Private, Bootstrapped, & Profitable: How Rajesh Jain Scaled to Over $100M As a Solo Founder

the future of email marketing is and I said no way and he said no it is and I said prove it and then he showed me some some things and I said you have to show that on stage on that note please tell me welcome to Stage Rees Jane from netor did I get that right that's how that's how it happened that's how it happened take a seat so um this guy is if you go to India and you ask around and you say who was like the first big sort of software internet entrepreneur

in India many people people will say Rees Jane because you launched India World in '98 launched it in ' 95 95 sold it in '99 this is sorry for doing this how many of you were born after 1995 there there you go the front row there we go all right you sold it then for what 116 million 99 yeah 115 115 million 99 um you then took all that money did you plow a bunch of that right into net core immediately no netore actually I didn't put in too much money

because first 10 years we were too small not growing and then we did something right we basically started email and SMS Marketing in India and those just turned out cash so it's just perfect I didn't have to put much money in this was so we're looking at your Revenue graph right now 2003 you get going it was 2008 was that like your first million dollar year maybe yeah around that time around that time what started working really well like 2013 2018 we're going to 15 so two things happened 2013 uh 2018 2008 to 13 basically the

email SMS Revenue started growing very rapidly until 20 8 we are doing some random stuff which wasn't making us any money okay um you know when you sell a company you think you can you're like God's gift to the world so you you think anything everything will work didn't happen um and your wife reminded you of that right absolutely yeah um you got that on video somewhere I do I do have that on video 2018 we also did around that time we did two things first is to

the email SMS and we sell to b2c companies um mid to large sized companies we added marketing automation with a customer engagement piece and then we also started growing internationally mhm so we started expanding from India to Southeast Asia Middle East uh not yet the us at that time but that helped us essentially diversify both the product side and the Geo side spend a minute talking about your product strategy then the net core marketing Cloud so actually if you think

about it the the real problem that businesses have is if you ask why are b2c businesses not more profitable and the real answer is that most of those profits or some of those profits are basically on the balance sheets of big adtech Google and meta I mean in many cases they're in a CA trap where the cost of customer acquisition is going up much faster than their revenues so where netor comes in is basically saying that look we can help you do more with your

existing customers so it's a full stack where we have the communication channels email SMS WhatsApp RCS and all of that and then you also have the marketing automation piece the customer engagement so the journeys Etc the personalization bit and then we added search and product Discovery to it through an acquisition MH so full stack hopefully you guys are sort of grounded now on what Rees is building netc core.com if you want to follow along on your laptops we tried to

map this full space right so I start off by just saying let me just do the bottom left of what you see on the screen here but then when I posted it on LinkedIn people said no no no you can't just talk about newsletters if you talk about email marketing I talk about cpass and Omni Channel and walk me through are mean are these the right buckets how do you think about email marketing in general see email marketing has been around for 20 25 years now there are different types there is the API based email marketing so C pass bottom C pass just use the API and send things out uh

newsletters use so substack Etc they will send out uh anyone running a Blog will have newsletters going out upper upper right right campaign monitor clearly there then you have for smbs uh basically the the sort of integrated marketing stack like MailChimp yeah essentially for the small midsize businesses um then you have the Omni Channel which is where sort of netcode plays yep mid to large sized companies

so brace sort of clavio U message bird CCH all of them are there uh and then you have sort of the Omni Channel and the CRM bit where email fits in as part of a multi Channel communication strategy because the customers are on different channels this is the bottom right here these are the big guys right these are the m&a players in the space yeah and but they are all Legacy you so Oracle Etc they had bought these email esps about 10 years ago mhm so you have now a new age of companies and there's a

lot of interesting stuff happening in email of course which we'll talk about which I showed you y uh which I think can be transfered because in the US for e-commerce companies 20 to 40% revenue is coming from email so the push messages that we get that's the only way for pretty much the only way for them other than maybe SMS to bring customers back to their website or app where they do the transactions and that world is about to change MH and the reason SAS open is beautiful is that statement directly contradicts what arena from

hoot kicked us off saying jenz is not looking at emails they ignore push notifications right it just tells you there's a way to do there's different ways to do everything and different things work for different people but this is working for e-commerce Brands it's working for you so much so that you said wow over the first I guess 15 years how much how much did your bank balance like cash in your bank did you build up to so we built it up to about 100 million in by 2020 no outside Capital didn't raise outside profits profits okay so you're sitting there looking you know I'm I'm refreshing my Chase account

