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Building a $100mn ARR SaaS company from India | Anand Jain @ CleverTap
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Anand Jain lost his father when he was just 12. This experience caused him to step into an entrepreneurial role very early in life and Anand has literally done it all - from selling detergent door-to-door, to repairing and assembling computers to writing software. Despite no academic track record to speak of, Anand ended up getting hired by a tech company in the Silicon Valley in peak dot com era.
And while he could have settled for the American dream and made big dollars, he decided to come back to India and chase impact instead.
In India, he set up the original restaurant discovery website before Zomato, and if things had worked out differently - that startup would be a peer of Zomato and Swiggy today.
But the best is yet to come and Anand is currently the co-founder and product head at Clever Tap - which is a 100-million-dollar Saas company with a strong focus on serving India. This puts CleverTap into a category of its own with hardly any peers.
This conversation is proof that adversity leads to the best kind of resilience and Anand’s humility and depth of insights will leave you hungry for more.
Stay tuned for this very special episode of the Founder Thesis podcast with your host Akshay Datt.
Recommended
Transcript
Early Life and Entrepreneurial Spirit
00:00:00
Speaker
Anand Jain lost his father when he was just 12. This experience caused him to step into an entrepreneurial role very early in life and Anand has literally done it all. From selling detergent door to door to repairing and assembling computers to writing software. Despite no academic track record to speak of, Anand ended up getting hired by a tech company in the Silicon Valley in the peak dot com era.
00:00:24
Speaker
And while he could have settled for the American dream and made big dollars, he decided to come back to India and chase Impact instead. In India, he set up the original restaurant discovery website before Zomato. And if things had worked out differently, that startup would be a pure of Zomato and Swiggy today.
00:00:41
Speaker
But the best is yet to come and Anand is currently the co-founder and product head at CleverTap, which is a $100 million dollars SaaS company with a strong focus on serving India. This puts CleverTap into the category of its own with hardly any peers. This conversation is proof that adversity leads to the best kind of resilience and Anand's humility and depth of insights will leave you hungry for more. Stay tuned for this very special episode of the Found a thesis podcast with your host Akshay
Family Influence and Early Ventures
00:01:08
Speaker
Dutt.
00:01:08
Speaker
Every Marvel movie featuring a superhero begins with an origin story. And I am super inspired by your own origin story. Tell me what, like, you know, looking back, connecting the dots, what led to you becoming an entrepreneur?
00:01:28
Speaker
Far from a superhero, but a super hardworking person. um One of the defining moments very early in my life was the loss of my dad. I was 12, and my sister was two years when we lost him. And we were a small family, so mother and the two kids, far away in Ahmedabad, away from the rest of the relatives. So very quickly, at the age of 12, I had to figure out how do we get a meal on the table.
00:02:01
Speaker
And again, like you know I tried very hard, but I was not very good at studies. you know That self-realization is very, very helpful. The sooner you get things that you're not good at, the sooner you'll stop wasting time. So for me, I was a tinkerer at heart. I would open up the a fan, a mixer, anything that I could lay my hands on. And I taught myself how to start repairing electrical products. um And then I think a couple of years later, I taught myself how to repair electronics. So VCRs, cordless phones and such. And soon we were in an apartment building, and like a 10-story building, multiple apartments and all, multiple towers. And people would come in and you know like I could make, like I could get by.
00:02:46
Speaker
And when there's so much excitement in life, ah you don't have time for studies and other things. and So I think that that was my kind of starting point, right? And of course, like and after that, I taught myself how to ah repair first and then start assembling computers alongside I would also write software. So that is like the story, that's the beginning of the story of how it all kind of happened.
00:03:12
Speaker
So your like like you started bringing in money to run the household right from like 12 onwards, like when you were still a teenager. Correct. So me and mom both,
Education and Career Beginnings
00:03:24
Speaker
in fact, mom's my source of inspiration. She was the one that ah you know we like typically have like a six month morning period, et cetera, after the death of someone. She said, you know I can't wait six months because we have to you know get things going for us. So very quickly, she was super and entrepreneurial. right Until that point of time, when we lost my dad, she was like a homemaker, ah never out there. like you know
00:03:51
Speaker
But right after that event, like you know it it changed her. She started getting some saris from the wholesale market. She started getting you know all the women wear, et cetera, like the churidhar kurta, et cetera. And we started selling them in the house. So she was the, you know my mom was the main act. um She was the one that was, you know because I did, I had, like imagine being a 12-year-old, you don't even have, I mean, I had a lady cycle, right, as my right,
00:04:19
Speaker
So you have nothing, you have no capital, nothing. and Not that we had capital as a family. I think she was the one that figured out very quickly. from She converted the living room into like a shop of sorts. um And and yeah we be maybe out of sympathy, who knows, like you know but people started coming in, they would try to help us out. And while I tried to figure out other things right like the electronics I could repair or the electrical stuff. So I started doing this thing on the side. So anything, any rupee flowing in was help for the family. And when did you start your first company? I think you was still a teenager or maybe in in college when you started at your first company, right? Yeah, maybe I'll get trouble saying this, but I will started my
00:05:06
Speaker
I started a private limited company when I was 16 so there was a little bit of ah creativity that I did on the school living certificate and I think it was not even the school living, it was the 10th markship or something like that. and I started a private limited company. But before like a company of sorts, like you know we had like a partnership. Again, not on paper. like This was just me and am my good friend. like know We would assemble computers. We would write software. We would do whatever it takes to you know to to make some money on the side, right with supply, printer paper, with supply, the dust covers on the PCs back in the day. So anything that, like I said, like know anything that gave us money.
00:05:49
Speaker
But yeah, Private Limited was like, you know, my ambition, like, you know, I said, okay, well, I can do all of this. And maybe I got a little ahead of myself, but Private Limited company at the age of 16, we were actually a um on paper, a manufacturer, a computer manufacturer. I would take the train, Gujarat Mail, go from Andabad to Bombay, go to Lamington Road, get all the parts and travel back to Andabad.
00:06:20
Speaker
and assemble the PC. So this was while on paper, it's like some manufacturing unit, but it's like the a person of like army of one person who's doing all of this.
Silicon Valley and Return to India
00:06:29
Speaker
So yeah, entrepreneurial. Yes, not quite a private limited company. yeah Nice. Okay. So when did you finish college then? Did you join college ah like at 16? I did. I did.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, I did. like you know ah So I joined a beautiful college. It's called Sajaran Arts and Commerce College. I was not good at studies. Like I said, I would struggle. So 10th was probably my highest that I ever got. like no I think I got 62% or something. 12th was 50s, mid 50s.
00:07:03
Speaker
and I got in through a contact. let us say there was i mean I did not have any contacts while I was dejected, walking around the compound of the college. you know Outside the college, you know there's an area. I met someone who's now my best friend, but he just pulled me aside and says, you look depressed, man, what's going on? I'm like, you know what? I did not get admission in this college. He's like, meet me here tomorrow.
00:07:29
Speaker
I know the people that run the college, so we'll see what we can do for you. The beauty of that the beauty of that was that it was a morning college so and they did not you know they ah they did not mark their attendance, which means I never had to go to college.
00:07:46
Speaker
so all three years again like You only do things, i I personally only do things that I absolutely love doing, otherwise I will not do them. So studying commerce was not necessarily a natural thing, right? It was just like a fait accompli, right? Because of the marks I got. As good at physics, as good at electronics, as was good at writing code and all that. When none of that kind of, you know, I could not get into a science train just because of that, because of the poor show and other subjects, chemistry, biology, algebra,
00:08:18
Speaker
whatever else. so so Commerce was the only choice. I got into college, never went to college, so three years and every time, again, maybe this is bad, Sony will kill me, but I i copied and I passed my exams.
00:08:34
Speaker
factca because
00:08:38
Speaker
I swear to God, like every time, i there is no other way to get by. like you know ah But yeah, that was the year. So I graduated in 96. And even when I graduated, I was doing some things on the side. Like when I was working on the side, it was my own business, which kind of blew up. Then I started working as a modem salesman. So yeah, so pretty varied life until then, you know doing all sorts of odd things. Why didn't you continue your own business? Like you said it blew up.
00:09:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, so you know my partner then was like a stock broker. Again, these are the days of Harshad Mehta and Kepan Parik. And the prevalent wisdom was, you know private public limited company, the moment you show a little bit of sale and profit, you can IPO. And then this guy told me that, hey, Anil, I don't need you then after this.
00:09:31
Speaker
and I got a little mad and this conversations this intellectual conversation transpired at 3 a.m. in the morning um and I said you know what why do we wait until then I'm leaving right now.
00:09:49
Speaker
And then I left the business and then I did nothing for like a month. I literally, I, this was my computer that I was like, so we had one PC, which was mine. um We had one table, which was mine. And we had one carpet in the office, which was mine. I left off of this, a pretty dumb move, if you can. if you to And I came home and then for a month, I did nothing. Like, you know, I was just chilling, reading the newspaper and mom who had seen me work for like 20 plus hours every day.
00:10:19
Speaker
She was pretty concerned, like, you know, like, hey, what happened? I said nothing. He's like, what happened to that company of yours, right? We had called, so my grandfather, my uncles, everyone had come like from Punjab and Delhi for the big inauguration. And and then suddenly, but you know, your story stopped going to that ah business. So they were all concerned. And literally after like a month of doing nothing, one Sunday I borrowed my dad's shirt and trousers. So I dressed up like nicely and I went to this walk-in interview. They were looking for modern sales people. And then there's another story, but I waited for 8 to 10 hours and then I got the job. You were i was right because you were still you were not even a graduate then, I guess.
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah, the newspaper ad said that we are accepting either B.E. or B.Tech people, and you need to have some experience, electronics, electrical, you know one of those things. And I walked in, and the reception person who doubled up as an HR person like no said, well, when did you graduate? I said, well, next year I'm going to graduate. She's like, OK.
00:11:31
Speaker
which college And I said, Sajan, arts and commerce college? And she's like, what? No, no, you didn't read that properly. I said, I read it properly. And instead of trying to, you know, it's starting to be on my commerce you know background. ah Why don't you just let me interview like, you know, let the person ask me the question. So anyway, like, you know, they, I was obviously not candidate number one for them.
00:11:54
Speaker
They made me wait for the entire day. and you know humbiji to tenpola so we I waited pm. He's like, boss, I'm going to get firing from my boss, but let's take this month. like Why don't you and I both go? And before this big guy utter a other word, I said, please, listen to me. Just ask me the questions.
00:12:16
Speaker
I have got enough grief from this lady like you know because i'm not I understand i'm not like you know I don't fit the bill, but just it's a technical role, right? So just ask me the questions. He asked me three more questions. I think he said, you are in, and you're selected for the job. So I think I got the job selling modems door to door in the year 1996.
00:12:37
Speaker
thanks ah Now you can imagine. this is like ah Not too many people who wanted more, or who knew what a modem was, not too many people who had a PC back in Ahmedabad, and not too many internet connections. But I was the one doing this adrove today. Amazing. In this job is where you also had the like a chance encounter with someone who eventually played an important role later. as Just like take me through that story.
