in parts. We had two very, very good years. How were they distributing it? Was it a B2C business or was it like? No, we were distributing it through VAS, telecom operators. So VAS had its own challenges. We wanted to do the clean stuff. VAS is a dirty business. It was a dirty business at that time.
00:10:09
Speaker
In what way? VAS, I don't know how much you're aware about the entire VAS industry, but the entire industry was based on the charging pipes that were given out to various VAS vendors. What is that? Charging pipe is the ability of a telecom operator to take out the 50 paisa from your or one rupee from your mobile phone without you necessarily confirming.
00:10:36
Speaker
Right. So at that time it was rampant, absolutely rampant. Their telecom operators had given the ability to charge its subscribers to hundreds of vendors. So vendors would simply, without any consent, would simply take out the money from, let's say they have the list of entire daily prepaid subscribers of Airtel, they would take out 20 paisa or 50 paisa from the entire base.
00:10:59
Speaker
Oh, okay. Right. So, 1 million people paying 50 paisa, you have made your revenue for the day, but they've not offered any service. So, vendors across India, vast vendors across the country were doing this. And this was not an atel problem for the phone problem, this was the industry problem. That's how the entire industry was, the vast industry.
00:11:22
Speaker
The usage of the, you won't believe this, the actual usage of the product, which was supposedly being bought, was less than half a percent. So the games, games or the caller tunes or pandit surveys or jokes that were being sent by Airtel. And cricket scores. Yeah, only half a percent were genuine charging. 99.5% were all fraud charging. So we as a company tried to weep
00:11:49
Speaker
Once, while in Airtel, I obviously did not know this. I never got exposed to that part of the business. In VoiceTAP, once we went live with all these, we were live. The product was integrated with Airtel, with Vodafone, with Tata Tofumo.
00:12:03
Speaker
and with reliance as well. That took a bit of time, but once the mass billings started happening, the revenues grew rapidly. At some point in time, we realized that these revenues are not genuine. These are being done by us or through the mechanisms where the usage itself is so low.
00:12:23
Speaker
We started making efforts to build other distribution mechanisms. While the VAS continued, the other distribution invested a lot in building other distribution mechanisms. But honestly, at that time, everything was a challenge. From payment gateways, to ability to reach to the people, to the quality of the entire digital ecosystem was not ready for. We built beautiful content. A lot of good content was built, but the other distribution never scaled up.
00:12:53
Speaker
Then the content was around what, like learning English or was there other stuff also? There was learning English, there were a lot of other stuff, a lot of general knowledge stuff. So it was like a, in a way like an ad tech, but an audio ad tech. Was that it or like? Yes. Yes. And there was also an app, it was called Tutron mobile.
00:13:15
Speaker
The app had lots and lots of videos aggregated from multiple places, aggregated from a lot of video vendors, education video vendors. The app was available on Play Store. The app was available through Airtel Play Store and Tata Du Puma. They weren't really Play Stores, but on their app.
00:13:32
Speaker
So, so there was, there was a lot of video. It was like a subscription model and, and figuring out how to get subscribers to pay was the challenge here. Like that's easy. Yeah. The moment you, you at that time, there was no way we were able to sell overall, I think in three years of our effort, we were able to sell some 2000 packs of English on mobile and.
00:13:55
Speaker
This was massive effort, going to Meru powers, going to various cab drivers, putting booths at various places in the city, running ads in Metro, running ads on radio. So a lot of stuff we did. And we were selling a pack for, I think, $800, $899 or something, or $999, something like that. And after massive effort of two years, I think overall we were able to sell around $2000 packs.
00:14:20
Speaker
But the vast business was continuing. That was doing a very good run rate. But that wasn't running because of the product. That was running because of the integration you had and the way. So we tried pivoting that business to a lot of other stuff as well. We launched more products with Airtel around coupon distribution, around discounting products, etc.
00:14:42
Speaker
So the journey was going on, but a real value was not getting built, honestly. So sometime in, sometime in 2015 is when mergans moved out because of multiple issues with the investors in the boardroom.
00:14:58
Speaker
and between the investors themselves. There were
The Birth and Growth of iZuto
00:15:02
Speaker
lots and lots of disputes in the boat room. From the company side, it was me and Regan in the boat room. I was the silent witness to everything that was happening.
00:15:14
Speaker
in those motorhomes. I think sometime in 2015 is when Madams moved out and he created his own education tech business and I was made the CEO of the company and the company ran for another one year but the revenues were happening, we were profitable, there were no financial challenges per se.
00:15:34
Speaker
But it was direction, absolutely directionless. We were getting revenues from five, six different sources. We were not, we were hardly a technology business. We were more of a trading. So that in sometime 2016, me, Vivek and Sachin, we were together in that business we decided.
00:15:49
Speaker
Let's start building from scratch. Anyways, we had very, very little stake in that business. The entire stake was with the investor. So there was no point in running that business anymore. So that's when we came together and started. So this was like 2015 ish somewhere around that 2016 is I think the best thing that came out of voice tab was that we found us from each other.
00:16:14
Speaker
Me and Vivek. Vivek, me and Sachin and Shrikant. We found each other and we were all thinking similar things at the same time. What was it that you were thinking?
00:16:25
Speaker
So one is leaving voice tab, there is no way that we can continue here. The second thing we could see and in our last year with voice tab, we had started working with e-commerce businesses on the affiliate side, getting them customers through telecom inventory. And one of the things we realized that these companies are acquiring so many customers.
00:16:51
Speaker
but nobody's and everyone was talking about acquisition, nobody was bothered about engagement or retention. And we knew that at some point in time that all of these companies are going to start thinking of retention, would have a CRM team, they would start thinking of a lifetime value of the user.
00:17:06
Speaker
And there is definitely going to be a massive play in helping these companies retain the customers that they are acquiring because they were spending so much money on acquiring those customers, so much of discounts, so much money being paid to the coupon guys or the affiliate companies to acquire each and every customer. We knew that there is going to be a massive shift in retaining all of these customers and we need to start building a marketing platform.