you're like whoa that's a lot of digits uh you say what do I do with all this money and you say you know what let's bet it all let's spend 100 million bucks cash to go acquire unbox why'd you do this deal so so couple of reasons one is we wanted to look at adjacencies we want first we want to do a large deal we done a couple of small tucks where you sort of add on to the tech but that's not as exciting as a larger deal which can do which did two things for us number one

is gave us a complimentary product which we can sell into the same uh marketing department so unboxed uh does search and product Discovery so competitors include algolia Bloom reach Constructor so you can sort of place them there and it also gave us a presence in the US market now for a company like ours primarily India southeast Asia Emerging Markets it's very hard building an organic presence uh uh organic base and organic growth in the US and that's

where unboxed came in so at one shot we got about 200 plus customers whom we could potentially cross- sell our products to mhm now people can see your m&a strategy going down the left side of the screen you're not just buying companies like unbox you just bought a mtek Services Agency why would a SAS company buy a service these are some of them are just Investments okay so what happens is when we go to our customers in fact this is I think very important in SAS I think and I'm seeing this coming up again and again what at least mid to large-sized companies are saying

is we just don't want the platform add a thin Services layer so your platform becomes better and better every day it's what I call sort of Kaizen almost like the Japanese word continuous Improvement now as SAS companies most SAS companies are told not to get into services but the services layer actually can add a lot of stickiness so think of it as 80% SAS 20% services that thin layer I think can make accounts much more stickier especially when you're going to the mid to large- sized businesses and

you're getting paid for it and you're getting paid for it this is a good trade and you also learn because customers are more willing to now tell you what are their problems because they want them solved and they don't necessarily have the internal teams I mean look at what is a typical adoption of most SAS platforms 30 40% topical what adoption adop adop 30 40% so that's the big challenge that I think an investment in a Services Company helps us solve that they can basically take over because the DNA is

different they can help with Services Revenue keeps growing you know I get you on the phone you say Okay Nathan your six buckets look good for email marketing your team was very nice and then it was supposed to be a 15minute call it turns into an hourong call of you going this amp is the future amp is the future I'm going I don't know what the hell amp is I'm pretty good in SAS what is amp and why is this the future of email Market marketing so amp is let me just hold on so I don't feel stupid raise your hand if you have no idea what amp is please somebody okay all right now teach us so probably many of you all

know amp for mobile Pages this is amp for email uh now what amp does so basically it's a Google tech Google and Yao both support it with with Gmail I'm going to give the visual first right this is this is what if you see this in your inbox it's being driven by amp so the idea is that you can do all the actions inside the email and I think that's a game Cher for b2c not as much for B2B because it right now works on Gmail IDs and Yoo IDs but if you're

selling if your customers are selling to b2c uh the removal of the friction of the clickthrough to a website or app I mean we have seen five times 10 times increases in actions uh and just look at our own behavior you know when you see an email you got to click through how many times we do it but if you can now collect first party data Etc all inside the ma uh you can do gamification inside the mail ask questions do run surveys in newsletters right inside the mail and

show the results in place uh you see the spin the wheel Etc all of these I think become great uh foundations for what I call sort of channels 2.0 the push channels which are there so email is just uh uh email is changing with amp and then there's WhatsApp coming in well hold on before we move on from that if these folks just want to get like a crash course and like how do I use amp and my email marketing what should they go search on Google okay so amp. is a good starting site but it's a bit outdated if you go to netcor cloud.com

amp we have a lot of use cases spam netcor cloud.com um or just U email me and I'll send you lot of when you first showed me this what I thought is if I got something like this in my email inbox it feels gimmicky and I don't know if I would engage but look you're showing these results and you're showing the engagement is there and and I'm also thinking like will this render on my phone in Gmail how do you handle all these issues so the good news is that

there is no downside that in case so it works in the Gmail app it will not work on the iOS native app okay the native mail app that's there yep so it works on Android works on um iOS amp works on the browser so I'd say about 60 70% of customers typically uh would be able to see the amp interactivity number one second is there's no downside because in case the amp doesn't show up the fallback mail does you're typically

sending two emails the fallback mail the regular email and the amp mail and the male client Gmail or Y will decide uh which one basically to show now you're just to just to talk more about because I don't want people to see this and think this is gimmicky it's not the future I thought the same thing on our call and so I asked you some questions how many emails are being sent via netcor monthly today so we send out about 35 billion emails a month a a month a month it's a monthly number what percent of India's total email is that