00:13:07
Speaker
yeah Yeah, so um thankfully, i was able to I figured out that the only people who even remotely would require a PC it would be the industrialists. So there is a GIDC, which is Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation. I would take my Luna there, and then I would go dodge the gatekeeper, like go sweet talk him into sending me inside.
00:13:31
Speaker
um I would show them the modem and they're like, oh, this is, it's not something that you usually see, right? The door to door salesman don't show up in the modem. So it was beyond his so-called pay grade. So they would send me right to the boss, the boss, and I would go, I would say like, you know, hey, because these are rich people, right? And you realize that, you know, these this people might have, again, because bora they might have kids in the US, UK, somewhere else, like studying or immigrated or whatever.
00:13:59
Speaker
So I would say, hey, do you have any family members in the US? It's ah obviously a rhetoric question. They're like, of course. We're like, OK. And then you call them probably every week, or they call you. It's like, yes. I was like, OK, you know what? You can send them email. What is an email? I'm like, you know, it's like a letter that you send, and but they receive it instantly. And they can reply immediately. It's like, OK, how does this work? Well, modem, what do I connect this to? Like a PC. Oh, I don't have a PC.
00:14:25
Speaker
so I have the number of someone ah
Founding a Restaurant Discovery Platform
00:14:30
Speaker
you know who could... Because by the time my that other business i was completely done, I was done assembling and I was working for someone, right? So I don't do site gigs. I don't try to kind of you know like do anything on the site. I would give the name of a person, phone number, et cetera, who would assemble a PC for them. So PC modem, they have to get an extra telephone line because when you're connected, the line would be blocked.
00:14:56
Speaker
and Yeah, so that was a same and then you go to the next person and they would try the same story So I would I would meet or beat the I'd meet or beat the numbers right every month. So that was good news And soon I was like the blue-eyed boy for my boss After a while like one day, you know, I I taught myself how to write HTML. Again, like those days, I used to work close to 21 hours every day. I'd go home at 6 a.m., come back at 9, and that would be my day. right So 9 to 6.
00:15:34
Speaker
and So, selling modems in the daytime, writing HTML, doing work on CorelDRAW, Photoshop. I mean, this is like the Gen AI tools for now, but like this was like back in the days right where you had to go remove people from the background and do all sorts of things. like So, i do I did that. and So life was good. My boss was happy. Everything's going great. Until one day, he receives a phone call from someone who's struggling with you know some connectivity. They're trying to set up some servers. They they bought a modem from us some few months ago. And they said, can you send someone like you know that can set it up for me? So I was in the office, and the boss sends me to go see this person.
00:16:19
Speaker
This person said that it's not the usual connect the desktop to a modem to the telephone line. It's a little complex. like you know I have a server. I'm like, OK. And on this server, I have a few services that I'm trying to run. So I'm trying to run the internet, like the IIS, internet information server for Microsoft. I'm trying to run an email server, an FTP server. And it's not going to be a desktop for browsing. like know I'm going to do whatever it is like you know that they would tend to do.
00:16:48
Speaker
like Of course, he was he needed one more pair of eyes. like you know He didn't think I would solve it. I said, can you just leave me alone with this thing for a bit? I got it what you want. So I set up you know the the servers for him, connected the modem. He was online. i little realize I did not realize at that point of time that this was a person who had come from the Silicon Valley. He was trying to set up some offshore thing in India, et cetera.
00:17:16
Speaker
Right at the time, ah he paused he said, OK, well, you seem to be a smart chap. But do you know anything about writing code? I said, yes, I know how to write code. I can write in C. I know FoxPro, DBase, Clipper. He said, OK, good. job So do you know any Java? I said, no, I don't know Java. He's like, OK, we'll teach you Java.
00:17:38
Speaker
I'm like, how will you teach me job? It's like, I'm actually making an offer like now how much money you make? I said, 2500 rupees. He's like, okay, I'll pay you 25,000 rupees. And why did you come work for me? I said, sorry, I don't switch jobs for money. And my boss takes care, very good care of me, gets me the books I want from the US. He gives me off and the key high, like I have the office keys. So that's the highest amount of the highest form of trust.
00:18:06
Speaker
Which is a running joke now in travel. Like, you know, the key hire, like this guy has the keys to the office. ah he And I'm good, man. So, so yeah, that was, that is how I met this person who was, you know, who was from the Valley and is trying to set something up. But I did not
CleverTap's Origin and Development
00:18:25
Speaker
take the offer. I was happy. But you also ended up in the Valley eventually. How did that happen?
00:18:31
Speaker
Yeah, so you know after a while, ah life was going good until one of our family friends actually suggested to my mom that Anand try out CDAC. I had never heard of CDAC. I had no idea what they do and all that. But I think on a on a I mean, this guy was super persistent. So on a whim, I said, OK, let me check it out. you know And again, internet access in India around that time was very, very rare. But we had access in our office. right So I looked up CDAG. Then I figured out that they actually made the India supercomputer, Param and Paras. So I was intrigued a bit. Anyway, there was an entrance exam. I i crossed that. I went to Delhi.
00:19:14
Speaker
CDAC, I was there for, you know, like, I think eight month course. ah They teach you all programming languages from Java to, you know, visual C++ plus plus to Windows, MFC, to everything else, right?
00:19:26
Speaker
coborn I aced that exam and then there was a, you know, like on campus. So I reclused myself and everyone said, well, this is the year 1998, everyone's going to the US, you should totally you know attend. This is the Y2K around the Y2K thing, right? Things had just started to take off, but that is not how I ended up in the US. So I reclused myself and I said, no, no, I have a mom and a younger sister at home.
00:19:54
Speaker
i'm I now know like other forms of programming. So let me go back to Ahmedabad. So I came back to Ahmedabad. And then I went back to my boss. I said, hey, now I can write code. And he gave me like a good piece of advice. He's like, you know what? My doors are always open for you, but I think you were overqualified for the job of you know selling modems and writing HTML pages, building HTML pages. So there is something better for you.
00:20:20
Speaker
you have to go find it. I said, OK, thank you. I was very dejected, to be honest. side So I thanked them. And of course, there were no programming jobs available, not in Ahmedabad, the year 1998. So anyway, I started looking around. There's one company in Gandhinagar. They were looking for programmers. So I went there. And again, funny story, like know I talked the interview, got selected.
00:20:50
Speaker
And that is where I met this person again. like know So towards the end of the year 1998, this guy had come from the US again, ah things had started hitting a Y2K. But this guy was not on a Y2K project, like a proper product company. They were trying to make some product for a financial services company on the East Coast. right We bumped into each other. I showed him the latest stuff that I was working on and he took me to the vice president of the company and he said this guy is going to lead the project that I spoke about in the morning. So I became the leader and also that year was the first year that I i landed in the US on of course a B-1 visa to go check out like another project, meet some other teammates and all that.
00:21:33
Speaker
So this Gujarat company was a vendor, like an outsourced partner? That is correct. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Which I did not piece together, but now of course I know that's how it worked, right? So the Gujarat company, actually it was but it was called Software Frontiers Limited, part of the TVS group. So Ashok Muthanana Group. Pretty legit, like, you know, the and they were, the so the other company was called and MFL, Multimedia Frontiers Limited. but This was Software Frontiers Limited. So I was in Software Frontiers.
00:22:01
Speaker
And so I became the leader, two trips to the US. I think I did fairly well on the project. ah So much so in the second trip, this guy gives me an offer to come work for the his next startup. This is the year 1999, mid 1999. I'm not interested again. he type bret like Exactly, right? But I'm not interested. and I politely declined. I said, no, no. i really i have Again, same thing. Mom and sister, I have to go back home. He's like, can I talk to your mom? So whatever. like I do not know what they discussed. Punjabi mom and South Indian fellow. like
00:22:41
Speaker
so not ah Finally, mom said, you have to do this, so take the offer, right? So, all right. I took the offer. And of course, there was a little problem. I'm a commerce graduate with middling, like I think 52% or something. um You require a STEM degree and to go to the US. I did not collect my certificate from the, I did not have my graduation certificate or my CDAC certificate or any of the experience letters.
00:23:13
Speaker
So on paper, I have nothing like, you know if you meet me, I can go talk technology, I can write code and all that. So anyway, they on their part, like you know they got this they got this labor department clearance to get me from India. And I became the third employee to join this amazing startup called Brians, which had raised $200 million dollars in the first round of funding. Oh, wow. OK. Yeah, yeah. So that's how I ended up in the US.
00:23:41
Speaker
and and This is like that peak dot.com time. Did they also go through a bust period or did they survive? Actually, we we we were able to attract some solid talent. we had Of course, we had people from large companies, et cetera, but a lot of good Stanford, trilogy, et cetera.
00:23:59
Speaker
ah graduates who joined us and we were onto a very good thing like you know so even during so even not making a dot-com product to be honest right you know we were not one of these e-commerce online kind of things right it was a solid b2b company selling a mobile transformation so if you have a website and you know phones were just coming out ah in those days japan was the leader with all the color phones and entity and all this were like you know while Ericsson in Europe and then there was all the other players right the US Motorola was like a simple back and white ah one or two line forms right for support screen display.
00:24:34
Speaker
If you have a website and you want to automatically transform it to all these different form factors, you would use our product. ah We had some very good customers. We had AOL, we had ah Time Warner separately, we had you know Washington Mutual and T-Mobile, all of these customers in the US. But what happened was 9-11 happened and then the the tooling kind of like, you know, the the thing on top of the mind from mobility, it becomes security. Oh, the next attack is going to be cyber attack. like know So people didn't give a shit about mobile. It's like, all right, like, you know, we don't worry about that, but we need to protect, right?
00:25:11
Speaker
Our company did try to pivot. I guess pre-iPhone, mobile was a fad, right? You you wouldn't really care about having your website. Mobile was a fad, yes. People did have phones, yeah, but no one, I mean, people were generally calling each other, right? Like there was this SMSing each other or just calling. Yeah, yeah. No, so it kind of went away very quickly. We tried to you know pivot to a security company, to a messaging company and all that. But I think it was too late, a lot of dollars went down the drain. And then, you know, like if your mission focused finally, like, you know, when you changed the direction,
00:25:41
Speaker
Some people lose interest. So I think that company died in 2003.
00:25:46
Speaker
And again, I was ready to move back to India, but I got a job in Seattle in AT&T Wireless and then Motorola. So that's just to complete the US loop. And when did you decide to come back to India? At Motorola, it was and like you were developing mobile software solutions.
00:26:04
Speaker
That is correct, yes. So Motorola, we were a team based out of Seattle they of a company that they had acquired and we were actually building a few things. One
CleverTap's Growth and Client Interaction
00:26:15
Speaker
is to deliver firmware over the air to phones because that was the era when phones started getting a bit smarter and you needed to update the firmware to catch up and all that.
