Siddhartha Ahluwalia 00:51
Hi, this is your host Siddhartha Ahluwalia, co-founder of Neon Fund and host of Neon Show podcast. Neon Fund is one of the best funds which is investing in the most enterprising companies in B2B SaaS or enterprise AI coming out of India for the globe. Today I have with me on Neon Show, a guest who has quietly built one of India’s most respected global SaaS companies, and it did long before SaaS from India became, you know, a buzzword.

Raviteja Dodda, welcome to the Neon Show podcast. Ravi, so glad to have you today.

Raviteja Dodda 01:26
Thank you, Sid. Glad to be here. I don’t do a lot of podcasts.

So glad to be here and share my perspectives.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:36
So we are honored to be here on the first podcast podcast of your choice. So, you know, you are the co-founder and CEO of MoEngage, a customer engagement and retention platform used by more than 1200 global brands, including Domino’s, Airtel, Flipkart, Ola, and Swiggy. I think these are the most prominent names in India that every customer would have heard of, right?

And it’s most possible that, you know, any customer who has touched any of these digital or physical brands would have got a hyper-personalized push notification or in-app message, buy MoEngage. I assume that it would have touched at least a billion people in India.

Raviteja Dodda 02:15
Yes, yes. In fact, we, like you, I mean, you definitely mentioned some of the most prominent Indian brands, but we work with many global Fortune 500 brands like Deutsche Telekom, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, and multiple large global enterprises. And whenever I go to any event, I keep, I mean, especially like I was at an event in India, I was saying that, hey, our software is installed in at least one of your applications on your phones.

And most of you and our communications that we are powering are touching at least every one of you on a daily basis. And in fact, in terms of scale that you mentioned, like we currently profile about over 2 billion actual end customers across our platform. So operate at a significant scale from that standpoint.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 03:08
And you started the company in 2014. And the companies in this year, let’s say, by end of financial year 2025, going to cross 100 million in revenues.

Raviteja Dodda 03:20
Yes, yes. We are surpassing $100 million in annualized recurring revenue as we speak.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 03:26
Congratulations on that milestone.

Raviteja Dodda 03:28
Thank you. Thank you.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 03:29
And you started, so would love to know first, you know, how the domain that you started in, how is it mapped? What are the different products? What are the different categories?

How did you start in 2014? What was the product? And how has the product evolved since?

Raviteja Dodda 03:47
Yeah, happy to share about that story. I think in fact, so MoEngage came out of our own pain point. Yashwanth, my co-founder and I were facing in our previous company that we were building.

So both of us were running a company called Delight Circle between 2011 and 2014. It was our first entrepreneurial stint. And we made every mistake that we could in that in that startup.

And it was a B2C product. It was one of the first few mobile apps back in those days. Like this was even before like Flipkart or Zomato had a mobile app back then.

This was like 2011-12 when we started the that DelightCircle. And Delight Circle was basically a mobile app that helped people discover offers and coupons from local stores and retailers. And when we were scaling that that mobile business, we saw the challenges of driving customer engagement ourselves.

We figured out how to acquire customers at an optimal cost. But then we realized that a lot of the customers that we that install the app, a lot of them actually uninstall in just like few weeks or just within a month. And that’s and when we spoke to various other mobile app companies that at that point of time, everyone was facing this challenge of high uninstall rates, high churn rates as a mobile app business.

And then like then we then we kind of looked out to kind of solve this problem and then try to find tools to solve the problem. I mean, there were analytics solutions like Mixpanel, Google Analytics, which were available, but they were telling us what’s going wrong, but not providing the tools to do something about it. And then there were other marketing automation platforms out there, which are supposed to kind of help companies engage customers.

But all of them were built in the early 2000s. These are like if you look at larger players like Adobe campaign or salesforce exact target, and even like Mailchimp of the world and so on. All of them were built for email centric marketing and also kind of built for web centric businesses, but not built for today’s.

I mean, this was 2013, 14, like were not built for the mobile centric businesses. And, and yeah, that’s how we kind of like, identified this pain point. And then for our previous company, like we ended up having to build some of those ourselves.

And then when we realized that, hey, DelightCircle was not going well, and it was realized as we kind of wanted to kind of like start something new. With this, the pain point that we understood that, hey, today’s fast growing, digital first businesses are very mobile centric. And they need a modern customer engagement platform that helps companies better engage and retain their customers.