00:17:35
Speaker
or a CRM kind of platform, which helps these e-commerce companies to retain those customers. So we were all thinking the same thing. Sorry. What kind of e-commerce companies are you talking about? Are you talking about, say, a regular Flipkart, and those who say, this is a motto, and make my trade? No, no.
00:17:53
Speaker
Fashion, fashion e-commerce were, yeah, Jabong was the customer, Mentra was the customer and that I don't, I'm sure you would remember 2016 to 2019, there was just such massive surge in, 18 was such massive surge in fashion e-coms. There was fashion and you, there was, there were just so many, there was Zivame, Zivame. Zivame, yeah.
00:18:11
Speaker
Yeah, there were just so many out there. I think there were just the known brands were 30, 40 out there. And we were working with 10, 15, at least for 10, 15 of them. And we knew that at some point in time, all of these guys are going to move from acquisition mode to a retention and a lifetime value.
00:18:32
Speaker
mode and there was typically in such an option. So retention, like say Amazon's way of retention is that prime subscription in which you get a lot of stuff in that bundles. So are you talking of something like that or like what does retention mean?
00:18:50
Speaker
No, so retention here, at least at that time, it meant that once they've on-voted me as a user, once Snapdeal is on-voted or Fashion and you on-voted Neil as a user, and they've spent so much of money to get me once, what are they doing with this customer again? How are they going to make Neil do the second transaction and then the third transaction and then the fifth transaction?
00:19:17
Speaker
Then the game of acquiring for the first time, getting your app downloaded, getting the first transaction done was being attempted by so many people in the market and so many companies were helping these e-commerce companies. But who was helping them get the second transaction from the same person or the third transaction?
00:19:35
Speaker
So which essentially is like pushing personalized offers, like based on the strategy. Absolutely. Pushing personalized offers, making them open the app or come back on the website again, personalizing the entire experience for them, and then making sure that the entire thing is smooth enough for him to purchase again.
00:19:56
Speaker
So what was it that you wanted to build here, like the product app? So our initial thoughts were so much around emails, right? But in 2016, I think sometime in August or September or July, I think Google allowed web push notifications on mobile web and app, a mobile web and desktop web. And we knew that this is going to be massive.
00:20:23
Speaker
Right. That is exactly when we also, we said that this is the time to move out. We, we closed the voice tab. We started a new company, got some 10, 12 people who were already working with us to resign from that company come to us. And, and started this business. We developed a platform within two months. I think we got our first customer, which was Jabong for paying us to and make him pay two lakh rupees just for big push notifications at that time.
00:20:50
Speaker
We pushed notification at that point in time because it was so new to the people. Within the first six months, it started driving some 15%, I think 12% of the sales for Jibong. These were the people who had already purchased once and Jibong was pushing out new offers to those people to come back and buy again.
00:21:10
Speaker
That was a massive, massive boost for us. While we were onboarding very small clients, but Jabong was the first one, the first large client who really experimented and absolutely loved the product.
00:21:23
Speaker
How did the customized offers happen? Was it that you provided a platform and then the team would select, okay, send this to this cohort, send this to this cohort, and they would do the rest of the work? Or did you also read each customer's profile and then read the inventory and then do a back-end? At that time, no.
00:21:44
Speaker
In two years, we were able to develop a platform which would sit very closely in their ecosystem to send out the best offer possible based on his previous history of search and his previous history of transaction. But at that time, it was a very simple platform. You pick up an offer and push it out. So that's how it started. We've been able to personalize, build a lot of personalization.
00:22:06
Speaker
So essentially that time it was like a Mailchimp for notifications. A marketeer could have like an easy to use dashboard through which he could create a push notification campaign and track it.
00:22:21
Speaker
Absolutely. That's how it started. Very, very basic. And then over a period of time, we went deeper into e-commerce. But in the third year, third year for our existence, I think end of second year and beginning of third year, we... So first two years were crazy with e-commerce. There was a single e-commerce in this country and we used to proudly say that. Not a single e-commerce in this country, which was not using it. And I can... You name the e-commerce and a large e-commerce and they were using us.
00:22:49
Speaker
Any e-com that you can remember, which existed between 2017 and 18, was using iZoCo. So like Zomato, Swiggy, Fashion, all of these? Yeah, Zomato, Swiggy, no. Fashion e-com. Got it. Okay. Fashion and the shop clues, snap deals of the world.
00:23:22
Speaker
We got into all kinds of categories. HDFC was using us.
00:23:26
Speaker
They still use us. So, all kinds of categories. We went as horizontal as possible. We said, if you have a website which does transaction, we want you to use Isoprop. The Matos wiki were a lot more app-like, right? We did not have an app notification platform. But we were with everyone. With OLX was using us, for example. So, we went really, really horizontal.
00:23:48
Speaker
But within the fashion e-com space, we were with everyone, Coos, Tata Clique, everyone was using us. Did you bootstrap it or did you raise funds for this initial period?
00:24:02
Speaker
No, we've not raised capital till date at all. We've been completely bootstrapped, 100% bootstrapped.
iZuto's Strategic Shift to Publishers
00:24:08
Speaker
The first few months, we took out money from our bank accounts and paid to our employees. On day zero, we had 12 employees in the company and the four founders, so 16 of us.
00:24:20
Speaker
Each one of us took out money from our bank accounts to pay. The fourth month is when we started getting some monies in, but absolutely bootstrapped. Absolutely no debt and no funding. By when were you able to pay?
00:24:37
Speaker
founder salaries, like when did you reach that stage? Well, 12 months. Well, that's pretty fast. Okay. 12 months, but not the full blown founder salaries. I think from the third year onwards is when we got a little comfortable and paid us slightly more generously. But the first in the 12th month, we started paying one lakh to each of the founders.
00:24:58
Speaker
And so like what was your average selling price per deal? Like it was a thousand dollar plus. Okay. And what kind of brand did you do like in those first two, three years? We were doing, we'd got to some 40 lakhs a month kind of business.