00:26:24
Speaker
catch up with the newer things. We were also building a software that would deliver, believe it or not, like weather information, breaking top 10 breaking news, astrology, game scores, et cetera, while the phone is in your pocket. like now While you're not fiddling with your phone, which doesn't you know everyone always has their phones with them. But when you when you don't have your phone, we would deliver all those things onto the device for things that you subscribe. So yeah so that was the software part of Motorola.
00:26:52
Speaker
Oh, like a VAS offering basically. It was a VAS offering, correct. kind of So my six and a half years were up, my green card motor had applied for my green card and um I think it was, so my elder one was born in the US and I think that was like a chunk churning moment. So most of the you know like people like me who go to the US and there's always a, not this year, but next year. So there's always an N plus one that goes on in their life. ah So me and my wife had a chat, like know it's like now or never. like you know If we get the green card, there is no way we are going back.
00:27:29
Speaker
um and And if you then then you settle down, then you you know like do your thing right in the US. So for me, it was like a good good time to decide. We had a chat. We said, you know anyway, we never wanted to be here. ah So let's move back.
00:27:46
Speaker
um Again, like both of us are super comfortable living in the US. We are comfortable living in India. We don't have like, ah you know, a whether you want to call it dream hours or like the grass is green on the other side or any of that. Like we are absolutely happy. Now I'm in Mumbai, absolutely happy living here. ah Yeah. So that was the time we, we drew our green card application, packed our boxes and moved back to India in 2000. And she came in, in December, 2005. I kept in a three months later.
00:28:15
Speaker
And did you have a plan of what you want to do in India? No, actually I did not. So ah actually you hold on. So this is a little, you know, interesting part. Uh, I didn't have a job lined up number one. So, um, again, like, uh, this was all the pre startup India, right? There was no Flipkart. There's no Google in India, right? Uh, forget Facebook and everything else. So I thought, well, the chances that I will go get a job with, uh,
00:28:42
Speaker
Infosys, one of these large companies. like And in preparation for that, since because I'm still a commerce graduate. And I come back and I'll still be put on this education caste system, if I can call it that. So what do I do? So i I got a tutor and I learned Mandarin while in Seattle. And just before Motorola, like before they signed off, you know they said that, hey, you know what, Anand, the project that you worked on is actually coming to an end. And the deployment is with the China Telecom.
00:29:20
Speaker
And it will be, you know wouldn't you want to see this deployed in the hands of 200 million people in China? So I said, OK, I'll come back to India, but and I will work at the intersection of Beijing and India hours, which means three hours of work, to be honest. But I think in the project, I got sucked into going to Beijing. So I was there three, four times. I practically lived in Beijing for about seven months, deployed the project.
00:29:48
Speaker
And then came back and say, Motorola, it's done now. Thank you. like I'm on to my thing. right ah on In parallel, I was working on this. So we me and my co-founder, who I met in the US, we were thinking of multiple ideas. right But the one closest to our heart was this concept of food listings.
00:30:06
Speaker
And ah sorry, restaurant listings, anything to do with food, right? Food, nightlife, et cetera, right? So the thesis was that as the young population, as the average earning in India kind of goes up, as the younger populace is exposed to more options, ah they will want to go beyond the usual Masala Dosa and Choleba Turi, but they do not know, right? Like what do would you order in a Korean restaurant? Or what's authentic Italian food? And how do you pronounce these things?
00:30:35
Speaker
and how do you discover new places to eat and to go out and all that. ah So that was, so we we were working on the, you know, on burp.com on the site, but yeah, it became real once I moved back and I signed up with motor product. And was there a comparable US example, which you saw as? so Yeah, yeah. The inspiration was Yelp in the US. Yelp again is like a direct look up. Restaurant reviews and all.
00:31:04
Speaker
That is correct. Yes, reviews, a bunch of that. right And we wanted to model it like that. Of course, when I came back to India and I say, OK, so where is the list of restaurants? And they realize there is no list.
00:31:18
Speaker
Why would someone make a list? you know and there's a lot And again, you can go to the food and FH, RAI, whatever it's called, right the Restaurant Association and all that. Why would they give me the list? And the local roadside stall serving PowerBaji is not listed with them. right so And that's probably the most tastiest PowerBaji you'd find in in your neighborhood. right So then came the harder part of building this database, going doorto- door to door,
00:31:45
Speaker
and collecting all the data and then putting it up online. So you did what Zumato started with, right? This was the origin origin of Zumato as well, like like just to list out restaurants and menus. Yes.
00:31:58
Speaker
just yeah they Correct. They came in a year and a half later. I think we took off. We were super, super popular. We launched on 15th August, 2006. And Bert took off like you know because it was a nice team interface, good data. We crowd sourced the rest of it. So we bootstrapped like you a lot of content. ah Reviews were authentic and genuine.
00:32:22
Speaker
ah There's nothing paid on the side, right? And then people like like, okay, well, there are pictures and there's all sorts of things, right? I can go find out. and And they could submit reviews, they could submit restaurants. So I think it took off. And then a year and a half later, Zomato started something in Delhi, which was like just a menu of you know restaurants. That's correct, yes. So why why were the trajectories so different? like
00:32:47
Speaker
between that Interesting question. like you yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i can I can say this. I think 2006 is where no VC venture capitalist backed us. We met about 35 VCs. A lot of them were come back from the US. They just couldn't get it. like you know we were We were laughed out of the room. Some people said, why will someone turn on their desktop and then only to find the restaurant? like you know we all We all, I mean, these were middle aged and beyond people, right? they but They were like, we know the places we want to go to, to eat out. You know, a family favorite is this place, that place. I said, this is not for your age group. Some got offended when I said, it's not for you. It's for a younger audience, like, who like to eat out. You know, now we all order from Zomato, we order from like Swiggy and others, right? Like, we would not order that much back in the days, back in, you know, literally like, you know,
00:33:41
Speaker
15 years ago, right? yeah and You'd call up a restaurant then you yeah and yeah, exactly, right? You go out or you just call maybe once in a while, right? Not every day, not like such out of habit, right? They made it super easy. But VCs would never back us, right? We did not have anyone. So after three years of bootstrap, burning all the savings, et cetera, is when we merged forces with Infomedia.
00:34:03
Speaker
ah they there was Yeah, there was no revenue model. There was no advertising on the side. We partnered a with Exigo and we said, you know, let's do something sensible. ah So Alok was, sorry if Alok was listening to this, but he was fairly young back then, 17 years ago.
00:34:22
Speaker
ah solo So so ah so are we you know we said you know when people but try to look up flights, like say someone's going from Bombay to Delhi you know and they have the data and everything, you already know, right? So why don't we just add in five restaurants or five nightclubs to go check out like you know for your weekend in Delhi.
00:34:42
Speaker
And that was the quote-unquote ad model, right? We were not showing ads or pop-ups or doing anything bad. We were not renting out the user database. So we did make money from these kind of small projects, but most of it was like a bootstrapped, very, very frugal operation. Okay. So three years you ran it on your savings and then? Three years we ran it, bootstrapped minimum amount of spend, you know,
00:35:10
Speaker
And then, you know, infomedia came along. In fact, we met infomedia because they were interested, you know, like yellow pages, who looks at yellow pages, right? Even back then, it's dead. And we pitched them this idea, like, you know, hey, if we take yellow pages, put them online, that changes everything, right? And you make the listing rich, you add reviews and you add like photographs and whatnot, right? So what was infomedia running? Infomedia was erstwhile Tata yellow pages.
00:35:40
Speaker
ah And yeah, yeah, yeah, so they were publishing India's like there's only one India's yellow pages ah Super brand of sorts listed company. They also had a bunch of b2b magazines and some b2c magazines So if you jog your memory back like the chip magazine p3. Yes All of these were in for media publications, correct? Yeah So we wanted to modernize, digitize all of this. And, you know, I think they liked our execution. They wanted to infuse new blood into the organization. So we got acquired into Informidiety. In hindsight, would you have done something different in those three years you spent at Burp? Could you have figured out a revenue model?
00:36:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny, actually, some VCs came and apologized to me after like after I started Clever Tap. Hey, Anand, because you know as Clever Tap, we had to go raise money. So I met some of them again. And and some of them said, man, we are so sorry, man. we You were a little ahead of your time. of the you know But we should have seen this just working out. The the goodness for Zomato. Yeah, exactly. right So Sanjeev backed Zomato. And you know then he did not have to go raise the traditional capital.
00:36:52
Speaker
and right little like two years more two more Two or two three years more like you know and this ah turned into a massive juggernaut like as you have seen now. right hindsight I think I am good man. I don't have any remorse in the life ever. like you know Should I have studied more to score better marks in Vcom?
00:37:12
Speaker
so more I'm happy. and i'm I'm in a happy space in life. So I always believe whatever happens, happens for good. Even though at that point of time, you may not find it very good like know because these dot connects ah dots connect backwards. Right. right right okay So you got acquired by Informedia. How many years did you work in Informedia then? I assume they would have wanted you to continue working. and Correct. So I was there in Informedia. like no I met my other founders, namely Sunil and Suresh Nair. Sunil had just come back from the US. He was looking for a job. He was in India for like ah you know like just to give his kids a flavor of India. So we met. We, in fact, launched askme dot.com, ah which was a competitor to Just Dial, inside Informedia18. But Informedia18 ran a printing press. right
00:38:05
Speaker
which primarily means that two-thirds of your workforce is blue collar, which means you run the company with a very, very different mindset, right? Public limited company, super brand, blue collar. And we were the upstarts. We were the startup guys. you know If you want something right now, we get it right now. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. You can't buy a server yeah every month when the purchase committee meets.
00:38:29
Speaker
That's when you can put your proposal. I'm like, what proposal, man? I can call a bell right now and then they will give me a, ship me a server. What are you talking about? Like that's how it works. Young lad. So, you know, that was the thing.
00:38:43
Speaker
um So anyway, like you know we tried to modernize a lot of that, we we you know new technology, et cetera, et cetera. I think in two years after our acquisition, Network 18 lost appetite to run Informedia 18 as a separate company because Network 18 was a parent company. I mean, there were the TV channels and and movies and everything else. It was slightly more glamorous than Yellow Pages. And they merged Informedia 18 into Network 18, which then got Sunil and me to work on all the digital properties, web properties of Network 18. So namely, first post, money control, you know those kind of properties. So two years of modernizing all of that, you know moving everything to a new style. In dot.com, for example, was like a big, big thing, right? World's shortest mailbox. you know So Anandat, In.com, all those things, rolling out those things. I had some wacky idea that I proposed to Network 18, that you should come up with your own phone.
00:39:42
Speaker
like the network 18 phone that has all the content from network 18. And this stalled the idea for four, five months. Like I said, I never work in a place that I don't enjoy doing things. So I went to Sunil, I said, man I'm out of this place. And since you are a good boss, and we team up well, I think you should leave this place too. And I was able to convince him and Suresh to leave along and then start Clevertab.
