Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: While you were doing your political experiments, Netcore is still selling the two products – the SMS enterprise product and the email marketing product, right? That’s what Abhijit Saxena is executing on, right?

Rajesh Jain: From 2007-11, Abhijit was the CEO. In 2011, Girish Nair, who had come back from the US in 2005 and joined us as CEO. He then took over as the CEO from 2011 to 2014. All this time, the good thing was that email marketing in India was starting to grow rapidly. SMS was started. We were pretty much the only Indian company doing email. There were a couple of other smaller ones.

Sramana Mitra: Zoho was not selling in India at the time.

Rajesh Jain: Zoho did not have the email marketing platform.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, that’s right. It came later.

Rajesh Jain: That worked out pretty well for us because we strengthened our tech platform. The first goal for a SaaS company is typically to go global from India. That’s what all VCs tell their founders.

Unlike such SaaS companies, our growth was all pretty much India after the SMS and email platforms were done.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue level were you able to reach with that?

Rajesh Jain: So I think around 2014-15, we started doing a few million dollars a year.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. It’s recurring revenue, though. You’re on a subscription model.

Rajesh Jain: Both are actually on consumption basis, but pretty much it’s recurring. These were mid to large sized enterprises. We did not focus on the small businesses.

One learning which I had from my previous sort of failures was that in India, if you sell to small businesses, they expect the service level of a large business.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I know. Very, very high touch. We have this expression in Bengali, which translates as, “The soles of your shoes wear out by selling to SMEs in India.”

Rajesh Jain: Absolutely. So we’ve always stayed away from the sort of DIY small business. So our customers are typically mid-market to large enterprises in India. So, it’s very good steady revenue. Their customer base grew, and we also we started growing. Email was and still remains a very important platform.

In 2014-15, we still had these two and then we added more products to the portfolio.

Sramana Mitra: And in 2014-15, the revenue is still in the $2 million kind of range?

Rajesh Jain: It had probably reached the $5-$10 million range. We were we were doing a few billion SMS a month at that time and a lot of emails, of course. 

Till 2014-15, we were only in India. In 2014, Girish left and Kalpit Jain took over as CEO in 2015. Then we did two things. First is, we realized that email may not be there forever. So you need to think something beyond email. This is the feedback we started getting from people.

The second is that while India is great, India is still a drop in the ocean globally. You’ve got products which can potentially work outside of India.

So the two things we did was, we started building our marketing automation stack – segmentation, customer journey, the journey orchestration, etc. So, we’re moving up the ladder, up the stack from just the channels.

Sramana Mitra: You’re filling out the portfolio.

Rajesh Jain: Correct. These are all for B2C companies, not like the HubSpot types.

Sramana Mitra: Your enterprise customers were doing B2C marketing.

Rajesh Jain: Exactly. The second thing we did was we started looking outside of India. We expanded first to Southeast Asia because those were very similar regions.

Again, we made a couple of mistakes. We would try to work with partners locally and then we realized they don’t have skin in the game. Finally, we took the decision that we’re going to send people from India to the countries, and then they would basically hire local people and build up the teams there.

That really was the turning point for our international expansion to Southeast Asia and then Middle East. We expanded a few years down the line to Nigeria and most recently to South Africa. But the Southeast Asian regions actually gave us very good add on business.

Sramana Mitra: You were marketing to all the Southeast Asian countries?

Rajesh Jain: Primarily the large population countries. So the best countries are Indonesia, Malaysia, and Philippines. In the last few years, we have also expanded to Thailand, Vietnam, and of course, Singapore also now. The pricing becomes a little higher in some of these countries. Indonesia is very much like India with a large population; it has good volumes.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud
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