00:25:15
Speaker
right by which year? In our second year, I remember clearly end of the 12th month, we were doing 8 lakhs a month and end of the second year, we were doing around 40 lakhs a month. How did the product evolve? Because I think
00:25:30
Speaker
the browser-based post notification cycle is pretty much on the downward side now, right? It's very interesting how we evolved as a product. It's not on the downward side, it's just changing, it's maturing. Just like emails are matured and you have to evolve. There was a time when there were just so many companies who were trying to be MailChimp. But as the environment keeps on getting tighter, only a few survive.
00:25:59
Speaker
In our third year we realized that one we will be started losing e-commerce customers to more engaged web engage clever tab of the world because these guys came in with a with a larger platform with a lot of personalization that you were talking about they had they had they had app push that email that web push that on page.
00:26:19
Speaker
Okay, so they were solving a massive problem of personalization across channels and the website. So they had a full stack solution. They had a full stack and we were just a bit push.
00:26:34
Speaker
So we had, we had a choice. One was that we create a full stack, but, and go out there and raise capital and then create a full stack because that cost these guys that costed money. And also the fact that our realization was that this space is now being, will be completed by moving age, web-engaged clever tech only. They also made a lot of other similar product shutdown, right? Just a couple of million raise was not good enough because these guys were massively funded. These guys were, these guys were raising 35 million, 50 million, 100 million cut-off funds.
00:27:04
Speaker
And some of the similar, some of the players who had, there was a player called Beta out and there were a couple of other guys who would raise million to million. There were no way they were, they were being dragged completely pushed out of the market. We, and at the same time, we realized that we are, the impact that we are able to make on publishers as a business is huge, is huge. We had, we had gone live with a publisher called Bhaskar. I don't know if you've heard of that. Bhaskar.com. Yeah. I think Bhaskar.
00:27:34
Speaker
then in Bhaskar, so they have a website called Bhaskar. And then we had also gone live with Indian Express and used to get a lot of love from these customers. The big problem these guys had that they were not willing to pay us a lot of money because publisher that the business is in the business where they don't make much money.
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah, because of extremely high competition in the entire space. But we knew that we are able to make a significant impact. The second thing that we knew that these clever taps of the world are not going to get into the space. Okay, because it's low margin.
00:28:09
Speaker
It's low margin, they're going to focus on retail, right? Because the way they had built their products was to serve the retail, the e-commerce. Commerce, basically. Yeah. So we took a very conscious call that let's focus on publishers and start onboarding more and more publishers. One, it was a completely white space and we had to go out there and educate the market just like we were educating two years back, the e-coms.
00:28:34
Speaker
So when you educate the market, you also get the first, they also onboard you as the first platform, right? One is that, second is we knew that these massively funded companies would not like to go to a publisher who just wants to pay thousand or less than thousand dollars, right? Or just doesn't want to pay anything. In India, there are 10,000 news publishers, only 20 have capability to pay a platform fee.
00:28:58
Speaker
Right. Rest just want to have any tool for free and you have to figure out how we want to make money from that. We also changed our pricing model. We figured out that we'll have to sell it for free. Can we sell it for free? And can we make money from other means? Can we make money from data? Can we make money from advertisements? Because these publishers are fairly open to those thoughts. But what they are not open to is paying you monthly.
00:29:22
Speaker
So we picked up this category, started developing the product which was completely focused on publishers, made lots and lots of changes. Today our product, three years since that time, today our product is completely publisher focused. We know what we can do for publishers, no other platform can do that. We have a lot of features which editors love.
00:29:43
Speaker
There are a lot of features which are solving the use cases of the publisher. So one was that expansion. Second expansion was a very natural expansion, which was getting more channels. Web push is one channel. Can we do app push? Can we do emails? Can we do more and more channels, which are relevant for publishers, not for e-com. Right. And third.
00:30:01
Speaker
Third push was on the geo side. We started selling in Southeast Asia. We started selling in US. We've just started selling in MENA. So in the last three years, we've opened close to now six, seven countries, four publishers only. And we go out there and research countries where there is little or no competition. And we go out there and educate those markets on what we can do, why marketing platform is needed by the publishers, and what is the impact that we can lead.
00:30:30
Speaker
And with the pricing, which is zero as well, there are contracts where we pay the publisher for using our platform. So we take patent advertising opportunity and we maximize on that. So we've figured out our niche in the entire market. And that's how we are making the business right now, focused on publishers across multiple chains.
00:30:58
Speaker
If you like to hear stories of founders, then we have tons of great stories from entrepreneurs who have built billion-dollar businesses. Just search for the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app like Spotify, Ghana, Apple Podcasts, and subscribe to the show. So did you start seeing a revenue drop when a clever type of mortgage came in like around 2018-19?
00:31:25
Speaker
Yeah, overall basis, we never had revenue drops. We've always grown, but we started losing a lot of e-commerce customers. We lost Chippong, we lost Moo Chama, Chippong, we lost to Moo Engage, Mentra, we lost to Vapingage, we lost OLX, we lost Tata Click to, I think, Vapingage again.
Scaling Internationally and Innovating with Ads
00:31:43
Speaker
So every month, we started losing two or three commerce businesses. We started losing banks to CleverTap.
00:31:50
Speaker
There was a time when we were live on Kodak, we were live on HDFC, we were live on ICICF, we were live on Indusend. So we were live across multiple banks as well. We were live on a lot of aggregators as well. But within 12 to 24 months, every month we would lose three or four of these customers. But because we were expanding so fast on the publisher side, we never saw the dip in the revenue, but we saw a lot of churn.
00:32:18
Speaker
So, you know, I want to understand like how you figured out monetization, what are the, and like you said that you were even open giving it free. And so, you know, tell me that how that happened. Like monetization happened in a very interesting way. One is publishers taught us that they taught us that they are not going to pay for it.
