Social media and mobile phones have changed the way companies engage with customers. The opportunities thus created have given rise to some world class companies. Team Estrade had the exclusive opportunity to speak to the founder of one such world class company, CleverTap. The company was co-founded by Anand Jain and offers app analytics services to its clients. Following are the excerpts of a conversation with Anand Jain.
Tell us about CleverTap? Give us a brief history of the origins of Clever Tap?
CleverTap was founded in 2013 with the goal of helping businesses understand, onboard, retain and engage their users better. The founding team met during their stint at Network18.
We onboarded our first client – BookMyShow within 6 months of starting the company.
“Mobile Marketing Automation will be a $98 billion opportunity by 2021. It’s been growing at a CAGR or 28.1%.”
What are your products and services?
We’re offer App Analytics and User Engagement as a Service. Our clients use us to track app uninstalls, find out where users are dropping off in their product flows, and to send engaging campaigns.
Product managers use CleverTap to view funnel & cohort reports. While Marketeers use us to reach out their users in real-time via push notifications, emails, in-app notifications, SMS, or web-push notifications.
What is your geographical range?
We have clients from across 100 countries, however a majority of our clients are in the US and India.
What is the size of the market you are currently competing in, both in India and the world?
According to a report published by MarketsandMarkets, Mobile Marketing Automation will be a $98 billion opportunity by 2021. It’s been growing at a CAGR or 28.1%.
With the metoric rise of the mobile apps and the user base specially in South East Asia, I think we’re currently operating in a rapidly expanding market.
Who are your clients? What is your marketing strategy? For each product segment.
Over 4000 clients – Startups, SMBs and Fortune 500 companies use CleverTap to acquire, engage and retain users everyday. We work with global brands like Jio, Samsung, McDonalds, Sony, Star, Astro, Zomato, BookMyShow, DC Comics, Curiosity, Denver Broncos, and many more.
We have helped various companies to quickly scale and achieve high-growth. One important aspect of our marketing strategy is to showcase & highlight value that customers derive from using our product.
What is Clever Tap’s value unique offering? What is key differentiating factor/variable? Who is your competition?
CleverTap integrates analytics and engagement into one consolidated, comprehensive and out-of-the box solution. Our powerful segmentation engine allows publishers to segregate and target their users as they perform actions on the app or website, and then send them timely contextual messages using their powerful feature – Live User Segments.
We help businesses provide differentiated customer experiences that consider users to be more than mere data points.
Our key differentating aspect is that the entire solutions works in real-time, and at scale. One leading Telco trusted us as a partner as they grew from 0 to 100 million users in 170 days. The quickest to 100 million users on-boarded ever. A leading sports app used us to segment, and send 40 million messages per minute.
We face competition from providers that either offer either one of analytics, or engagement solutions. Unfortunately, you cannot retain and engage users without understanding their behavior first, you need a solution that combines both aspects into a single product – CleverTap.
“Clients in India are more demanding on the service levels.”
Tell us about Innovation First approach.
We strongly believe in the power of collaboration and hence our app analytics and engagement solution provides a single source of truth that enables product and marketing to get a unified view of their users and quickly make decisions that are in the best interest of their business and customer.
With this goal in mind, we invented a platform that is real-time in nature, scalable, provides personalization at scale, works for a variety of use-cases across verticals and supports businesses from startups to enterprises.
Our platform can analyze hundreds of millions of data points in a few milliseconds on a single server. Add more servers, and the processing capacity becomes virtually limitless. This gives us a unique advantage, as we can outcompete virtually any solution provider out there.
We have an open API framework that allows you to easily integrate our platform into existing workflows. Now businesses can leverage insights that are built on aggregated data across their entire workflows – POS, CRM, CMS, App and Website.
Is the eco system in India ripe companies like yours?
Yes, we’ve seen tremendous success in India. Our solution has been widely adopted by startups, and large enterprises alike. In fact, we’ve seen some very interesting mobile use cases emerge from countries like India, which can only be solved if have a first hand understanding of this market.
What do you feel is the future of Big Data, Complex machines and AI? Are these going to be eventually integrated into one product? How Clever Tap has incorporated these in its products?
Data analytics and insights are the core of strategic decision making. Leading companies are generating raw data in ever-increasing volumes (40-50% year-on-year growth), but face significant challenges regarding data storage, security and integrating advanced data processing technologies into their existing IT infrastructure. Beyond that, we see significant challenges around deriving meaningful insights from these multiple structured/unstructured data sources.
We use advanced computing techniques to dynamically scale our infrastructure as the data grows, as well as advanced parallel and distributed computing techniques to analyse large volumes of data and generate actionable insights at interactive speeds.
Our mission is to build an accessible and affordable platform that enables companies, both large and small, to collect, understand and use their data effectively and reap the benefits of data-driven decision making.
“We believe Analytics of Things (AoT) is the next logical thing.”
How is the analytics business evolving in India? Are the expectations of Indian clients from you different from the expectations of your foreign clients?
We work with global brands, who have the same set of problems they’re looking to solve no matter where they’re located geographically. Clients in India are more demanding on the service levels.
Which product segment is the highest revenue earner for your company?
We have customers across food-tech, media & entertainmetnt, ed-tech, travel, event ticketing, fin-tech, and health & fitness. We have a 80% plus market share in a few verticals.
What is the biggest challenge faced by your company currently?
Now that we’ve tasted early success, we need to carefully scale the company, our operations, sales and marketing, while maintaining our winning culture. Scaling the company culture is one of the biggest challenges in my opinion.
Who are your investors?
We are lucky to have attracted world-class investors to participate in our journey.
We count Accel Partners, and Sequoia as our investors.
What is your vision for your company, in terms of,
- Near term future, over the rest of 2017
- Long term, over the next 4 years or so.
Our world-view boils down to facilitating delighted customers through timely, relevant and personal user experiences. We work hard to surface user-level, actionable insights to our customers, helping them to deliver these superior user experiences.
We believe Analytics of Things (AoT) is the next logical thing. Given the large volumes of data being generated, it’s a daunting task to filter, analyse and make sense of this data. Our platform solves this problem, revealing hidden patterns in complex streams of data in just a few seconds.
“We have clients from across 100 countries” – Anand Jain, CleverTap