And, and then felt that there’s a need of there’s a gap, not just in India, but also globally. And then kind of like ended up starting more engaged with that inside ourselves.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 06:57
So from 2014 to 2019, right? I would say the company was underfunded, and you were still able to take, you know, big giants on. And there are two players in India significant in your category, WebEngage and CleverTap.

So at what point, you know, today, your revenue is much ahead of both WebEngage and CleverTap. So at what point, you know, you overtook in this category and became a leader, at least from the India perspective?

Raviteja Dodda 07:24
Yeah. And, and if you look at this category, right, I mean, I’ll give you some kind of like background. And when we start off in 2014, so we were almost kind of creating this category of mobile engagement or mobile marketing.

And at that point of time, and at that point of time, there were no like mobile marketing solutions, like, which were available for mobile app companies. In fact, like our first set of customers were like, we started from India in 2014. And our first set of customers were the likes of taxi for sure, Snapdeal, Bigbasket, Gaana, and so on.

And back then, when we were kind of like selling when we were kind of like pitching this product was, it was the right product, in the sense that like everyone was facing this problem of retention. And, and everyone needed the solution. So the timing couldn’t be better.

And so we were able to kind of like quickly kind of onboard many of these customers, many of these brands.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 08:28
And how did you acquire all the top, let’s say, these customers, what I can say is the consumer internet companies of India?

Raviteja Dodda 08:37
Yeah. So I think that’s, I think that’s the best part in the sense that I mean, look at most of these customers that we sign, actually didn’t come from our network.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 08:47
Okay.

Raviteja Dodda 08:49
And I kind of, I had to kind of learn, I mean, learn some of the basic aspects of SaaS, because like, I mean, we were we didn’t build any SaaS company before, right. And kind of had to kind of learn how to kind of write cold emails, and so on. So I think we were able to, at that point of time, we were able to kind of reach these product managers and growth teams in these companies, like, whether it is Taxi for Sure, BookMyShow, and many of these companies, I was just able to write.

And then, because everyone was facing this problem, which was kind of very acute, like they were able to kind of give time to me. And then on one fine day in like, June 2014, like Taxi for Sure said, hey, we would like to use your product. And in fact, in one week, like we kind of like did a lot of coding, and then kind of made like, the initial version ready.

And then they onboarded us. And then we kind of like quickly kind of gain traction post that I mean.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 09:46
And this was a product on push notifications.

Raviteja Dodda 09:49
So the first version of the product was focused on helping, like, let’s say mobile app company, track customer behavior, and send highly segmented notifications.

That’s the first version that we coded, then we obviously built a lot of it over the point of time.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 10:07
And how did the product evolve after the first version?

Raviteja Dodda 10:10
Yeah, so the idea was that I mean, so the first pain point we were trying to solve is that, hey, companies need to be able to kind of do highly segmented notifications based on behavioral data beyond just the transaction data. So it’s like, if you’re, if you’re a ride hailing company, you should be able to kind of like, okay, look for you should be able to segment customers who are searching for a ride in a certain location, and who typically kind of take rides in certain locations, and then kind of like be able to kind of send relevant communications. And they should be able to kind of segment between like a very new customers, highly activated customers, high frequency customers, and all sorts of segments, right?

That was the first version. And then and then it expanded both in terms of the capabilities and channels of engagement capabilities could be like, a lot more trigger based messaging. Hey, if if people are like searching for a cab, and, and then kind of didn’t make a purchase or didn’t make a ride, triggering some communication within like five minutes, for example.

So a lot more automated communications, which people can set up. And then we expanded to all the channels of engagement. Like first, we kind of expanded all the channels from mobile app standpoint, like notifications, in app messages, like inside the app, you see certain pop ups and overlays like to nudge customers that okay, I’m so for example, if you’re a ride hailing company, like when you open the app, you can show nudge about other categories of services that we are offering and only to certain customers who could be interested in those, right. And then, then we, so we first focused on building the best in class customer engagement platform for mobile app companies. In 2016, we started expanding to a all the touch points for a given brand.