00:32:43
Speaker
Okay. Initially, you were trying to sell subscription, they kept saying no. They would say we love the platform, but we can't pay. And I knew when we went out, and I personally have met more than 600 publishers in India, honestly. I've personally spoken and met, I've traveled the length and breadth, I've traveled to obscure places in South India to meet those publishers. Everyone in Noida publishing companies, everyone knows me, I've knocked on their doors.
00:33:13
Speaker
So I've done this sales myself. So, and in a lot of conversations. Can you define what is a publisher here? I'm thinking publisher as like news websites. Yeah, publisher as news websites. Yeah, publisher as news website. And then we also, as of today, we also consider, for us, publisher is anyone who's making money from advertising.
00:33:34
Speaker
Okay. So even a podcasting, like what we are doing. Yes. It's a podcasted brand new way to publish content, but, but news remains the biggest category on internet. So you were telling me you met people across the country.
00:33:51
Speaker
Yeah, so we met publishers across the country in various cities. We met them, spoke to them, firstly called middle, those cold calls and convinced them to start using the platform. One thing that I realized very quickly outside of the top five, seven publishers, the next 15 were ready to pay, but were extremely uncomfortable.
00:34:11
Speaker
And beyond the 20, there is no way that someone called Prabhad Khabbar is sitting in Ranchi is going to pay you the grant. They cannot and they would not use the product or they will figure out some free product, which is the same purpose. 2018 was also the time when globally there was a product out of US called OneSignal, which was offering web push for free.
00:34:36
Speaker
So these publishers were happier using that product, though it limited them on various things. It required massive effort from their editorial team, but they were not even ready to pay $100 for it.
00:34:51
Speaker
One Signal's free version was just like a lead gen. They were not monetizing in any other way. They were saying, okay, 100 use for free, 10 will pay. They were just building the base and then after one or two years, they started putting a lot of limits.
00:35:09
Speaker
They would only deliver 10,000 notifications. If your subscribers more than 10,000, they would only show you 10,000 in the latest one. They start putting a lot of limits, which I knew would happen at some point in time.
00:35:23
Speaker
We realized that these guys are not going to pay and they would rather use a crappy free product, which is not made for them, but because it is free, it works for them. So we had to figure out how do we monetize. The way it started was because of our affiliate, we were doing some kind of affiliate business and we were in touch with some of these e-commerce companies. So we walked up to these e-commerce companies and said, can we run a campaign on push notifications for you?
00:35:52
Speaker
Can I, and I took the permission from some of these obscure publishers and saying that, can I send out a notification, a sponsored notification to your base? Right. And e-commerce companies are always open. So that was not a problem. The publisher said, okay, if you're going to give it to me for free and I will allow you to send it. So that's how we started monetizing and we started generating some amount of money.
00:36:18
Speaker
Then I did not have much background in the entire advertising tech, honestly. But one day I end up meeting a guy, he runs a company out of Pune, a fairly popular native platform. He saw some couple of
00:36:34
Speaker
websites which he works with as well and he called me and said that if I get to the campaigns would you run it on push notifications for me and I said we will and he said that let's do it but we will we will do an integration I can't give you the campaigns offline we will do an integration
00:36:53
Speaker
And we did that integration and just worked. And suddenly, in a single day, we started doing some $500, $700 a day. And I knew that this is going to scale up. This can be scaled up massively. And we had solved the problem where publishers were OK sending ads, but they were not OK paying. So we sent this box. And it just opened up everything for us because we can go to even the smallest of publishers with the same proposition.
00:37:18
Speaker
We don't have to limit ourselves to the large enterprise publishers. So that's how monetization got cracked. Once we had this Pune-based company who started monetizing with us, I figured out who their competition is, their global competition. We started talking to them. I think we were globally the first one to monetize push notifications. We in fact introduced it to some of the largest native players out there in the world in 2018.
00:37:43
Speaker
And we taught them how the integration would work. My CTO taught them how the integration would work. What kind of feed would we require? How would we personalize the entire ad for the people, if we can? And that was a big trigger for us to go out there and start talking to publishers all over the world.
00:38:01
Speaker
This company and other companies, like the Puna based company, these are like ad networks, like say in Moby, like companies which have a customer base that want to spend money on advertising. Like these are the kind of companies you tied up. These are ad networks, they are what they call as native ads.
00:38:22
Speaker
Native ads are... Native ads look like... If you download a game on Android, there's a small little banner at the bottom advertising something. No, they're not these guys. No, no, that's not the one. But if you're ever reading news, at the end of the news article you will have, you may also like... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like tabula... Yeah, yeah. So tabula and outbrains of the world, yes. Okay, okay. They're called native ads. And native ads work well on notifications.
00:38:51
Speaker
Why is native ad a different industry? Why is it not just ad? What is unique about these companies like Tabula or Brin? Why does the word native come in here just help me understand? Native, the entire concept on how it started, now they look very different, honestly. But the entire concept how native ad was started was that there's this theory that if you're reading about, let's say, a financial product, if you're reading about a financial product, you're most likely to look for an insurance at that time.
00:39:21
Speaker
That's the theory of a native ad. It's native to the content. So if you're reading about an article on car, you're most likely to look for a test drive at that time. So make it contextual to the content.
00:39:36
Speaker
That's the theory of it. It evolved into a very clickbaitish content saying, you will see those ads. Somebody in Noida has earned 50,000 rupees. Over a period of time, Native became the advertising medium for companies which could not advertise on Facebook.
00:39:59
Speaker
Some of these categories are not allowed on Facebook or Google. So a lot of health ads are not allowed on Facebook. Crypto is not allowed. A lot of other ads, a lot of other categories which are not allowed on Google, it became the go-to advertising platforms. But the other companies which really loved the results of native was a lot of financial products. The lead generation products and the credit cards, they performed much better compared to a display ad.
00:40:30
Speaker
because you can put in a lot of content along with the, so the messaging is very different. So that's why detail has been fairly successful.
00:40:39
Speaker
But that original premise that if you are reading an article about a car, you're likely to agree for a test drive. That is something which Google also delivers today, right? Like through their ad network. Yeah, Google also has a native product. So native itself has evolved. I think it's now, it just doesn't make sense.
