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

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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 things. And I said, you have to show that onstage. On that note, please help me. Welcome to the stage, Rajesh Jain from Netcore.

Is that right? That's how it happened. Take a seat. So this guy is, if you go to India and you ask around and you say, who was like the first big sort of software or internet entrepreneur in India? Many people will say Rajesh Jain, 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 you go, the front row. There we go. All right. You sold it then for, what, 116 million in 99?

Yeah, 115.

115 million in 99. You then took all that money, did you plow a bunch of that right into Netcore immediately?

No, Netcore, 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. Was 2008, was that like your first million dollar year, maybe?

Yeah, around that time.

Around that time. What started working really well in like 2013, 2018, where you're going to 50?

So two things happened. 2013, 28, 2008 to 13, basically, the email SMS revenue started growing very rapidly. Until 2008, we were doing some random stuff, which wasn't making us any money.

Okay.

You know, when you sell a company, you think you can, you're like God's gift to the world. So you think anything, everything will work. Didn't happen.

And so your wife reminded you of that, right?

Absolutely.

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, mid to large sized companies. We added marketing automation, the customer engagement piece, and then we also started growing internationally. So we started expanding from India to Southeast Asia, Middle East, 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, the Netcore Marketing Cloud.

So actually, if you think about it, 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 ad tech, Google and Meta. I mean, in many cases, they're in a CAC trap where the cost of customer acquisition is going up much faster than their revenues. So where Netcore 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, et cetera, the personalization bit. And then we added search and product discovery to it through an acquisition.

So full stack, hopefully you guys are sort of grounded now on what Rajesh is building. Netcore.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, you talk about email marketing. Talk about CPaaS, an omnichannel. Walk me through, are these the right buckets? How do you think about email marketing in general?

See, email marketing's been around for 20, 25 years. Now, there are different types. There is the API-based email marketing.

You call that CPaaS, bottom left.

Just use the API and send things out. Newsletters use, also Substack, et cetera, they will send out. Anyone running a blog will have newsletters going out.

Upper right, right? Campaign Monitor, clearly there.

Then you have for SMBs, basically, the sort of integrated marketing stack, like MailChimp, essentially, for the small, mid-sized businesses.

Then you have the omni-channel, which is where sort of Netcore plays.

Yep.

Mid to large-sized companies, so Braze, sort of Klaviyo.

Messagebird, Sensch.

All of them are there. 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 image here. These are the big guys, right? These are the M&A players in the space.

Yeah, but they are all legacy. So Oracle, etc., they bought these email ESPs about 10 years ago. 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.

Yep.

Which I think can be transformative. 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.

Mm-hmm. And the reason Sats open is beautiful is that statement directly contradicts what Irina from HootSuite kicked us off, saying Gen Z 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 by 2020.

And no outside capital, didn't raise?

No outside.

Profits?

Profits.

Okay, so you're sitting there looking, you know, I'm regressing, I'm refreshing my Chase account. You're like, whoa, that's a lot of digits. 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, a couple of reasons. One is, we wanted to look at adjacencies. First, we wanted to do a large deal. We had done a couple of small tuck-ins, 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 complementary product, which we can sell into the same marketing department. So Unboxed does search and product. Product discovery. So competitors include Algolia, Bloomreach, Constructors. So you can sort of place them there. And it also gave us a presence in the US market. For a company like ours, primarily India, Southeast Asia, emerging markets.

It's very hard building an organic presence, organic base and organic growth in the US. And that's where Unbox came in. So at one shot, we got about 200 plus customers whom we could potentially cross-sell our products to.

Now, people can see your M and A strategy going on the left side of the screen. You're not just buying companies like Unbox. You just bought a martech services agency. Why would a SaaS company buy a service?

Yeah, these are, some of them are just investments.

Ah, okay.

So what happens is when we go to our customers, in fact, this is, I think, very important in SaaS. 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 SaaS companies, most SaaS 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% SaaS, 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-off.

And you also learn, because customers are more willing to now tell you what are their problems. So they want them solved. And they don't necessarily have the internal teams. I mean, look at, what is a typical adoption of most SaaS platforms? 30, 40%.

Typical what? Adoption?

Adoption, featured adoption.

Yeah, 30, 40%.

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 is very nice. And then, it was supposed to be a 15-minute call, turns into an hour-long call of you going, this AMP is the future. AMP is the future. I'm going to Rajesh. I don't know what the hell AMP is. I'm pretty good in SaaS. What is AMP and why is it the future of email marketing?