00:40:12
Speaker
Of course, we did not make a phone, but, yeah. Like, CleverTap was built out of problems you saw ah while you were working on the Informedia online properties. What was the thesis? Yeah. So we were running product and technology amongst the three of us, right? And some of the problems we saw was data was in silos, multiple kind of pockets of data, right? Say you are a money control customer.
00:40:40
Speaker
there is no way for you to see a consolidated view of the user. like There is Google Analytics for the analytics. There is some vendor selling email. There is some other vendor selling SMS. There are some other things you know that you upload your database. So your data is all over the place. And the core thesis that I was trying to impress upon, the outside of the phone idea, the other thing that we were trying to sell within Network 18, that we need this one big database which can store and process all this data in real time. If you can put all of this together, you will get better insights on every single user. You will know where they drop off. You know how to and keep on engaging them, what works, what does not work for them, and how do you run Winback? How do you get them back onto the properties, right?
00:41:27
Speaker
And we tried finding things like, you know we actually went out because we were not in the mood of building something when you can just buy it off the thing, right? So we really wanted to go get a database, something that like a data processing the technology that can process the... ah Until that point of time, I think money control won the highest volumes of traffic in India. So at that scale, something that could work. We couldn't find anything. The next actual thing was... Salesforce had this marketing cloud product that might have been something that might have...
00:41:56
Speaker
no Salesforce one was not in India and two they did not have any mobile components like you know, India mobile was taking off, right? And we wanted to do it on a scrappy budget like, you know, we did not want to spend Salesforce kind of dollars, right? So we said we'll write of our own and they said they again They were no takers for this idea. So we got you know like things did not kind of go well. I felt like the three of us felt so strongly about this idea that we said, you know what, we should pursue this. We should leave this job and then go do it. So that's how we kind of, that was the starting point for CleverTap. Okay. So essentially a unified view of your customer. That was what you wanted to build.
00:42:41
Speaker
More than that, like you know so ah unified view is like the starting point. right But what can you do with that? So of course, no business in the world wants to piss off their customer. right If you go to your local Kiriana shop right or a restaurant that you frequently go visit, that the waiter knows you. They know your spice levels. What are you allergic to? like no this It's an unwritten thing. It's not that you've submitted a form, et cetera. But they've seen you in enough number of times to understand everything about you, right whether you show up alone, show up with your family, with a bunch of friends.
00:43:11
Speaker
etc ah So, a place knows you because they have seen you multiple times. Can you not do this with your users on digital properties, on your website, on your app, e etc? Can you not treat the person as the same person across two different form factors? That was the thesis, right? So, if you have all the data in one place, right you can look at this as composite You can use it for insights. You can use it for audience segregation or segmentation. You can use it for personalizing every message that you send to this person. And sometimes no message is the best message right because you know this person is a regular. So that was the objective. right like What do you do with this one view is to service the person better, give them a full personalized service.
00:43:59
Speaker
okay so but centralized database for a unified view and then cohorts, I assume, like you would create cohorts of customers based on behavior and then actions on those cohorts. What kind of actions are we talking about here? like Yeah, so it starts with insights. right What do the users do? like For example, you know if you are talking about some digital app, right let's say it's a financial services app, where do people drop off? like you know Why are they here? Why did someone download my app? Oh, maybe this guy wanted a loan. Maybe this guy wanted to apply for a credit card or wanted to invest in mutual funds. right
00:44:34
Speaker
So, but some not everyone who downloads your app immediately goes and puts like a bunch of money and gets to the, you know, like transaction, buying mutual funds. People do drop off and they take their time, right? Sometimes the third visit converts, sometimes the 10th visit, right? Maybe a phone call will help you. So understanding that part, right? Where do people drop off? Why do they drop off? And can we do something right here?
00:44:58
Speaker
to prevent a drop off. You know, like if you go to a physical store, let's say you walk into a chroma, you spent like an hour there and the moment you're about to, you know, the moment you look at the exit door, someone will walk up to you and say, hey, actually, can I help you with something specific you're looking for, right? Or if you've just been browsing,
00:45:19
Speaker
I bet even before the top of the hour, someone will come and actually talk to you. right Like, hey, we saw that you were checking out the washing machines. Are you looking to buy one? How big is the house? And blah, blah, blah. right How much space you got? Where do you live? you know Something like that. right Because they're trying to be helpful to you, right trying to help you out.
00:45:38
Speaker
Online we before like you know the clever tab we did not see there was something like this like you know it was just like hey I'm the category manager for some electronics product so I will send you a newsletter with the products I want to sell I don't care what you want to buy they may not be in the right color not size not no brand whatever whatever right so can I make this whole thing better so it starts with insights knowing where do people drop off and predicting what a person might do next right so Welcome to AI. like Now you can predict. right okay People like this. Again, like a shopkeeper would know this. When a shopkeeper sees you walking in, I bet there is some secret shopkeeper algorithm in their head that knows this guy will buy or not. guy Is he here just to you know just browse or this person is actually looking to buy? Everyone in the mall probably knows this. They see a young couple walking around.
00:46:28
Speaker
Fifth shop, random shop, they went to the electronic store, then the clothes shop, then the shoe shop, and then now they are in my shop, not going to buy. They just time passed till later. But someone who's got box in says, do you have a size 42 and blue color check shirt, they know this guy's going to buy. it So there is some shopkeeper algorithm. Similarly, like you can you do something like this online? right So on the basis of this, can you predict?
00:46:53
Speaker
people, and based on the prediction, can you run an intervention? Now, what are these interventions? You could ask him ah something as simple as changing the flow of the app, depending on who the person is, or localizing the app. So if you know that someone from, I don't like you know, some village shows up, instead of trying to put this whole app in English, can you localize it it? Can you show it in the local language? Can you offer a phone call? Or can you call them directly, actually? Say, hey, I'm from the app. like you know Can I help you? Saw that you were browsing around.
00:47:22
Speaker
right Or people who were buying have stopped buying and can you get them back? So anyway, these are the various use cases once you know a person intimately like, you know Again respecting the privacy and all those good things Can you be slightly more personalized to them? That is the that is what we try to get to okay um so you've given a simplified understanding of what clever tab does I want to slightly get a more Nuance understanding go a little bit into the weeds. So there is this technology called CDP, customer data platform. So one part of what you do is a CDP or does a CDP do everything or are you a CDP? Like are you a CDP or are you a CDP++? plus plus
00:48:11
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. CDP is nothing but a customer data platform. ah Since we hold all customer data, we are a CDP. ah We don't talk about it, you know, if you go to my website or if you look at the product, we don't say we are CDP, etc. We don't try to jargonify things.
00:48:24
Speaker
But yes, CleverTap is a CDP, but we do a lot more than CDP. We do user insights. We do predictive analytics and predictive segmentation. We do the whole suite of marketing automation, which means a customer lifecycle. Can you automate this the messaging around all of these touch points? So if you looked at the product, added to cart, and you disappeared, can we send you a message? right It's called cart abandonment.
00:48:51
Speaker
So, all of this across multiple channels, whether it's a post-notification or a email, SMS, WhatsApp, changing the layout of the app depending upon who you are, and so on and so forth. The business point of view, like from a business, if you're running a business, right it's simply called, like what CleverTap will come and pitch will say that we help you improve the customer lifetime value.
00:49:16
Speaker
That is what we do for you, right? Using all of these insights and segmentation and all of these signs to improve the customer lifetime value, which means so you are going to retain customers for longer and you will build a relationship such that they'll keep coming back to you and you know use more of your services. Okay. This ah term CDP is a relatively recent term. What's the evolution? Like why don't we just...
00:49:40
Speaker
Continue to I mean essentially how is it different from just a database but like what is why was this term coined CDP? what What's the how has this industry evolved? ah Can you give me like a broader perspective of that technology trend?
00:49:55
Speaker
Absolutely. So I think this is a loaded question. So let me answer it in parts. right So we go back, I don't know, 20 years maybe. 20 years ago, there was web only and there's web analytics. right And though sometimes you store the data with you. Sometimes you would just leave it with the whatever's the analytics provider. And then you would do email marketing. You would send emails to people.
00:50:19
Speaker
um send SMS's to people back in the days and maybe if you go back a little longer people would send physical letters like you know hey ah especially in the US you had million catalogs people would send the physical catalog you can look at the product call them and say I want item number 823 right ship to my this is my address right all of those things which means the more channels you have the more customer data is spread across everything then So before CDP was CRM, like no customer relationship is management yeah was the and yeah CRM. right I mean, there are all sorts of acronyms. We can yeah have CLN, customer life cycle management and and other other things like that. right But the heart of a CDP is customer data platform. All the customer data is in one platform.
00:51:05
Speaker
which means now you can use this. Yeah, sorry. Why is this not a CRM only? why Why was this term specifically coined? and like like Was there a fundamental change of approach? Yeah, yeah. so yeah yeah In CRM, what happened was the companies, right companies like Oracle or Salesforce or Adobe, et cetera, they were the ones that had the data. yeah You could store data with with them and they could then send the you know like the emails out. Mostly it was emails right back in the days, especially in the US.
00:51:34
Speaker
India started as a push notification market or an SMS market, but for US it was mostly emails. CDP came because people said I want control of this data with me and I will decouple the messaging part. I can choose what vendor to use for the messaging part or the journey or automation part. like It does not have to be the same vendor. So I don't have to have a sales force as both the holder of the data as well as the message and you sending part.
00:52:02
Speaker
i can have I can hold the data, I can decide which vendor to use. So that's how CDPs are born. Okay. Okay. Okay. Understood. And I guess CDPs also capture a lot more granular data, like which all pages did a customer visit or how much time did he spend on that page or like... Yeah. Most CDPs, I would say, do not record the visitor data. Most CDPs, right? now You can arm twist a CDP and say, record everything, but generally the cost would go go up to the roof.
00:52:31
Speaker
but For example, on an e-commerce site, more people browse and look at products than people buy. right So that ratio would be anywhere from 80-20, of the 80% people that are browsing and looking at random products and whatever. like you know Is there a sale on the and some good brand?
00:52:48
Speaker
right Very few people actually end up purchasing, right? Now, if you want to record all of this thing, it will cost you a bomb. And that's where people like us come in, right? Clever tap. Our fundamental innovation, like i told about the I spoke about the data platform, right? What actually we did is we had to invent a data technology called Tesseract DB.
00:53:08
Speaker
which made it the most cost efficient in the market to store data, which means you can throw whatever you want. You can store all this 80% browsing data. You can store the 20% transactions. You can store all of this in cover tab while processing it. That means getting insights at the speed of light, which is real time. So as people, like imagine the, I'll give an example, right? Just to kind of bring this home, think IPL time. It's like the biggest festival in India, outside of Diwali, maybe, uh, the,
00:53:37
Speaker
that the streaming apps are showing the match live. Food delivery apps are actually serving all those people who are watching the match because no one wants to go and cook. So the sugis, the the phasos, and so on and so forth. Then there are all the express quick commerce, whatever you might require. like So all the quick commerce guys get into action. Then there are the fantasy sports like Dream11, others. There are the scoring sites like yeah ESPN. So every name that I mentioned, ah including GeoCinema, is a customer of Levita. Now imagine the traffic, but they individually see on their websites and their apps just doing IPL. And the ability to process all this in real time, figuring out like you know who which person dropped off, which person is there, how long have we known them, can we send them an offer, et cetera, to transact right now in the middle of the match.