00:41:00
Speaker
It's a placement, it's a content placement below as part of the other content and it is very clickbaitish and it usually suits ads where you want to pass on a bigger message than just an image. That's where it is. Okay. So essentially that ad portrays itself as an article that you may also want to read. And when you read that while reading it, you are getting convinced about whatever is there called new action.
00:41:25
Speaker
Yes. And so, like, essentially, what you are doing is, on the one hand, you are aggregating supply, would you call the publisher's supply? So how we do not look upon, we do not look at why we are getting our revenue from ads, we do not look on Izuto as an ad tech product at all. Notifications have a lot of utility for the editorial team of the publisher.
00:41:54
Speaker
Our focus as a business remains how can we help editor maximize his engagement, get the user back on the website, make users read the right content, and maximize their own goals of driving more page views or driving more subscriptions, etc. Pushing out a sponsored content is a pricing strategy for us and nothing more. We are very happy to go out there and ask for a platform fee.
00:42:24
Speaker
or a hybrid model wherein we discount the platform fee and take a part of our ad revenue or free model with limited features. But the focus of the company, the focus of all employers, we need to drive the engagement bit, the actual use case of push notifications, which is editor sending out those content notifications.
00:42:46
Speaker
So for an editor, they need products like this to drive engagement. For example, breaking news and whatever new articles they're releasing. I can tell you that when we walk into the offices of publishers, the hub that we get is from the editors.
00:43:02
Speaker
Not from the new guys. We don't like meeting the new guys. That's not the mandate. The mandate is to meet the user who is the editor who is using R2. But for the native ad companies, you are essentially giving them supply. Yeah. Native ad companies will look on us as a supply partner.
00:43:25
Speaker
That's right. And what are like the number of users that you can deliver to a native ad platform? Like what is the number of eyeballs or what is your inventory size? What are the metrics? I don't know what metrics are. Yeah. So we deliver. Yeah. So our metrics are on the scale side. We are doing close to 10 billion notifications a day. Our 10 billion a day, which includes
iZuto's Focus on AI and Publisher Solutions
00:43:50
Speaker
the content notification and the ad notification, the sponsored ad notifications.
00:43:54
Speaker
That makes it, we believe we are among the top three in the world in terms of scale. That's how we've scaled up the infra. We work with some of the largest publishers in India, in Southeast Asia, and now in MENA. So we work with all the big brands that you can think of. And from a pure sponsored notification perspective, we do close to 200 million sponsored notification the day. And we do more than 9 billion content notification.
00:44:24
Speaker
And how many eyeballs do you reach? What is that number? The unique eyeballs? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unique eyeballs on a monthly basis, we are cooking around close to 2 billion people globally. Wow. They may not be unique. Obviously, one of the things that we cannot do right now is track the same user on desktop and mobile.
00:44:49
Speaker
Okay, so you might be coming through desktop and mobile and you can count the desktop users in my system, but we're cooking close to 2 billion users a month.
00:45:01
Speaker
So which would mean at least 1 billion unique at the very least? At the very least, it will be 1 billion. It's very funny in some of the countries, we are in countries like Thailand and Philippines, we are we are cooking close to 70-75% of the population. Well, why do you use this word cooking?
00:45:22
Speaker
No, cooking is... Every time somebody comes on a website, let's say you go on timesofindia.com, Times of India would place certain cookies to track your user behavior so that it can personalize the content for you. When I say cooking, our pixel gets called out 2 billion times in a month, a billion unique times a month.
00:45:45
Speaker
I didn't understand this. Can you explain a bit more? My code is loaded 2 billion times a month. So that's the easiest.
00:46:00
Speaker
If I work with Indian Express, every time you go to Indian Express, there are multiple codes that will load, right? All the vendors, the ad partners, the notification partner, their codes would load, right? And each one of them may or may not put a cookie on you as a user to track your behavior on the Indian Express website.
00:46:17
Speaker
So, our code is fired 2 billion times in a month. But that doesn't mean 2 billion eyeballs because the same person, if he comes every day, then he's counted 30 times.
00:46:32
Speaker
No, no, I'm talking about 2 billion unique. Okay. So you don't have your own cookie loading when someone comes to Indian Express, but within the Indian Express cookie is where you get the data to do personalization. You can say that. So which is why you don't know if this person is A, going to Indian Express and then B, also going to Times of India because you... I would not do that. I'm not because we are a third party.
00:47:00
Speaker
Right. It can be done, but without the permission of the publisher that should not be done, we don't. Right. Okay. So what is the revenue split for you between sponsored notification versus subscription?
00:47:15
Speaker
It is 60-40, 40% is subscription, 60% is sponsored. And what do you see it trending towards? It will remain similar because we are getting into developed markets now where publishers are slightly more comfortable paying the subscription fee.
00:47:34
Speaker
So we are getting into, we are spending a lot of our time and energy in Mina now, which is UV, Saudi, these markets, and we also intend to grow in US. So my senses will remain same, obviously, slight 5% here and there can happen, but my senses are here. Okay.
00:47:51
Speaker
And these sponsored notifications are only for the browser notification, or like you said, you also got into app notification, email. App doesn't allow for sponsored notifications. Google Play Store doesn't allow for sponsored notifications. Interestingly, iOS does.
00:48:09
Speaker
Okay. On the app side, we've tried, but we want to stay away from sponsored notifications on the app. And we also have messenger notifications, not Facebook messenger notifications. Again, Facebook has its own policy around sending out sponsored content. So we want to stay away from that as well.
00:48:30
Speaker
There's an Indian Express bot on Facebook Messenger which is giving news notifications and in between there would be a sponsored notification. That's right. I don't think Facebook would allow that. So we want to stay away, just focus on the utility of the product itself and make sure that we are able to maximise on the utility for the publishers and figure out how the pricing will work.