So for example, there’s a e commerce company. So they might have a mobile touch point, they might have web touch points. And if they’re if you’re an offline online retailer, you might have even offline touch point like where people are coming to a store and making transactions, like Westside, for example, in India, right.

And so we said, Okay, let’s go across all the touch points of a given brand. And also all channels of engagement. So touch points from the collection of data standpoint, okay, if you’re on the website, also, we’ll be able to kind of track what people are doing, and what transactions that people are making.

And then channels of engagement would be like, like we started with only push messages, in app messages, then we expanded to email, which is which are some of the traditional channels of marketing that email SMS, then we expanded to like on site experiences, web experiences, advertising channels like Facebook ads, Google ads, and so on. So that’s, that’s been, that’s happened over the period of time. And then we added, so then, so I would say this is the core part of what we call it as like cross channel marketing core product.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 12:59
And again, coming back to the question, so when did you know, like, become a leader in the category?

Raviteja Dodda 13:07
I think, obviously, like we’re a global player with multiple locations. And I’ll talk about that multiple food, multiple geographies. I think when we started off in 2014, 15, and 16, we were ahead of everyone in in India as a market, because we were the first player to in the mobile engagement space.

Our competitors like CleverTap, they were they started from analytics. And then they started coming into our category. WebEngage, I think came into the category of proper marketing automation much later in the period, they were doing more on the website of feedback and certain online surveys and so on.

I think so we were we were ahead until 2016. And then we realized quickly realized that if you want to build a large hundred million dollar business, and even multi multitude of that, we need to invest in other markets. So I and some of the leaderships focused more on outside Indian markets, then fast forward to 2018, 19, we were behind CleverTap in Indian market after.

And then we started focusing much more again on Indian market in 2020. And today, I mean, over the last four or five years, I mean, now, I mean, over the last two, three years, I think we added we add much more net new business in India than any other player out there. It I think, though it happened, because of, I would say strong execution rigor over the last four or five years.

I think I’ll talk about how I think there are multiple things that have that we had to kind of do to make that happen. First, in 2020, we kind of changed the org structure from very functional org structure to a more regional org structure. So we have a separate org structure, like separate team for India, separate team for other markets.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 15:06
And they don’t interact with each other.

Raviteja Dodda 15:07
Yes, it’s like a separate startup within the company. So like we have the, so the India team would have the overall India region team would have right from SDRs, like from marketing, SDRs, AEs, implementation teams, customer success teams, everything kind of kind of, and then obviously, there are central functions, which are which are more common in nature. But this this team was completely kind of independent for each region.

So it helped us that way it helped us kind of do have enough focus on each region, because like sometimes like your smaller regions will not get enough focus if you kind of have a very functional org structure, which is like we do reviews at a sales level and marketing level, then it would operate very differently. So we instead like said, okay, there’s an India team, they are focused on India targets. And they basically, and we do reviews on a quarterly basis or targets on a quarterly basis only at in at a regional level.

And, and, and for us, there’s also different nuance in terms of where we are in terms of maturity in each region. So it made a lot of sense that because in India, we might be a different scale of the business. So so when we did that, and we kind of made some changes to our team structure as well.

And it, it created a lot of and we kind of so one is that change in the structure. The second is, I think one of the most important things that has helped us scale faster in India is our customer success and support. So India is a like everyone knows everyone, right?

Every every company knows, like, it’s a small community of product people and marketing people, they talk to each other. So one, we basically made sure that our customers are very happy, and are seeing the most value. I think that’s one of the important pieces where we felt that our competition did not live up to customers expectations.

So we basically, our customers were significant advocates. So and whenever we are speaking to prospects, I mean, they speak to the some of the customers of MoEngage, they always heard like great, glowing references when compared to our competition. That is the second, the third, we did a lot of migrations from our competition.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 17:28
Okay. That worked also.

Raviteja Dodda 17:29
So, I mean, it’s like each of the two competitors that we have in India, we made a significant number of migrations.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 17:39
And you made it based on price or based on capability?

Raviteja Dodda 17:43
Capability. And I’ll talk about some of the capabilities that helped us differentiate, but we made a lot of migrations driven by one capability. Second part, like customers were not happy with that existing platform with the other platform, either because of their customer success and support.

And, and, and maybe, and probably the other competitors did not put enough focus on in terms of that those areas

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 18:11
Customer support were not like the best you can say in the market.