00:54:29
Speaker
That improves their economics like you know because now they know who to message, when to message, what to message, et cetera, and can we get them to transact with us okay or stick around on the platform in case you're a streaming app. Okay. One last question on the CDP part, then I'll come to the orchestration part. What is this Tesseract technology that you built? how How was it different from what was earlier there? like Yeah, great question. So like I said, like you know in Network 18, we were looking for this technology to you know to store all the customer data in one place. Storing is the easy part, actually. You know we all you can store everything on your hard drive or laptop. right But processing this in real time is is extremely hard. right So can you store granular data, process this, and then generate insights from it, et cetera? Can you use this data in real time to personalize the home page or every message that you send to the person?
00:55:25
Speaker
we actually couldn't find anything in the market that was real time, right? Or real time and storage, but at a cost, you know, good cost base, right? Like where the economics work out. So as engineers, like, I mean, I have 30 years of experience now on technology, right? My other founders have similar years of experience. So we said, well, why does it cost so much like, you know, because most of the data technologies out there are actually general purpose.
00:55:52
Speaker
they're built to store data, not customer data, just any data, transactional data, banking transactions, whatever. So can we build something that's purpose-built? Can we have something purpose-built just for a spot marketing automation?
00:56:06
Speaker
like And that was the starting point. So what do people do? like Well, they go and you know they launch the app, they search for products, add products to cart, they transact, they renew subscriptions, they watch movies, whatever. I mean, these are the user actions. So can you build something that captures user actions? Optionally captures who did it.
00:56:27
Speaker
Because most of the blind people, like I said, they browse. like You can go to any e-commerce site right now and start browsing. You don't have to log in. You don't have to fill up a form. anonymous You're anonymous, and you can browse. So can you store all of this information and while providing insights in real time? And I think that led us to this invention called Tessarac DB, which exactly has these capabilities. There is no limit on the amount of data you can store with it. It has the best unit economics and it has the best capabilities of any data platform. For example, you can go look up 10 years worth of data. Most of the players in our competitive field offer like a six month or a 90 day look back period. ah We offer like a 10 year look back period. And looking back is how much you retain in your memory. So to simplify it for everyone, look back is like, for example, you remember the conversation we had three years ago.
00:57:23
Speaker
Imagine we had met and you're like, oh, I don't know who you are. And you're like, no, no, but we met man, like three years ago. So if a user came back after a while and you look back, Peter doesn't remember that person, then it's going to be terrible, right? If you could know this person for like a long period of time, you can improve your services for the person.
00:57:43
Speaker
Okay. Test-Rack DB is like, say, a MongoDB or an SQL. like These are all backend database technology. So, Test-Rack DB is something similar to these. Test-Rack DB is handwritten from the ground up. It's not based off open source or anything of that sort. We have a file that doesn't patent on that technology.
00:58:07
Speaker
And there are a dozen more that we are finding in the next few months on this thing, right? It is actually the beauty of Tesseract DB is since we wrote the data technology, like we wrote, okay, we wrote the database, right? And all the data that goes into it is controlled by us as clever tab, right? Which also means that I can run code on the database. Most of the databases, you have to download code, ah you have to download the data, sorry, and then you have to run code on that.
00:58:38
Speaker
For example, if you want a million users in some database, say MongoDB, and you wanted to find out you know which are the top, whatever, man like let's count all the products that they've bought. right Most of the times, you will write some Java program or some other language, you will fetch the data, you will do all the calculation, and you will discard the rest of the data that you don't care about. So it's like how many products have people bought, and what are my best-selling products?
00:59:05
Speaker
Right. So that that data is loaded into some short-term memory. That is correct. Analyzed and or some algorithm is run on it and then an outcome. Absolutely right. Okay. Absolutely. we thats rightly We don't have to do that. Of course, what we do is fully transparent to the user. If you were a customer of clever time, you would never figure out all this memory, all that. But what you do is you run a query, it runs in the data, which makes it real time. So that is one of the things that makes it real time.
00:59:32
Speaker
It also makes all the AI real-time, which means you can run predictions in real-time. You can log into the Clavita database right now, say you are a customer and you say, okay, well, today's X day, you know to let's say today's Sunday, how many people will buy a Nike t-shirt for more than I don't know, 2000 rupees in the next week. I want to run a prediction. And not only that, I want to find out the propensity of these people to buy. So Alan's propensity. So you know let's say the score is 10 out of 10, highest propensity to buy. That means you can now save your daughters. You don't have to give me a coupon or discount or send a message to me. You can wait until the end of the week before you do it. right But for someone who has no propensity to buy, like no this guy will require a lot of convincing.
01:00:21
Speaker
You know, because this guy is not really in the mood to buying a product right now. You can say, hey, there's a, you know, like a free shipping or there's a cash back or there's something. So as a business with the ability to predict in real time, you can actually save your dollars for rupees.
01:00:36
Speaker
In a way, the entire database resides in short term memory. I'm just speaking as a low man. um Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. But of course, memory is one of the most expensive parts of the computer. So we really don't keep everything in memory while still making it real time. That is the invention and the innovation. So you don't want to monetize this as a standalone product?
01:00:57
Speaker
No, actually, no, no. we are like I call this the car manufacturer, man. like you know you You don't buy the engine of the car. You buy the car. Of course, but you're using the engine all the time, right? But you don't say, hey, you know what? I got the wheels. I got the rest of the stuff. Why don't you sell me the engine? So as a company, if I were a database company, I would be doing that. But here is my here is why I don't want to do this. Forget the car analogies aside.
01:01:23
Speaker
I think we can activate your data a lot better than what you can. And here is why. We as a business right have a good visibility across a broad set of customers, like vertical industries, right ah financial services industries, streaming apps, food delivery, retail, and and so on and so forth, gaming. right And we know how different businesses are using this data and activating it. right again, like storing data is not the hard part here. What do you do with the data is the hardest part, right? How do you mine it for information? ah Can you go figure out some pink codes or zip codes where people are placing unusually large orders? And you can when you go to the root cause of why they are doing that, right? So we have that ability.
01:02:14
Speaker
and we will continue to continue to get better at that. For example, one of the things that we do is we ship a recommendation engine which outperforms a lot of the homegrown recommendation engine or a third party recommendation engine gene that a lot of retailers use. We have done this test and we realize that ours performs better. A recommendation engine would be like, say, if I log on to the Amazon app,
01:02:37
Speaker
but My homepage is customized based on what I browse in the past. So that that is the recommendation. engine Like what Amazon is customizing? yeah ah Yes. like Okay. but con Multiple levels? Yeah, multiple levels for Amazon, right? So let's take a retailer, right? The moment you land on the homepage, they personalize the homepage. This is what they predict that you will be interested in.
01:03:00
Speaker
Right? ah That's one. Second thing is when you're looking at a product, they might show you competing products. Again, that's the second level. The third level is when you're about to check out to say people who buy this, usually buy this. For example, you're buying an iPhone and they know the charger is not included in the pack. They're like, hey, you know why? Because you'll come back again and buy it, right? So they saved you like this trouble, right? um and And so forth, right? so And even if after you bought a product,
01:03:28
Speaker
The following day, let's say you receive an email or a notification, something which says, let's say you looked at a product, you were just this close to buying it and you dropped off. Now, something in the back predicts that you know this person may not buy this, so let them show them a cheaper product or a better product or a different color, different brand. All of this comes together and you say, oh, you this is the right thing, I want to buy this. and So that that is, you're recommending, but in the context of our prediction in lot of cases.
01:03:54
Speaker
Okay. So, and you're saying your recommendation is better than a homegrown recommendation than in most cases? the third party or a third party, one because of the continuous feedback loop. So imagine yeah you're running an e-commerce site, and there's a million people online right now. And looking at the patterns of all the million people, the ability to know what product is selling and who which kind of users buy, this is exactly like a shop people. Maybe that example is very good. like If you walk into a shop right now, ah looking at you, they would probably say, you know if you walk into a clothes shop right now, most likely they know that Diwali is coming up.
01:04:32
Speaker
And looking at you, they are want to they are not going to get into some big debate with you, right? They also know what are the colors for a festive season, right? And, you know, like, whatever, like, so the shopkeeper knows, like, you know, what you, but if you bought, the let's say you bought a kurta, right? And you bought it, you went back home, went to the shop the following day, they are again they are not going to say, oh, another kurta for you, like, you know, they know that something happened to that thing that you bought. So that is the context, that is the power of context.
01:05:02
Speaker
right Most of the recommendation engine, et cetera, they kind of miss some of this context. So you have to like know. So a technology like ours actually helps them piece this together. And ah so you said that and so one layer of your product is the customer data platform, the CDP. The second layer is orchestration.
01:05:23
Speaker
orchestration but By orchestration, what I mean is like running the intervention, be it in terms of changing the app flow or what you see on the app or what communication is sent to the customer. So this orchestration is powered by the recommendation engine. This orchestration is not powered by recommendation. The recommendation is part of the orchestration. So for example, you know like let's say it's the cart abandonment use case that we were talking about. What products to send to you is from the recommendation engine.
01:05:53
Speaker
like But the orchestration is, okay, well, Akshay looked at this product 30 seconds ago, let's say, or three minutes ago. Now, it depends upon what you were looking at. If you were looking to take your family to a vacation, right, since we are both in India, let's say to the US,
01:06:11
Speaker
3 minutes is not like some odd track printing thing. They'll probably give you a couple of days to think about it before they send you like a communication, right? Hey, I'm still thinking about that vacation. You know, there is a sale coming up on Emirates or Singapore Air or something like that.
01:06:24
Speaker
But in a quick commerce context, they will not wait three days and say, are you still thinking about the packet of biscuits that you were looking at like not three days ago? Because that will sound very foolish, right? So the reaction time is different. so And then depending upon what they are reacting to, what is the business, what is the ticket size, and the customers, sometimes a push notification or an email or a WhatsApp message, like these are three different things, like three or four different things, or maybe even showing you something when you're in the app.
01:06:52
Speaker
Right. ah So all of this is part of the orchestration. What to show, when to show, who to show it to, how often to show it to. And, you know, like finally, what is the best way to show all of these things to the person. Okay. Okay. oh How does, I'm assuming like an app, a quick commerce app, they would have built it on their own using some I don't know what stack, but whatever. They would have used some stack and built an app. How does CleverTap influence what I see in that? Like there are some blank fields and those fields are filled by CleverTap. Like at the point of checkout, you can say frequently bought together and there are blank fields that, and those blank fields that there is an API call or something with that. Like like how does that integration happen? I just want to understand that.
01:07:46
Speaker
Correct. It's more than just that, right? it's even the so even So let's talk about quick commerce, right? From a customer onboarding journey, like, you know, should I show you like a discount coupon? i Should I give you discount or ah or a wallet, some money in your wallet for your first transaction? Should we do it? Should we not do it? Do even sell your zip code.