00:48:57
Speaker
So for the free users, then you would only give them web notification as a feature because that is the only one you can monetize. For the paying subscribers, they get access to the full suite where they can... Yeah, free users also get very limited number of notifications. We don't allow them to send more than 10 notifications a day. We also limit the features that we're offering them. We're developing more...
00:49:27
Speaker
So we're developing features like direct RSS integration. We have developed our own AI engine. So we have one, we have developed our own content recommendation engine. What we do is, what we do is we take the entire field of the publisher, of the news publisher, and every one hour we pick up our every few hours, we would pick up the right story and match the story with the user and automatically create a notification and push it out. No manual intervention.
00:49:53
Speaker
So it goes on autopilot, the publisher doesn't need a separate team to do this. We also go and tell editor that we know you are very intelligent, you know the pulse of your user, but we will match every user with an article. So we know this sports article has to go to these 10,000 users and this political article has to go to 15,000. You don't need to push to all. Right.
00:50:19
Speaker
And you don't have to worry about notifications at all. We will do the, so we are moving towards automation of that. So those things I cannot, obviously I cannot offer for free. It's a massive data effort. It's a massive infra effort as well. So, and then we have features like we've also created something called notification center. We call it news hub. We're personalizing it to every user. If you go on the website, you will be able to see all the notifications that you've received since morning.
00:50:49
Speaker
So that is powered by you, essentially, that page. That's correct. There are just so many other features. We also have a lot of other kind of automation available.
00:51:01
Speaker
Tell me about them. I love learning about product features. We have something called video abandonment. Let's say you're watching a video and you... So, publishers make money when you watch the complete video, right? They're able to show you two ads, two or three ads. If it's a longer video, they will have an ad every three minutes or four minutes or something like that, five minutes.
00:51:27
Speaker
The problem with publishers is obviously nobody, because people are just so distracted, nobody watches a video, they would just drop off a video in 30th or the 40th second. So we track the user behavior and auto generate a notification saying you were watching this video, click and come back. So similarly, just like everyone today has multiple tabs open on the desktop and the mobile.
00:51:53
Speaker
So you're reading a news article and you did not complete it. Automatically, we will start a notification trip on you unless you come back saying you were reading the article on Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi. Click here and come back to the article. So we have created some 20 odd what we call these as playbooks.
00:52:16
Speaker
So these are these are fundamentally events on the publisher page where a user has not completed the expected behavior and we nudge him to complete that. So the other other playbook is let's say you're a publisher who sells subscription. And just like any, any sales process, there is a funnel and people drop off at various places. So let's say you, you chose a seven day plan and just before the payment confirmation page, you dropped off.
00:52:46
Speaker
I will create a funnel on a trip on you saying you were about to complete this. Click and come back. The second time, I will push across a coupon to you saying 10% off if you complete this transaction in the next three hours. The third time, we will say we are missing you. Please come back and complete your subscription. Latest article has been published by your favorite editor. So any event on publisher's website,
00:53:14
Speaker
Can we help him complete the expected behavior of the user, which he's not doing right now, which the visitor may have missed? And we're doing it at massive scale, right? With some of the publishers we work with, they have 100 million unique visitors in a month, right?
00:53:31
Speaker
Some of these news websites, very popular news websites, especially the Hindi ones. If the traffic that they get from the Hindi belt is crazy, some of these guys get 70 million, 100 million unique visitors a month. So we're doing it for them at that scale.
00:53:47
Speaker
And even a 10% impact is massive, is a massive impact for them. So like sometimes when your mouse is on a site and you scroll up to the address bar, you get a notification. So do you do stuff like that also? Yeah. Yeah. So that is like intent to exit. So then you kind of exit intent notifications just when you were exiting, we'll ask you, you may be interested in these stories. We do that as well. You.
00:54:17
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, publishers, you know, you should buy one of the reasons we chose publishers. We did a bit of research out of thousands of marketing platforms out there. Less than 40 are serving publishers. This is global.
00:54:34
Speaker
every marketing platform in the world is being built for a commerce, retail, commerce, financial businesses. There are very few markets. There are lots and lots of advertising platforms, advertising optimization and ad technology platform for publishers. It's extreme. The publishers are extremely underserved on the marketing side. None of the publishers that I've ever met has a marketing department. That's true.
00:55:04
Speaker
If you go to any publisher, they do not call their website visitor as customers, they call them visitors. We tell them, start calling them customers. The moment you start calling them customers, you want to know more about your customers. You want them to come back again. You want to see the lifetime value of those customers. Don't call them just visitors.
00:55:32
Speaker
So it's a massive, massive opportunity, which is going to further open up in the next five years as the publishers mature. How do you personalize the sponsored offer based on the reading behavior? For example, if you know that this person is interested in sports, then he will get a car related identification offer.
00:55:53
Speaker
So what we do is, one is our capability is only till understanding the browsing behavior of the customer. Like what he's reading on that publisher site. Correct. Or what the publisher site, if the publisher site itself is let's say only a car site and it's very easy, right?
00:56:10
Speaker
Otherwise, we obviously know he's reading politics, he's read politics three times in the last five days or something like that. So our ability is only to pass on that information to the demand partner. And then we hope that the tabula and outbrain are able to run their algos to figure out the best possible demand for these guys.
00:56:27
Speaker
But in India and Southeast Asia, there is an oversupply of inventory and very limited demand. It's a massive mismatch. It's almost impossible to personalize the ad in India. It doesn't happen. But why don't you do the personalization? Why do you leave it to the native ad platform? Because you would be able to look at their content and then marry it.
00:56:56
Speaker
One is we do not have access to the demand directly. All of these tabula and outbrains are two-side companies. They go out there and work with agencies in the brand and on the other side, they go and work with the publishers. We are very small. We want to remain focused on publishers as a customer.
00:57:17
Speaker
and not go out there and start fetching ads directly. I don't see that as our business, honestly. Our business is a marketing platform for publishers, and we want to remain like that. Advertising is just an option, pricing option, and there are much bigger, better players than us who can do the job. We've been doing it for years.