Raviteja Dodda 18:19
Yes, yes. Because I think if you look at it, we are very mission critical for every company.

And our product helps our customers drive a lot of revenue and customer lifetime value. Our customers see anywhere from 15 to 20% of their revenue coming from CRM channels powered by MoEngage with a direct attribution, not even influence attribution. Right.

So, so if you have so important, so people want to work with the best in class products.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 18:45
But then the argument is Indian customers don’t pay well.

Raviteja Dodda 18:49
Yeah, I’ll talk about that. I think that’s one of the important things I want to talk about today, because it’s very common thing. So let me complete the question on the on the previous one.

So, so those are some of the things that helped us kind of really accelerate, like, in terms of like, so we were able to add a lot more net new business than our competition. And then it’s a flywheel. And the other playbook, which I’ll talk about is our the community playbook, which also helped us kind of like, really kind of amplify that customer advocacy.

So we’re able to kind of bring our customers and our prospects together at our what we call it as hash growth community events. And those are, I think all of this is a flywheel. I think people think that SaaS growth just happens.

You like the way I approach the flywheel is that okay, you sign your onboard customers, you make them very successful. And your marketing kind of talks about those customer stories. And because every, if you look at most buying decisions are made by the biggest part is social proof.

People like to see, okay, who are some of the other companies that are similar to us are working with you. And if you and then they would like to kind of also talk to like, hey, the references and then the word of mouth and so on. So I think we were able to amplify that.

And then we were also able to kind of amplify into a lot of net new categories. I think what we also realize is that, hey, you let’s focus on the net new categories, which are seeing a lot of tailwinds, whether it is financial services, or whether it is any new digital categories. So we were able to not just kind of obviously migrate from from the other migrant vendors from our migrant customers from the competition, but also in the new categories that were growing, we were able to kind of capture more market share.

So all of these kind of helped us kind of go much ahead of the competition. And now coming to the Indian customers don’t pay part, which is, so today we have almost like, I mean, significant business from India.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 20:55
Let me for audience help them visualize the revenue. Yes. So by the next year, you would have crossed 100 mil.

So and the revenue distributions equal across many geographies, like 25% is US.

Raviteja Dodda 21:11
Yeah, so today about 25 to 30% of the business comes from North America and Americas. About 20 to 25% of the business comes from EMEA. India plus Southeast Asia together contribute to about 45 to 50% of the business, with India being more than 30% of the business at the moment.

So these are all at the moment, I mean, and things are changing quite a bit. And we want each geography to compete with each other. So yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:40
Yeah. So basically, you are saying on an overall basis, also 30% of the revenue comes from..

Raviteja Dodda 21:46
India today

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:47
India today. So and, you know, it’s a misnomer that Indian customers don’t pay well.

Raviteja Dodda 21:54
Yeah, I mean, so I think Indian companies will pay as long as you’re able to deliver value. And I think Indian companies are probably the best validation of broad market fit. If you’re able to get Indian companies pay 100k plus and even half a million dollar plus, kind of in terms of ACVs, I mean, it’s a big, I would say validation of the product market fit.

I think the way that my experience and we have operated in for 11 years now in Indian market. So Indian companies are ready to pay where I think what happens is that the companies and the vendors in the space are the ones who kind of like, I would say, pull down that pricing. So what I meant by that is that, like we, our competitors or even like in any category, like we see this, like, if our competitor is pricing, like, let’s say, 50% of what we are pricing, then automatically, like the customer, Indian companies are not ready to pay that significant premium, right?

I think the SaaS companies operating in the category, we all of us have to kind of think ourselves that, okay, should I be pricing for based on value? Or are we pricing based on trying to be the cheapest vendor? If we don’t, if all of all the SaaS vendors are selling in Indian companies or operate in a more rationally, I think we all can actually kind of say that, I mean, we are able to kind of generate good margins even from Indian companies.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 23:25
But there are stories, Khadim has told a public story, you know, a podcast that among the top 10 companies, the top 10 corporates of India, he was trying to sell a deal and the customer asked for it is about Whatfix, the customer asked about, he can Khadim give equity to the customer, and the customer will not pay because they are signing up to be one of the first customers.