01:08:06
Speaker
Maybe you're in some remote place that is not being served. right So from some of those logic like you know to getting this person to transact, sending out communication like, no hey, there's an event in the evening. Let's say the night of Diwali, like two hours before that, looking at their own number of riders and delivery partners they have in certain neighborhoods, they could send out a message saying that, hey, looking, scrambling last minute for the diyas or some idols or whatever like it is, like, you know hey, we can deliver this to you.
01:08:35
Speaker
all the way to the checkout page. um I think all of this, it's not just a recommendation, like know I would say. like It's actually more of what to message and to whom, right? And what is the context of the message? like what does what is What is the best time to send the message? What is the best channel? Those kind of things. For quick commerce, we help them also shape demand. So it depends upon the delivery partners, that kind of influence. If someone is looking for a cool fee,
01:09:03
Speaker
but your Kulfi stock is running low, can you influence that to buy, get them some of the dessert? An ice cream maybe of sorts or a cake versus ordering a Kulfi, right? So a little bit of that. But how how does it happen?
01:09:16
Speaker
how do how How does CleverTap influence what is being shown? is there like a I mean, how how is that how does the technology, how do we these platforms help each other? Is it complete autopilot or is there some sort of a product manager or a growth manager who is ah running CleverTap and making these calls or you know like the execution of this idea correct that you've told me, how how is this executed?
01:09:44
Speaker
Yeah in in all the cases it is a very tight integration with their operations right. So, with their catalogues for example, in case of quick commerce it is like a per neighborhood catalog right because some neighborhoods might like or not all neighborhoods will have all the inventory right some so get sold out or every neighborhood has a little different flavor etcetera.
01:10:03
Speaker
So depending upon so that those catalogs are tightly integrat integrated with CleverTap in real time. Number two, all the users that are doing things on the app or the website, that data comes in real time. right They have set some rules.
01:10:21
Speaker
For example, on day three, do this thing. For new users that we acquired through Instagram, where the ad said, like you know try your first thing. you know You only get this thing on my store.
01:10:32
Speaker
When they show up on the app, like know show them that product, don't show them some other random product. right so Integrating all of these flows is right is one of the things that we help them do. ah And then, you know, identifying, like I said, some people who are going to drop off, some people who are going to complete the transaction, some people, what is the right time to go message? What is the right message, actually, in fact? So, we have a capability called Scribe, in which you can actually put in a message, let's say you want to offer a 20% discount on Dias for Diwali, like some lamps.
01:11:04
Speaker
But depending upon who you are targeting, you may want a different tone of the message. In some cases, there's a FOMO, there's a surprise, there's anticipation, there is trust, there is joy. So you may want to change the emotion of that message. And Clever Tap lets you do that. We'll tell you like you know what emotions work for what, and then you can use that to send it out. And to see the conversion rate improve. ah Conversion is when people click on the message and come back and buy the lamps.
01:11:30
Speaker
right That also comes back to us. We, this person, has bought the lamp. So now do not include them in the next message that goes out right as a reminder. Correct? Or a reminder to do things. One of my customers, a financial services company, actually uses reminders for bill payments. So if today is the 30th of the month and it's the last day to pay your and electricity bill, they'll send you a reminder three days before. And if you've already paid, then you're out of that loop of reminders.
01:12:01
Speaker
or if you say, remind me in 30 minutes, in three days or two days because I'm on a flight right now. So remind me in two hours, in two hours, that reminder will come to you. okay okay
01:12:14
Speaker
the Is there a human operating clever type in most of your clients? or is it or yes Yes, there is a team. yeah It's called the growth team. In most cases, there is the growth team, which comprises of people from the product and marketing. It's highly data-driven. They actually look at clever type dashboards all the time. They look at you know what's happening, who responded, et cetera. Let me give an example. right let Let's say you know the ability for humans to look at data and respond to it is, of course, lagged by a bitch.
AI in CleverTap: Assistance Over Automation
01:12:45
Speaker
We are 24 hours on the dashboard and we are looking at things. right So there are some things in Kravata. One of the things is called Intelli node. They can actually put in a customer journey and say, ah but I do not know what message is going to work. I do not know which channel is going to work. I do not know what is the time delay. Should I wait two hours, three hours, 30 minutes? Who knows? So I will experiment with this.
01:13:08
Speaker
but solve for this particular metric. So in the time delay for example, solve for conversion. That means people should come and convert, like they should buy more, right? Or they should engage with this piece of video that I have. Some movie trailer is there, like they should go watch the trailer to the end of it, right?
01:13:26
Speaker
after they were looking at tickets, for example. like Let's say you want to do that. So there is a capability called Intelli node that you can plug into CleverTap and it will automatically optimize it. It's a continuous evaluation. So the technical term for that is called a multi-amp bandit.
01:13:41
Speaker
It's a data science, it's an AI feature, but behind the scenes, it's continuously evaluating that. So, but run by that human puts that thing and says, let's ah use this. So we, as a platform, as CleverTap, we provide a lot of AI, non-AI building blocks like you know to our customers who then put it all together and and run this thing and do it. Do you just need to be like a prompt engineer to use CleverTap or do you need specialized training? or like Yeah you don't I mean by but the way prompt engineering is a specialized training so they're not like the things that we type on charge GPT is not problem I mean that's the CAT CAD, BAT bad kind of prompt engineering right there is like some serious amount of prompt engineering. In CleverTap you can get by by just you know like playing around with the product.
01:14:31
Speaker
In most cases, as the company, we come and provide you training. So if you're an enterprise in the retail industry, we'll tell you how to integrate the catalog. We'll tell you best practices, what do others in your field, what we have seen like, you know, best across the board. We'll give you some comparables.
01:14:50
Speaker
I will also encourage your team and your staff to go take up some CleverTap University courses. So to democratize this, like you know like we have made this available in the in the product itself, you can go sign for sign up for it and you can get CleverTap certified. And of course, people who get are certified know a bit more of how to effectively use the product than the others.
01:15:10
Speaker
ah But I've seen this you know since we've been in India for about close to 11 years, um I've seen a lot of people you know who have prior experience of using the product get hired into other jobs like know so that they know how to set it up and run it. Yeah, so it's become like say Salesforce. Salesforce has a developer community. Correct.
01:15:33
Speaker
when a company wants to implement Salesforce, they first need to find somebody who's already like a Salesforce developer or administrator or whatever. Okay. Got it. Got it. That is correct. Yes. And apart from that, we have a lot of videos. We have the hu how-to guides. In fact, there is one thing that we've, it's been like what, six months, we have shifted in the product. In the dashboard itself, there is a ask.
01:15:55
Speaker
ah widge If you click on the ask widget and in that sense, you can now prompt, like you can write whatever you want. Like, hey, how do I improve the funnels, like, you know, conversion of my funnels in this purchase journey? And you can even plug it numbers. You can do some things and it'll tell you the answer. Like, you know, have you tried doing this? Have you tried localizing the message? Have you tried, you know, like whatever control group or some experiment? So you can now talk to it like a good friend and come up with answers.
01:16:24
Speaker
Okay. So the future of Clarota would essentially be this multi-armed bandit, which use like essentially autopilot mode. Like I am responsible for increasing your customer lifetime value. Don't worry about it. Like I will decide messaging everything. Like, like is that the future or ah do you think you will always need humans in the loop?
01:16:49
Speaker
Let me ask you a reverse question. actually like Let's say you you and I have known each other for a few years now. right like Let's say I send you a message. Would you be comfortable having some sort of a chatbot or whatever? like you Auto to respond to Anand without you looking at the message?
01:17:04
Speaker
No, not at all. Exactly, right? So a lot of people are very uncomfortable letting AI fully run their business, right? It's their business finally, and it's their customers. So what people want is, what we what the the framing of that is, it's called assistive. They want Someone to assist them in their daily operations remove them ah remove the repetitive remove the you know If there's some massive amount of data help us help me with the analysis of that if there is some big journey customer journey that is running Help me optimize the journey like you know remove the nodes that don't contribute to the to the conversion Percentages all that right, but I don't think so anyone of our customers and then I see our it does not mean current level of customers and
01:17:52
Speaker
It means the industries we serve is ready to let it run in an autopilot mode. They definitely want human supervision. In fact, some of our largest customers who have multiple business units, right? So imagine a large BFSI customer, multiple business units, they want governance at a per business unit level.
01:18:13
Speaker
So if if one company has, I don't know, 25 business in it, they do not want every business in it to send a message said at 9 AM to that same user. They want to rate control that. Who sends a message? Who approves it? ah Is it according to a brand guideline? A variety of other other things, right? So a business or running a business is very complex. And if this is the tool that lets you communicate with your users, then you want to be extra careful of what goes out.
01:18:40
Speaker
but wouldn't and This imperative to be extra careful of what goes out make you want to have less humans in the loop.
01:18:49
Speaker
ah Less humans, yes, because it's, ah you know, it's assisted. But final control, like, you know, what goes out, like, you know, I will drop the message, e etc. you Of course, there is always budget. And when I say budget, I don't mean money budget, like, you know, a mindset budget for experimentation, right? Can I use Gen AI to create an image? And, you know, like, you know, we recently saw one of the largest food delivery apps saying that we are not going to use Gen AI to create an image, because what Gen AI creates might not match up with actual product.
01:19:18
Speaker
Yes. Right. There you go. Large food delivery company saying that we are not going to use NAI. It's a big thing, right? What says, just read that description and create an image. Like you're so simple, man. And I know this because in birth, when I was telling you earlier, like, you know, we used to send photographers to take images of food and the restaurant. So you still need to do that step.
01:19:40
Speaker
There's also the problem of guardrails, right? In anything that's AI, I think the more regulated you are, the more guardrails you want. You don't want anyone to talk to your chatbot and somehow convince you to underwrite something that you're not ready to underwrite or sell you a product that you're not ready to sell. right So i I've heard with some of the largest that they they are not ready to use, of course they want to, everyone wants any AI, everyone wants to use AI, but they're not ready to roll it out in production just because of the risks involved in that.
CleverTap's Comprehensive Marketing Platform
01:20:12
Speaker
you know farda Marketeer, can you just talk about what the MarTech industry is like? What are the different types of tools which are available? And in that matrix of tools, where is CleverTap? And what are the other tools which go together? And you know, just like give me a vano one-on-one on MarTech.
01:20:34
Speaker
It is a pretty clouded space. How is that for a start? There are many, many, many, many many tools, right? There are ah web tools, there are mobile tools, there are voice tools and so on and so forth, right? So, if you if broadly if you ask me like Anand of these things, how are they divided, you know, how do they think of themselves?
01:20:57
Speaker
So there are the analytics players. They only do product analytics. They don't know anything else. There is no messaging. There is no any of the other stuff, right? Then there are email vendors. Some of them are examples names also, like what would be that? Of course, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. yeah yeah So analytics players are like players like mix panel, amplitude. Then you have Google Analytics, Omniture, et cetera, right? They are just pure play analytics. Most of them are bought by product managers who want to sit and analyze data.