00:57:38
Speaker
and do a better job over there. So we just rely on them. And how do their algorithms run? What do they receive from you? They receive a spreadsheet which has customer profile and some behavior, and then they decide, okay, these 10,000 customers you push this to. We ask for an ad.
00:57:58
Speaker
We tell them this website, the header information, which is the browser, the website, the device and the IP, this location. And we've created buckets at our end. Buckets are on the browsing categories, which is politics, cricket, entertainment, Bollywood, etc. And we pass on the bucket to them.
00:58:20
Speaker
saying I have a customer in Delhi who is from the Indian Express who is reading cricket, who reads cricket and on a mobile. I pass on this information to Tabula and they revert with an ad which I pushed out.
00:58:37
Speaker
I don't get to view the ad in my system. Because they obviously don't want to, like they want that confidentiality with themselves. No, it's not about that. It's just the fact that it's impossible to, when you're going to push out 200 million ads, it's impossible to look at the URLs that they're passing. And what they pass us, those are obviously the URLs, right? So it's impossible for my system to check each and every.
00:59:02
Speaker
So URL with some call to action, right? Like apply for a loan today and then click here or something like that. Absolutely. Okay.
00:59:12
Speaker
So I'm just wondering, why don't you become an ad tech company? Because at 1 billion users, you're maybe bigger than, say, Facebook has more reach. But then the next level of platforms, say Pinterest, I'm sure you're bigger than Pinterest, or even bigger than Twitter for sure. Twitter doesn't have 1 billion users. And these are like massive
00:59:41
Speaker
companies with ads. Yeah, my own belief, and I think maybe you are right, we don't know. But my own belief is that we'll use focus on the platform. We want to remain a technology company which is solving, we want to go deeper in solving the marketing problem of the publisher. But I should do both.
01:00:01
Speaker
No, pricing would take care of itself. If I think of advertising as a pricing option, at some point in time, I will be focused so much on larger customers that I will let that pass on. If I can solve the massive problem that publishers have, which is being underserved on the marketing side, I would rather focus on building products and a robust platform on that side of the business, rather than start building a platform which solves the advertiser's need.
01:00:32
Speaker
Right. Does this help from an aversion to raise funds? Because at the end of the day, if you have enough money.
Bootstrapping and Independence
01:00:41
Speaker
Maybe yes. And also the aversion comes from the fact that I do not enjoy all and I'm speaking on behalf of the rest of founders also, we've never enjoyed we've had that relationship with the affiliate kind of relationship in our previous organization.
01:00:58
Speaker
I never enjoyed that business wherein my sales guy sitting at the agency offices waiting for a PO to come and then we run that campaign and then we send out invoices and the payment comes in 180 to 240 days.
01:01:14
Speaker
It just becomes a very different, very massive effort and a big mindset change. As of today, when we do subscription business or this demand partner business, we either get our payments in advance or we get it in 30 days. End of story. So the entire business hasn't built on the fact that we do not have any collection guy in the office.
01:01:34
Speaker
But then you have a billion users. You can dictate how the business gets to be built. So crypto startups, they are spending tons of money on TV ads. You can offer them a more targeted way. They all want to reach to tier two, tier three locations. You have access to that. I mean, you can dictate terms. You can tell them that this is upfront, you load a wallet, and then whatever.
01:02:01
Speaker
I mean, one million users is massive and you're just sitting on a goldmine and you're not mining it. That's what it seems to me.
01:02:12
Speaker
Yes and no. I mean, I'm sure there are a lot more active companies who are pushing off their pixels to more than others. If your code is on timesofindia.com, you anyways will be pixeling somebody, right? Or Indian Express of Africa.
01:02:32
Speaker
It looks like an opportunity, but it just opens up a, it just, and maybe you're right, because we are averse to raising capital, we've remained bootstrapped and we're very happy like that. So we like what we are doing and it just, I think there are just in our own mind, I think there are, there are problems with that business.
01:02:48
Speaker
We've seen those businesses and it becomes a very different effort. You then also make a publisher's business more viable because you will be able to share more revenue with them. Like, you know, you would probably be getting pennies from a tabula compared to if you directly go to a crypto startup.
01:03:09
Speaker
You know, this will be like pennies to dollars, no difference. And that can be shared with the publisher. I mean, it can be shared for sure. Absolutely pennies, right? We get pennies from the southern outbursts of the world. Yeah, it gives your publishers the ability to thrive then, based on that revenue.
01:03:30
Speaker
Yes, but the problem happens is that, and again, you're right. That's one way to look at the business, but with publishers, we don't want to go and talk to the ad operations. We start competing with very different set of people. So unless this plan would work, if you're able to keep the focus on both the things at the same time.
01:03:50
Speaker
If we can, if we can focus on building a platform, which solves the advertisers need as well. And we start getting a lot of direct advertisers, but at the same time, we do not lose focus on the, on the publisher side and what we really want to solve for them. So as of now, I think the current bandwidth and the current plans that we have, it does not allow for that split focus.
01:04:10
Speaker
So I hope some VC listens to this podcast and comes and convinces you to take his money. And maybe do this. There are a lot of downsides sometimes get sometimes get disturbed when we lose people and they leave the organization for more money, which is obviously right thing to do.
01:04:35
Speaker
But that's the only time I think of raising capital and paying more salaries and getting the best talent from the market and retaining them. But in everything else, we're very happy to start.
iZuto's Benefits for Podcasters
01:04:48
Speaker
Very, very happy to start. What is your currently revenue-run rate? What will you give this year? This year, we'll close at $5 million.
01:04:57
Speaker
Okay. So couple of questions I've written and let me just quickly take a look at the, okay. So this is like pretty much the, like just towards the, I'm at the end of the questions I wanted to ask. So, you know, like I run a podcast and can you like tell me how I could benefit from Izuto and you know, like, like as a prospective customer, what's your pitch to me?
