Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: If you study Adobe’s product strategy, it’s basically a MarTech rollout. You can do the MarTech rollout. Given where we are, if you focus on companies that have more of an AI nuance to really build a cutting edge MarTech AI rollout, I think you have a very interesting opportunity in front of you.

Rajesh Jain: There is one more dimension to this. Compared to AdTech, MarTech has sort of been the poor cousin. About $500 billion is being spent on AdTech for new customer acquisition and existing customer reacquisition. Half of that money is basically being wasted on wrong acquisitions and reacquisition.

Brands should be building better hotlines with their existing customers, but they’re not doing it. Then they go back into the big AdTech platforms for reacquiring and retargeting their same customers. This is where I think there’s a great opportunity for MarTech to target that $250 billion of ad waste.

There are, I think, two big disruptions or industry resets, which I think will help MarTech companies. The broader way to think about this is as retention reengineering.

Number one is the next generation agentic AI. Every marketer can have a sort of co-marketer as a software agent that can interact with digital twins of individual customers and segments of customers. The same idea which has happened in the industrial world over the last 10-15 years with digital twins can now apply to brands. This can help with better targeting, better engagement, and of course, more revenues from existing customers.

The second is that all the push channels which are used by marketers to bring people back to their properties, such as the website and the app, are now becoming interactive.

At least in some countries in the world, we see the rise of WhatsApp in channel conversion. I do not now need to take a person to the website or app. My inbox itself becomes the platform.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely.

Rajesh Jain: Email itself with the use of AMP essentially is driving interactive elements inside the email. We are seeing phenomenal success in India. It’s a new way to email, where I’m not taking people to the website or app, but I’m whether it’s searching inside email, paying inside email, getting recommendations, or filling forms – all of that is inside email.

RCS is also coming in from Google in some countries. So these two, what I think of as channels to auto and agentic AI, essentially are laying the foundation for a new era where brand profitability can actually increase dramatically.

Sramana Mitra: There’s one nuance that you have not talked about, which I think is the main driver of your opportunity ahead, which is where it has been possible to do this kind of interactive nurturing and follow-ups and so forth is in B to B brands, right?

So if you look at the HubSpot story or Salesforce.com’s whole portfolio or Zoho’s whole portfolio, most of that is in B to B. Where you are succeeding with your current product portfolio and current set of customers in B to C MarTech.

In B to C brand communication, this kind of interactive, high-touch consumer management has not been possible and will not be possible profitably without AI. AI is a requirement for that. Otherwise, you can’t really do that. This is one of the reasons why MarTech has focused on B to B and not on B to C. Now, if you can bring AI into MarTech in a serious way and enable the B to C brands to have the same kind of high-touch communication, that is an opportunity.

Rajesh Jain: Absolutely. In B to C MarTech, what we’ve been using is basically the predictive part such as predictive segmentation. Over the last year, the generative piece is coming in, but the real power of AI will come with multi-agent systems.

Sramana Mitra: Agent-driven interactivity.

Rajesh Jain: My belief is, it’s the next surge of growth in all the SaaS domains. Customer relationships are the most critical for brands. Most B to C brands struggle today because their CAC is going up very rapidly.

For the first time now, they have AI centric tools which can drive customer lifetime value and therefore profitability.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have, Rajesh?

Rajesh Jain: Globally, we have 6,500 customers.

Sramana Mitra: So if you can identify all the B to C Martech companies out there and look at which ones are up for acquisition, this is a very interesting roll-up opportunity. I don’t see any problem for a private equity fund funding this.

Rajesh Jain: We want to do one good sized acquisition well before going there. Unboxed is our first big acquisition and we are very happy with it.

Sramana Mitra: Of course, you have to integrate and execute on it first.

Rajesh Jain: Now we have a good track record of having done that. Now is the next phase, where possibly with the combination of both private markets and public markets over the next two to three years, we’re going to see very good consolidation opportunities  going forward.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. This is a different way to build. Frankly, I don’t really care about unicorns.

Rajesh Jain: So, Proficorn is the word I like to use for companies. I have written a book about it.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Bootstrapped, profitable and scaling. Fantastic. As we’ve talked about before, one of my favorite case studies has always been Zoho, which has done no acquisition. They’ve built everything on their own, but have built a phenomenal company. I have tremendous respect for Sridhar Vembu.

You’re doing it a little bit differently, but it’s also a very interesting path to building a great company. Congratulations. It’s a real pleasure talking to you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud
1 2 3 4 5 6 7