01:21:26
Speaker
So, even if you notice there is a drop-off happening, there is no way to message those people, which means you require some sort of a messaging tool now, right? And messaging tools come in various shapes and forms. There are the email messaging tools, right? The likes of MRSes and others, right? Responses and others, right?
01:21:47
Speaker
Male chimp would be an SMB tool, yeah. the These are some of the higher end, right? In fact, male chimp is not even connected to any analytics, right? You just upload a list of people. See, if you're running a cake shop, a neighborhood deli, like, you know, upload a list of people and just tell them, hey, what new kinds of cakes in my shop, right? Or there's a Valentine's Day thing going on or whatever, right?
01:22:08
Speaker
So there are mail providers, like you know mail messaging. Then there are companies that provide SMS. So if you realize realize this, like Twilio just ah IPO-ed in the, I mean, not just IPO, but the IPO just on the power of SMS, right? And then they acquired companies like ah SendGrid and Segment.
01:22:26
Speaker
for the rest of the capabilities. So you can go and even in India, some of the oldest players like Netcode, Value First, etc. are SMS providers and then they branch on into other things, maybe SMS and email in some cases and so on and so forth. So it's kind of hard, what I'm trying to get to is as if it's not hard enough to run one business, very hard to do everything together.
01:22:48
Speaker
Then there are some segmentation players who call themselves a CDP, right so segment, M-particle, some others like that, that say we are a CDP and we will put all this data into us and we will help you segment ah people into multiple groups. um There are WhatsApp providers, likes of GUPSHAP, Netcore, we are a WhatsApp provider as well that that do WhatsApp messaging. The recommendation engines, the recommendation engines for retail,
01:23:16
Speaker
Some of the names are like Bloom Reach in the US is unboxed and we ship a recommendation engine also. And so and so I can go on and on. There's all sorts of players. like What we do differently from everyone else is to provide this one platform fully integrated end to end.
01:23:37
Speaker
that you can use for everything from analytics to segmentation to personalizing all messages, automating all the messaging across all channels, whether it's a WhatsApp, email, SMS, WhatsApp.
01:23:51
Speaker
doing an A-B testing or there are A-B testing players also. right so Our product likes to do A-B testing on the web, on the mobile. you know Those companies that only do A-B testing are companies like Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely. Those do A-B testing and there are many others like that. well Then there are companies that let you do remote config, like LaunchDarkly, others.
01:24:13
Speaker
in with But with CleverTap, you can do all of this in one product, which means it's very easy to measure the cause and effect. For example, if you saw a spike in unsubscribes or uninstalls at 11am,
01:24:28
Speaker
and you are the product guy and you're like, what the hell happened, man? Why is everyone uninstalling my app? It's very easy for you to go to a correlation in the product to say, ah, we sent a message to everyone know at 10.30 AM and that caused this spike. And that was just like a senseless blast of message. like you know We should have been more careful. We should have done it with a smaller group of people and so on and so forth. right So the correlation or the recommendation that you shipped Is it causing people to try out undiscovered products? right Because that as a part of the configuration of recommendation, you said, well, newer products, because there is there's no precedence of anyone buying that new product. right So how will you recommend something that's never been bought by anyone before? like So those kind of things. So the cause and effect becomes ah easy. All of the messaging that you do to see how many people came back, opened it. you know So how many were qualified? how many were
01:25:24
Speaker
delivered how many open, viewed, clicked, and finally transacted. All of this in one product. So that's the USP. It's the hardest thing to do like you know because there is no other product that's like us that does everything end to end. Even some of the largest that do this um actually do this through customer the two companies that they've acquired. So if you look at the Adobe's and Salesforce's of the world, there are multiple companies or Oracle's of the world, the multiple companies that they acquired But these are separate companies, right separate products. We're the only truly fully integrated product that does this end to end.
01:26:01
Speaker
ah
01:26:04
Speaker
how how would you and like you know the I'm a little skeptical about how could you be good at so many things. The traditional wisdom is focus leads to excellence.
01:26:16
Speaker
um say something as simple as email, like ensuring a high deliverability rate would be something that a focused email service provider would have worked many years on to ensure that the deliverability rate of the email platform is high. Whereas for you, email is maybe 5% of your feature set. I mean, there would be like 19 other features beyond email.
01:26:41
Speaker
so would you So would you offer a good enough experience or would you offer an excellent experience in all of these features? That's something I'm wondering. Yeah, I think... um i See, the other thing that that's a little risky for us is to get slaughtered as a mid-market product like a Swiss army knife. right You would not use a Swiss army knife.
01:27:04
Speaker
to cut vegetables at home. It's good to carry it on a camping trip. yeah You never know what you'll end up using. But for us, with software, it is actually power it's actually possible to ship a Swiss Army knife that's very good at cutting vegetables too. right For example, our email traffic has grown quarter by quarter. It's doubled actually quarter by quarter for the last four quarters. And we look forward to doubling at this quarter, Q4.
01:27:27
Speaker
for us right and why so because for the I would say for the longest time I assume that this is the last decade of email, emails going to die right and not as clever tap even back prior to that. Email continues to live. Yes. Right. So we said if you can't beat them join them.
01:27:45
Speaker
So last three last two and a half years, I've been making significant investments in email, which was traditionally a neglected channel for us, and India who really sells emails, right? But as you go to the more mature markets like North America, Europe, people do send emails. And if you go to more traditional industries in India, right like BFSI segment for sure, they send emails to you, right?
01:28:09
Speaker
So we invested in email and that's showing the results, right like doubling the traffic every doubling the volume of emails sent out. um And you're right, like you know it's it's very hard to kind of not it's hard to focus on all these areas. right The only way to do that is actually to create the product organization. And I say this because I'm the CPO.
01:28:29
Speaker
that has specific pods that just work on this capability. like I have a team that just works on WhatsApp. I have a team that just works on email. I have a team that just works on analytics. right So for them, they operate like a mini company.
01:28:43
Speaker
within the company, they have only one metric line and two to measure ah you know the adoption of that specific thing in a customer's usage. right are the my customers are Whatever we are shipping, are my customers using it or not? I think that becomes important. So we have seen, and of course, I have no prizes for guessing, I run a real-time dashboard to see customer adoption across the board. So we slice it by geography.
01:29:09
Speaker
slice it by the size of the customer, slice it by the vertical of the customer, whether it's ah a retailer versus a financial services versus quick commerce, and so on and so forth. And that's how we measure. And for the segment that is not adopting, we go back and learn from them. like What did we miss? like you know They're like, oh, in our industry, like you know there is this thing.
01:29:27
Speaker
which is a little different than the rest of your customers. Like, okay, no problem. We'll take that feedback and we'll go and prove it. but So for the last 11 years, I think we've managed to ship something that's very good across the entire range of the spectrum of capabilities. Okay. Amazing. um Okay. So last bit of like ah digging I want to do is on go to market. Let's start first. Tell me what kind of ARR are you at? Ballpark.
01:29:57
Speaker
or what will you add? Yeah, yeah I'd say close to 100 is what I want to put on it. $100 million. Oh, wow. Phenomenal. OK. So you you would probably be at a unicorn valuation whenever you raise next, right? At $100 million. Yeah, ah yeah well, it depends whether we raise. I think we are in a comfortable position right now that we may not have to raise. OK, OK.
01:30:22
Speaker
So, tell me that journey of reaching 100 million ARR, like that, you know, from the first customer to what practices you built to, you know, make go-to-market efficient, what you learned about go-to-market, how do you sell to enterprise clients? Because you're not selling to SMEs, you're selling to like Fortune 500 companies, how do you sell to them? You know, I'd love to learn your insights in this space.
01:30:47
Speaker
Sorry, one quick correction. is We don't only sell to enterprises. In fact, I run as product, Clavita for startups, where you can start for as low as $50 a month. You can sign up. There is no annual commitment. So for all the early state startups, whether you're funded or not, you can go sign up and you can get started with Clavita. And of course, on the other end of the spectrum are large companies.
01:31:08
Speaker
telecom operators, banks, et cetera, that pay us a few million dollars. i mean But I'll tell you the journey, right? The type of your revenue would be enterprise, right? like ah Yeah. I mean, we are at heart an enterprise company, I'd say, but for the younger startups, like you know i have in fact, I'll tell you one of the two of the largest Genicon plus plus companies in India actually started as clever type of startups customers, like you know paying us $50 a month.
01:31:36
Speaker
but Yeah, so it it works, right? You never know like know who's going to make it to the to the next level.
Stealth Mode to Market Launch
01:31:42
Speaker
So i think you know for the first so we started CleverTap in 2013 and for the first 30 months of our startup life, we were busy building this Tesseract DB. We believed so strongly in this vision.
01:31:56
Speaker
that there has to be like a you can't like half asset like you have to build it fully and along the way we were doing some I can call it three pilots with some friendlies right like free charge back in the days and then book by show so two three free again like I know both the founders and I told them you know like this might We might you know like not make it to the other side. So try it at your risk. But you if you make it, it's going to be something good and wonderful. And they agreed to do the pilot. So first three bootstraps, the first three years? No, no. Actually, we raised the capital. So in fact, within the first year, as we were doing a pilot with Book My Show,
01:32:41
Speaker
Ashish sent a message to Axel to check us out and then we got on a phone call and we spoke technology. We did not quite understand things like go to market and others like know we learned that on the job. We are technologists so we spoke about in memory database and columnar vector storage and bit compression and those kind of topics and they got interested because They grilled us, but they got interested. So we raised capital la gura seed round from them, $1.6 million dollars in 2014. And in 2015, we raised the CVZ from Sequoia, now peak 15. So we were well-funded, I would say, but we never wanted to ship like something that's half. So I use this analog analogy, including in the town hall as well, right in company town halls. I don't want to ship a car with two wheels.
01:33:34
Speaker
because no matter where you put them, but it's not going to work, right? So you need like, if you're shipping a scooter or a motorcycle, two wheels is good. If you're shipping a car, and I said, told you, right? Like we we do the entire range of things. We wanted to build this properly. ah So it took us like about three years. And then we started selling. and the art So one being in stealth for like three years is was not it still is not in fashion.
01:34:02
Speaker
So we bucked that trend. The second thing we did was a conventional business was, hey, build in India and sell to the West. And again, it didn't make any sense from a first principles perspective. Why do we build it here and sell halfway across the world when we can just sell it here? It's not that the Indian apps look different than the ones in the US, right? It's not that the Indian consumers or the companies that are built differently than the ones in the US.
01:34:29
Speaker
so It was only natural for us to say, we don't really buy the theory of, you know, building here, selling to the west. We'll sell here. And we actually started selling here. It took off, like the product took off. So the day ah we launched, like we came out, like, you know, we put up a website and all, is when I started showing the product around. And some of my earliest customers that signed up were Zomato, Jio, Book My Show, Urban Company, and Tracto.