So AMP is a...

Let me just hold on, so I don't feel stupid. 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.

Now, what AMP does, so basically it's a Google tech. Google and Yahoo both support it with Gmail.

I'm gonna 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 changer for B to C. Not as much for B to B because it right now works on Gmail IDs and Yahoo IDs. But if you're selling, if your customers are selling to B to C, the removal of the friction of the click through to a website or app. I mean, we have seen five times, 10 times increases in actions. And just look at our own behavior, you know, when you see an email, you've got to click through. How many times will we do it? But if you can now collect first party data, et cetera, all inside the mail. You can do gamification inside the mail. Ask questions, do run surveys and newsletters right inside the mail and show the results in place.

You see the spin the wheel, et cetera. All of these, I think, become great foundations for what I call sort of channels 2.2, the push channels which are there. So email is just, 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 in my email marketing? What should they go search on Google?

Okay, so AMP.dev is a good starting site, but it's a bit outdated. If you go to netcorecloud.com/amp, we have a lot of use cases.

Or slash A M P.

A M P, netcorecloud.com/amp.

Or just email me and I'll send you.

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 I'm also thinking like, will this actually 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 email app that's there.

Yep.

So it works on Android, works on iOS AMP, works on the browser. So I'd say about sixty, seventy percent of customers typically 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 mail client Gmail or Yahoo will decide 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 Net Core monthly today?

So we send out about thirty-five billion emails a month.

A month? A month? It's a monthly number. What percent of India's total email is that?

That's a small percentage.

Okay.

My guess is we're probably two or three percent of the emails going out.

It's a big number.

Oh yeah, massive.

Big number, so 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 twenty, or five to ten 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 using things like this. So how do we translate these e-commerce use cases to SaaS founders, right? How could they use a spin the wheel or a, you know, a tell us what you like?

Yeah, for SaaS founders, if you're sending to B2B, that's a problem. And there's an alternative to AMP which works in Apple email called CSS. So it's not the sort of full functionality, but you can, I think the best place to use it is form fills. 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. You could do this for your SaaS 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, will capture the data, but the user, the customer has entered the data right in the email without the friction of the click through.

Yep.

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. And collecting payments. And we have companies in India for mutual funds, collecting those, what they call SIP in India, systematic monthly payments for funds. All of that's now happening inside email. And the game changer really is that this whole, the click-through friction, which always hindered 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 with their own customers. Get more first, more zero-party data, do better personalization.

So just to give you guys an example of 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 with your stuff. And we're going to test effectively signing up people to join our webinars inside the email. So you never have to leave and see if we get more people doing it versus sending them all to a landing page.

Right. Webinar registration is a great use case.

Yes, which we should. Well, and then we then will take all the, well, basically all these input fields at 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, if you're using AMP, then you can see the results right in place.

So amp.dev or netcorecloud.com?

Netcorecloud.com/AMP.

AMP.

Amp.dev is the Google site, but it's a little outdated. They don't update it.

Who's thinking they might try a test? Are you 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, I'll just full transparent to everybody here. We are really having, trying to figure out how do you stand out and just email in general? It's so busy.

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. Now, two innovations there. WhatsApp. Now, how many, how many people use WhatsApp in the room? There you go. It's about almost half. A hundred million plus users in the US on WhatsApp. That's probably about 30, 40% of the adult population. 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 too, when I interview founders in India and I say, "How did you get your big waitlist? How do you get your community together?" They all say WhatsApp.

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 fast-growing India companies that are building WhatsApp groups for their SaaS businesses, growing much faster than their US counterparts, trying to drive everyone into a Slack channel.

Yeah, I mean, anyone's got, even a small international connect, they'll all be on WhatsApp.

Yep.

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 app that's going to support it. So if you think about it, email, WhatsApp, and RCS, they are transforming the one-way push channels into basically becoming two-way endpoints for conversion.

Yep. I'm fired up. I mean, this is the OG of software in India. $116 million exit, goes all in on Netcore, you know, fools around for a little bit, it doesn't work, and then 2013 starts to hit it. He now believes the future of email marketing truly is sort of 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 more big bets in the future. Check out his book, Profit Corn. Please help me thank Rajesh Jain from Netcore.

Thank you.

Rajesh.

Thank you very much, man.

Thank you so much. Thank you.