Marketing Automation Technology Enabler Betaout Plans to Take A Leap Into South- Asian Market

BWDisrupt’s Soumya Gupta interacted with Ankit Maheshwari, Co-Founder Betaout to know more about this disruptive technology's usage in the online space

Betaout to know more about disruptive marketing automation technology, Founded by Ankit Maheshwari (CEO) and co-founded by serial entrepreneurs Maheshwari, Raghubir Thakur, Arjun Maheshwari and Nandini Rathi.

Prior to Betaout, Maheshwari founded Instamedia Network - a lifestyle blog network, Times Internet-backed Instamedia, a Shimla-based content network, which was sold by the investors to a Dubai-based media group in June 2012. Instamedia was serving over 20 Million page views before it was acquired by a Dubai based Media Company.

He has over 10 years of experience in managing large content teams for Digital content. Betaout is a customer intelligence and marketing automation platform for E-commerce.

Subsequently, Maheshwari started Betaout, as a SaaS platform aimed at building tools and software for publishers and digital agencies. Betaout's first product was ContentCloud, an editorial project management software application that enables users to plug in to their chosen content management system (CMS).

Betaout's customer intelligence and marketing platform, a new business line, was launched in April 2015. Ever since, the company claims, it has witnessed double-digit monthly revenue growth and has top e-commerce companies as clients.

It makes marketing smart, intelligent and relevant by making sense of deep data insights generated from customer's interactions across all channels including mobile, web, social, email etc.

Along with earlier seed funding, this brings Betaout’s total raised so far to about $2 million. The list of investors in its new round include Beenext, Stanford Angels, Letsventure, Chennai Angels, Hyderabad Angels, and Mumbai Angels. Previous backer Sam Yagan, former CEO of The Match Group and founder of Corazon Capital, also returned for the pre-Series A. 

Edited Excerpts from the interview-

What kind of services does Betaout provide to E-Commerce players?
We help companies do behavioral marketing just like Amazon does. E-Commerce companies all around the world invest heavily into marketing efforts but there consumer information gets stuck with multiple marketing platforms as those tools belong to a variety of different companies. But with our technical enablers they can easily get hold of customer data without investing too much on in-house tech tools.

Our product is basically the marketing automation tools that empower small, medium and large organization to consolidate and validate their marketing plans, without depending on technical teams or purchasing data from different companies.

How do you serve your clients?
Mostly e-Commerce companies have three pain points which Betaout strives to solve:

• They don’t know their customers and fail to take notice of their personal behavior and choices. So, if a marketer doesn’t communicate intelligently enough it results in wastage of company’s resources & loose the trust of the customer as well. Companies these days need to engage in pre-emptive marketing strategies and cannot afford to annoy the customers.
• Since the customer data is highly fragmented with tools like SMS, e-mail services, Facebook posts, push notifications, twitter, Google ads etc. marketers struggle to know which is the most optimal channel to reach a particular customer?
• The third most difficult thing to handle is to make marketing plans with dependency on technical teams, but with our services they can do without any tech help.

How did its genesis happen?
The idea came to us around one and a half year ago. I and my brother had sold out our last venture and were thinking of something. Just then we encountered this problem of e-commerce companies communicating irrationally.

We had ordered a coffee-maker machine online and happy with its installation and quality functioning. After 4 days or so we received a message from the same company offering the same coffee machine on 25% discount. So, we got it replaced and asked for a refund too and finally bought the discounted version. It was a headache of 5-7 days.

We realized the company loses a lot more with miscommunication than communication and Betaout was born. We are in an age where companies cannot afford to mistreat or disrespect a single customer as that also has a multiplier effect. Customer database needed to be upgraded with amalgamating data from 20-80 marketing tools. The days of sending each person the same message through the year via different platforms makes no sense at all.

How much investment have you raised so far?
Initially, we were bootstrapped but we are fortunate to find so many of our clients happily turning into investors or partners. Now we have raised $2 million with the help of biggest startup founders in India and abroad. They have supported us because they know where the digital market is going and they were satisfied with our performance. These disruptors wanted to invest in something that is futuristic & Betaout is such a startup. People have willingly invested out their personal funds in our company and also acquired stakes in shares. Unlike conventional VC’s, it wasn’t very difficult to pitch our business plans to them as these mentors have believe in quick-decision-making. We are happy to receive great feedback from our clients. We are lucky that people felt extremely confident about our automation tools & went to invest multiple rounds.

What are your future plans for Betaout?
• We have set out to build a global company but for now we are watching the South-Asian markets more closely.
• Secondly, Betaout has been focusing on aggressive marketing & helping out e-commerce players become empowered to judge consumer-behavior beforehand. We aim to change the entire landscape of marketing technology through our inventive tools.