01:35:00
Speaker
I'm very happy to report. They still are my customers. like so what they So they've been also part of the ride drag for the last eight years after we went out. So 2016 is when we launched. And and then of course we we started like expanding rapidly in India. I think the market was was waiting for a product like this. See, it is there is one thing to have a theory around certain things like, oh, if you put it all together, analytics inside this, that, it'll all work. right And the other thing is to actually feel the validation in the market, ah not because your friends told you that this is a great idea, but because people start paying dollars for that. right but You can start invoicing them. That is the moment of truth. So for us, that was an amazing moment of truth that, you know hey, they're using all of the product, not just parts of it.
01:35:46
Speaker
um And then we started like the natural expansion for us was countries like Southeast Asia and the Middle East, right? We are three founders, so we sent Sunil back to the US. So he, in 2015, he ended up in the in the Bay Area again. And we said, why don't you go there and you start establishing a beachhead with some of the customers, right? So he started throwing the product around. and We tasted some very early success, and not as much as we were seeing it in India, but some early success with some smaller startups.
01:36:16
Speaker
So we were firing on all cylinders.
01:36:21
Speaker
2019, we raised two rounds of capital back to back, one in
01:36:28
Speaker
One in April, series B, which saw Tiger Global come in as a part of the cap table. And then we had around C in October that year in ready because we were firing on all cylinders. We are growing massively. We had set up a Latin America office that we are signing up customers there. We had a Europe office and we were ready to press the pedal to grow even faster.
01:36:53
Speaker
And of course we know what happened. 60 million dollars you raised in 2019 in these two rounds. 2019 was 76 in total. 76 million dollars. Wow. In total. like Why did you raise so much money? Did you actually need it or it was that if it's coming then let's take it? No, no. we we i mean My school of thought is do not over capitalize yourself because yeah because you will go spend it. like You know those stupid things, right?
01:37:23
Speaker
and Talk to investors only when you're ready to raise. like you know Sorry, this might sound a little controversial, but do not go and hang around and unless you're ready to raise around. right Use the time to focus on your customers, your product, your market, and everything else, right your employees. The reason we raised is because we were ready to step on the accelerator. See, a lot had changed between the first the series B and series C. In fact, we were growing so we were doing the triple, triple, triple. That means we're going 3X every year.
01:37:53
Speaker
every year, right? So that that and you know that's like hyper growth. And in 2019, we had raised in the anticipation of growing big in the US and Europe and other markets like outside of India. India, we were doing fairly well. And how much was the revenue in 2019? Do recall? Rough.
01:38:16
Speaker
Single digit, million dollars types, I guess. No, no, we were double digit for sure. Like, no. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, you were going for like this triple, triple, triple, triple. This triple, triple, triple comes from, I think there's this famous formula for B2B SaaS businesses for them to reach unicorn valuation, your triple, triple, triple first three years, and then double, double next two years. Correct. You're right. Absolutely right. Yeah. So we were going to multiple triple. 2020 of course, COVID happened. and and And then, you know, we got the Black Swan one more like, you know, that this is the world has never seen this conserve capital. And then we had to pull back, right. um So we, we go, we started going a little, but not a little, but we slowed down massively other investments in product and go to market and everything.
01:39:05
Speaker
We were still growing. We were still good. And of course, we tied it out the COVID wave. Again, please understand, a lot of my customers got hit with lockdowns. So if you're in the food delivery business, if you're in the event ticketing business, if you're in the travel financial services business, travel business, all of this came to a grounding halt. And when these customers are also growing along with us, when all of this came to a grounding halt, naturally they would come to us and say, hey, we can't pay the bills.
01:39:35
Speaker
So we had to thankfully, because of the two but rounds of fundraise, we were able to absorb some of the chalk. So it was good in that sense, right? We type we we we wrote that out. In 2022, we had and a good opportunity to acquire one of our largest competitors in the US, a company called Linplum.
Acquisition and Global Expansion
01:39:56
Speaker
So we went for it like you know on three three assumptions or three points. like you know Number one was that you know hey they have some extremely good logos in the US and Europe. So as the market recovers, we can you know we we will have ah like a higher like ground up. We'll have a good launching point for these brands. So let's do that. The second point was that they had a phenomenal technology i Productively testing, et cetera. They'll begin to gaming. So we'll acquire gaming customers. We'll acquire gaming technology and all that. ah Gaming, so to say, is decision-proof. Good or bad times, people you know like people who are gamers, they they play games. right So we said it's a good thing. And the third thing was like a phenomenal team that we inherited. We had an opportunity to speak with some of the team members as a part of the transaction, before closing the transaction. And we found an amazing depth of talent.
01:40:54
Speaker
and we went ahead and acquired them. We closed the deal in June of 2022. How much did you acquire them for? It's undisclosed right now, but it' so it was mostly stock and a little bit of cash. It was from accruals. We did not raise capital for that. Separately, we also raised capital of series D from CDPQ and IIFL.
01:41:20
Speaker
with others participating. I can see he has raised 172 million dollars over its lifetime. So this must have been like a distress sale, really good deal kind of a situation. The COVID. Yeah, I think COVID never were hit badly. Some of the technology choices they had made. So while the product was good, the engine, like again, go back to Tesseract DB, right? The reason why we wrote that The engine was not as performant. like They were using a third party. They were using Google managed services. It was not as it was not very cost efficient. right so with the As they grew, the costs also grew.
01:42:03
Speaker
leaves me little money on the table for you to kind of get back, right? And at some point in time that scaling stopped, like, you know, the customers just left them. So they were, I could not, yeah, they were in a bad time and we acquired them. You know, we, again, for us, it was not like ah that this company is available for cheap, but we had outlined the reasons that we acquired them for, right? Better technology, access to good customers and a phenomenal technology team.
01:42:26
Speaker
um So that went through, we acquired them. Series D happened, CDPQ and IAF are coming in, others participating. a question about this lead term How much revenue has Leanplum added to you over the, can you attribute like Leanplum boosted our revenue by X million dollars in the last one or two years?
01:42:48
Speaker
I think when we got them, they were at $20 million. dollars After that, it's kind of hard because it's, you know, if you mix two jugs of water, like you don't know which one is which, right? It's hard to attribute. We don't count it separately now. They would have like doubled your revenue or increased it by another 50% or something like that. Less than 50%, I would say. Got it. Yeah. So we got that and it is capital. And again, we're back to the, we're back growing again. So this is the last two years. A billion dollar round you raised.
01:43:23
Speaker
so the $105 million, I believe, $8.22. What was the reason for this? like but do you What do you want to use these funds for? Yeah, one of them was like ah we realized that the better technology like that we offer right can actually go, we can do a land grab. There's a lot of hungry customers in the market like you know who are underserved.
01:43:51
Speaker
Uh, just because, you know, whatever they're using is archaic, like, you know, is, is we can, we can do a replacement cycle with them. Uh, so when you do that, you have a lot of opportunity for, even mean you have an opportunity for a global expansion, right? And when you expand globally, you need the money, uh, to do some of these things, right? Um, and, uh, the second thing was, uh, you know, we were growing as a team, like one of the expenses and all that. So we had to like, uh, get that capital. Okay.
01:44:18
Speaker
Right. And I think we got good investors, you know, some who can back us ah up for a long period of time. And this was probably the last days that we did. So that's the reason we raised 105. I was assuming you still have money in the bank. There's no rush to raise another round. Correct. Correct. That's right. Yes. And how many quarters till you become EBITDA positive?
01:44:43
Speaker
yeah actually going to become very quickly like I don't have the exact number but you know we are in that direction right so now it is always a fine balance between should we invest or should we like focus on the unit economics I would say the more I read on um The more I talk to investors and I read on some blogs and all that, like you know the world is divided into profitability versus growth. At least in the past, it was very clear growth. now it's it's So I think we keep talking about this. We keep discussing this internally. We are going to get some good, sustainable growth. right That lets us very quickly switch to profit in the near term.
01:45:28
Speaker
okay how how do you ah you know How do you actually acquire enterprise customers? like what is How long is that sales cycle? What kind of approaches work when acquiring and enterprise customers? so Yeah, so multiple things. One is you call the, the so we have on ground teams in all the geographies that we operate in. So which is the field team sales, um that is one channel.
01:45:58
Speaker
The second thing is on the marketing, I mean, on even on the sales side, like know we have partners local partners, their technology partners, system integrators, the GSI, global system integrators, like large companies, et cetera, through which- EY, like these kind of- Correct. Like Deloitte and et cetera, that also helped us out with some of these things, like through which you jointly go pitch to a customer and then you go sign them up. like On the marketing side, we run events. like you know So the regional marketing team runs several events across the globe. These are industry events. Sometimes you go participate in another event. We do online marketing, s SCM. The usual thing, like you know that any enterprise company does the usual stuff to do this. Plus, i like I said, I i i run the CleverTap for startups initiative through which also we have a very healthy rate of signups like now for future unicorns.
01:46:56
Speaker
but right i right okay okay mean ah Let me end with like a slightly generic question. oh you know What's your advice to founders who are starting up now today in 2024 or who aspire to start up today?
01:47:14
Speaker
I think ah jump on it like you know either ways you are going to come out rich with experience it's a hard journey so don't expect any sudden increases in wealth or fame or any of the things you don't do entrepreneurship for that you do it to actually solve a specific pain point and that becomes your mission in more of a life. On the business side of things, I think keep an eye on sustainable growth, like that is a must have for this, for the new world of today. What is the unique opportunities today in 2024 with availability of Gen AI on tap? What do you think are some um mega trends where there is opportunity for people to build businesses in?
01:48:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think Gen AI levels the playing field for everyone. right like Internet did, like know when I was selling moderns. The more people had internet, like so there was no arbitrage opportunity. The opportunity you have is to actually go disrupt traditional businesses right that are not using or digitalizing Gen AI.
01:48:20
Speaker
Now, how can you go build solutions for the underserved industries? right I think a lot of this is not, again, like this is my personal opinion, is problems that you personally see. It is not because you one day wake up and say, okay, I'm going to disrupt this industry. So don't be the entrepreneur that wants to just do it for the heck of doing it. Do it because you personally faced a problem or you understand a field very deeply for you to go change it.
01:48:46
Speaker
ah So that is very, very important. Everything that I've done in my life is based on this thing. I will not randomly go and do something just because it's a big opportunity. so You are in the camp that entrepreneurship should be loved marriage, not arranged marriage.
01:49:01
Speaker
Yeah, because you're going to live if with it. Assuming in the latter, like there is no love. So you have to live with it for the rest of your life. right ah You have to every day hire, which means you have to go transfer your enthusiasm to other people. You have to bring them into the fold, like you know on the mission. ah You have to go talk to investors. You have to go sell every day. So how will you do that if you don't have the passion for this? right And passion comes from feeling it in your heart like, OK, this is the problem. I want to go pursue. And I want to solve it once and for good.
01:49:32
Speaker
Thank you so much for your time Anand, it was a real pleasure. Akshay as always man, pleasure talking to you as well.