01:05:24
Speaker
As a podcast, do you have a, how do you distribute a podcast? Do you distribute it on LinkedIn, Facebook? Yeah. Yeah. One part of distribution is you have these hosting services. And once you host on one of these services, like Anchor is one and there are others. So once you host it there, then it gets distributed to the audio streaming apps. Like in India, you have Ghana, Jio, sovereign global, Apple, Spotify. So, so.
01:05:50
Speaker
and hosting service will take care of hosting it and distributing it and pushing the new episode to that app. So people who subscribe to the podcast on Spotify will get to see that there's a new episode out. That's right. But tell me, so let's say I... Yeah, we have a website where we have a widget that comes from our hosting service and we have some content below it, like a blog with a playable widget on it on our website.
01:06:19
Speaker
So what I can do is today you are completely dependent, let's call all of these services at World Gardens, right? The user belongs to gana.com, it belongs to Spotify, it belongs to Google and Facebook. You are among the million content providers to them. So they are aggregating all the content, the efforts that you have made. They are not making any effort.
01:06:42
Speaker
But they're presenting that content in a manner which user it appeals to the user because the buying process or the or the search process is very discovery process is very simple. If from tomorrow they because of some reason they stop giving you space in their in their aggregated platform.
01:07:04
Speaker
nothing will change for them. Everything will get destroyed for you. So as a content creator, it's very important that you also start creating your own email list, your own subscription list, push notification subscription list, so that over a period of time, you are able to reduce your dependencies on these world gardens. And that's where iZuto comes in. We call iZuto as an owned audience marketing platform.
01:07:30
Speaker
Right. So if you, if you start using Izuto platform for your website or in future, if you want to have an app, you can, every time you produce certain content, while you can distribute it to the wall garden and hope that somebody searches over there for you. You can also push out a notification or send across an email to your subscribers saying, I have released a new podcast.
01:07:52
Speaker
And before I release it to the world, there is a five day or one week exclusively available for you. And you can create a lot of offers which you only want to serve to your users directly. This is your list. You can run a survey on this list. You can know more about these guys. You can know how many are male, female. You can customize your future content.
01:08:11
Speaker
It is almost impossible for you to know who is consuming the product for you on Ghana.com. I don't know how much would Ghana tell you that the people who consumed your product or your content were between the age of 30 and 40 and they've come from Delhi and most of them were there. Yeah, you don't get any statistics here.
01:08:29
Speaker
Right? So today, if you look at your distribution, it's a good way to start, but you're massively dependent on all of these guys, and you have no control on your consumer. If you want to control your consumer, you want to know everything about them, change your content strategy, take decisions, you need to control your consumer, and iSuito can help you start on that side. It may not solve all your problems, but it'll at least help you control the communication.
01:08:55
Speaker
So like say we have like a WordPress site where every episode there's a little bit of text under it and there's a widget to play it. So how will I enroll users onto the iZoto notification platform? How will I start the onboarding? All you need to do is with WordPress specifically, we have a plugin.
01:09:18
Speaker
You install that plugin, you go live with isentro. Every time a user comes in, there is a prompt, user will be asked, do you want to subscribe to the notification? Out of a hundred people that come in, possibly 10 would subscribe and on any given day. And once, once they start subscribing, you can, we will, we will expose a dashboard to you. Wherein you can, you can see those subscribers, how many are getting from mobile desktop, what cities, what countries are you getting it from?
01:09:45
Speaker
If you also allow us to track the behavior of those users, we can track which podcasts are they consuming. If you allow us to track the consumption time of those users, we'll also create those playbooks which I was talking about. Here are three people who consumed only this much of the content and automatically the system will send out a notification. You were listening to Neil Qadhari's podcast.
01:10:12
Speaker
click and come back and listen to the full episode. We can help you create those personalizations. I won't call it personalization, let's call it customization. It is not so much one-to-one level, but at least you can start customizing the communication to these users.
01:10:29
Speaker
And over a period of time, you can hope that at least 30% of your distribution effort is on the user that you're able to drive to your content is from your direct efforts. And 70% can keep coming from walled gardens from various other avenues that you might open in future. But at least 30% if you're in control, then you are a good business.
01:10:49
Speaker
Okay. So every time I release a new episode, I can send out a notification, Neil Kotari's episode now live, like turn about. Okay. Got it. Got it. Okay. And what about the email thing here? So, so yeah, yes, you can email. We're going live next month. Email also absolutely just like that. Every time you release a episode, you can send out an email. The latest episode of Neil Kotari Aizupo is live. Here is the
01:11:15
Speaker
Here's a snippet from that. I had a lot of fun. Click here to listen in. And you'll give us a widget to collect the email. Absolutely. I have to put an iZuto widget which will ask people to subscribe. Nobody will see iZuto anymore. Like a white label widget.
01:11:34
Speaker
It'll be absolutely wide-label for you. You will be able to customize that wizard in some way, the placement or what you want to write and the colors, et cetera. And people will sign up. It's a slow process. It's a painful process. It's time-consuming, but you will see the value over a few years. And what will this cost me if I was to go without sponsoring, like without the sponsored posts? It won't cost you anything. Just start. It's been 12 months. Post-12 months.
01:12:04
Speaker
Okay, we are pilot partner for every other feature that we launch. Okay, allow us to experiment, launch new features with you. And we will do something.
01:12:16
Speaker
If you like The Founded Season's podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like marketing, technology, career advice, books and drama. Visit the podium.in for a complete list of all our shows.
01:12:37
Speaker
Before we end the episode, I want to share a bit about my journey as a podcaster. I started podcasting in 2020 and in the last two years, I've had the opportunity to interview more than 250 founders who are shaping India's future across sectors.
01:12:53
Speaker
If you also want to speak to the best minds in your field and build an enviable network, then you must consider becoming a podcaster. And the first step to becoming a podcaster starts with Zencaster, which takes care of all the nuts and bolts of podcasting, from remote recording to editing to distribution and finally monetization.
01:13:14
Speaker
If you are planning to check out the platform, then please show your support for the founder thesis podcast by using this link zen.ai founder thesis. That's zen.ai founder thesis.