that's a small percentage okay uh my guess is you have probably two or 3% of the emails going up it's a big number oh yeah massive big number so it's it's I mean if you think about it there are about four five billion email IDs in the world each one's getting roughly 20 five to 10 emails a day it's almost a trillion marketing emails going out marketing transactional all kinds insane so look India I would say is probably ahead of us in terms of e-commerce in terms of the states of of using things like this so how do we translate these

e-commerce use cases to SAS Founders right how could they use a spin the wheel or a you know a tell us what you like yeah for SAS uh Founders if you're sending to B2B that's a problem mhm and there's an alternative to amp which works in um in Apple email called CSS so it's not uh the sort of full functionality but you can have I I think the best place to use it is form fills M so some of the activities which you're doing on the landing page can actually be brought like we're seeing here is actually a good example could do this

for your SAS business yeah so you can do it the thing is that once you do the submit it'll take you to a landing page on CSS but capture the data but the user has the customer has entered the data right in the email without the friction of the click through yeah and in amp you don't even have to go to the landing page the landing page is inside the email so for if you have customers who are b2c customers you know for shopping for searching inside email even collecting payments I mean we have companies uh in India for mutual funds collecting those uh what they call Sip

in India systematic invest monthly pay payments for for funds all of that's now happening inside email and the the game changer really is that this whole the the clickthrough friction which always hindered uh uh email ctrs now that goes away imagine if ctrs go up 5x 10x what does that do for brands that really helps them build deeper better hotlines for for with their own

customers get more first more zero party data do better personalization so just to give you guys an example how we're going to test this right we're specifically going to do a use case just like this for founder path if you guys anyone been on a Founder path webinar before or seen one raise your hand High okay so we usually have send an email out teasing the content then you have to go to a landing page put your stuff and we're going to test effectively signing up people to join our webinars inside the email like this so you never have to leave and see if we get more people doing it versus sending them all to a landing page which webinar registration is a great use case we should well and

then we then will take all the we'll basically all these input field to the top we will then let's say AJ does it right and AJ says I'm doing a million of Revenue his birth date is this date he's male he's 37 years old we will then selectively use those merge fields and we'll say like on the webinar start time date two hours before start time we'll say Hey you know there's 120 other 37 year olds with a software company joining in two hours do you want to join so it's like subtle merge tags where it doesn't feel like we're just blasting merge tag Fields out to get a click through but it feels like you're talking

to somebody and in fact even in newsletters that you send out imagine doing surveys polls right inside the newsletter and then you uh if you're using amp then you can see the results right in place so amp dodev or netcor cloud.com netcor cloud.com .d is the Google site but it's a little outdated they don't update it who who Who's who's who's thinking they might try a test or you're just going to explore when you get home it's interesting right who knows if it's the future or not we'll see we're also doing

a bunch I mean our I'll just full transparency to everybody here we are really having trying to figure out how stand out and just email in general it's so busy um we've just started collecting mobile phone numbers and our mobile list like our whole Focus internally is growing our mobile list our SMS list you're also playing in this space briefly so what's very interesting now is that our interactions on mobile are also changing so SMS largely One Way MH now two innovations there WhatsApp you

know how many how many people use WhatsApp in the room okay there you go it's about almost half 100 million plus users in the US on WhatsApp that's probably about 30 40% of the adult population uh you can do so you can do WhatsApp shops you can do all kinds of things inside WhatsApp the next big upgrade is coming on SMS well hold on before we move on from WhatsApp one thing I'll say to when I interview Founders in India and I say how did you get your big weight list how do you get your community together they all say a a WhatsApp gr oh yeah I asked an American

founder the same thing they say slack so like what I will tell you is you are seeing incredibly f fast growing India companies that are building WhatsApp groups for their SAS businesses growing much faster than their us counterparts trying to drive everyone into a slack Channel anyone's got even a small International connect they will all be on WhatsApp yeah now what's also interesting is SMS is getting upgraded with RCS again RCS is from Google but it's being rolled out through operators

essentially on Android and uh Apple's going to support it so if you think about it email uh WhatsApp and RCS they are transforming the one-way push channels into basically becoming two-way end points for conversion yep I'm fired up I mean this is the OG of software in India $116 million exit goes all in on net core you know fools around for a little bit doesn't work and then 2013 starts to hit it he now believes the future of email marketing truly is sort

of this these embedded opt in forms inside of email to increase conversion rates 35 billion emails per month in India growing quickly bootstrapped 110 million bucks of Revenue making big bets we'll see big bets in the future check out his book profor please help me thank Rees Jane from netor thank you so much thank you