Raviteja Dodda 23:50
Yeah, I mean, see, Indian company is obviously demanding, right? So you can, if you compare an Indian customer to a US customer, there’s always going to be a difference in pricing power.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:03
And why is that?

Raviteja Dodda 24:03
That’s for sure. I’ll tell you the reason. And there’s a very logical and rational reason for it, right?

In our space, at least. In our space, if you look at it, let’s say in Indian, let’s just take two different companies, like Swiggy and DoorDash, I was able to come to the same example, Swiggy and DoorDash. Look at the ARPU of a Swiggy customer.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:23
Less than $10, $5.

Raviteja Dodda 24:24
And compare with the ARPU of a DoorDash customer.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:26
$20, $30.

Raviteja Dodda 24:28
Exactly, right? Now, if I have a million monthly active, like, let’s say, whatever, 10 million monthly active users that both companies have, I can’t, they both can’t be the same to us as MoEngage, right? Because their ARPUs are very different.

So they can’t actually be the same. For them, like, the value of our product is different for both companies, right?

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:47
But hold on to that.
But do you price your product differently across India and the US?

Raviteja Dodda 24:52
Yes, we do. So we have different pricing.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 24:57
And how much does the pricing differ between India and the US?

Raviteja Dodda 25:01
I think the list pricing can always be. So broadly, I think it’s typically like 2 to 3x, 2.5 to 3x. In terms of the, if you take the similar metrics, that’s an average.

And it can be even, there are obviously customers in the US who can pay like 4x, and so on. But definitely, I mean, Indian customers are demanding. There’s no doubt about that.

So because of us being operating in India, it helped us kind of build a very efficient technology platform, which basically, we are able to operate at like 70% over 70% gross margins. Our platform is, I mean, while we look at outside from the outside, we are like a customer engagement company. So we have a lot more data and deep tech company on the behind the scenes, right?

Because we currently, as I mentioned, we currently profile about 2 billion plus overusers across every month and almost half a billion plus profiles every day. So that’s a lot of data that we track. We track about 3 billion plus events every single day.

So it’s a lot of huge data intensive operations. And because of us being operating in India, we’re able to kind of build a very strong technology platform which operates at a significant scale, but at the same time, at a lower cost of goods.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:32
But the problem with the Indian SaaS companies, you could say, because you are charging 2x or 3x less to your Indian customers than you would pay to the US. But what you pay to your vendors like AWS or cloud vendors would be equal to your counterparts. They are not discounting you.

Raviteja Dodda 26:52
Yeah, exactly. And that is part, that is the reason I’m saying that we need to, I mean, obviously, it helps us kind of get more, have higher gross margin in the US when compared to gross margin that we make with Indian customers, but it’s always the blended. So that helps us kind of have a blended, better blended gross margin overall as a company.

And the more we kind of scale our business in some of the Western markets, our gross margin will continue to kind of grow.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 27:18
There’s a metric, like an Indian SaaS company would roughly spend 20% of their revenue on cloud, whereas a US company would spend 10% of their revenue on cloud.

Raviteja Dodda 27:33
Yeah. So I think it varies by the category of the product that you’re operating in. So we are basically a very data intensive company.

So for us, that sort of applies, like you mentioned, the gross margin for us with Indian customers is lower when compared to our US and other Western markets. But for a lot of application companies, I think that difference should be less because a lot of it’s just a normal application. I think the cost, the overall infra cost itself tend to be not that high, but yes, there’ll be difference, but it might not be that stark.

Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 28:09
Yeah. And another, I thought always the reason is that Indian enterprises don’t pay for SaaS tools or pay lower because the GDP per capita is $2,700, which means that they can put more people on the problem.

Raviteja Dodda 28:26
Got it. I think it all comes down to ARPU.

And the other part is the competitive dynamics. Like if the company has a choice to kind of able to bring down, there are so many companies that are selling to them, and then they’re able to kind of like bring down more because of the competitiveness that’s there. So they are able to kind of leverage that, right?

I think Indian internet companies used to kind of, some of the internet companies used to do a lot more building internally. I mean, Ola, for example, like had an internal solution until 2019. And we moved them from internal solution to MoEngage in 2019.

And it’s been six years. I think that that changed. I think when there was a lot of venture capital available, everyone thought, hey, I have all my engineers available, I can just keep building internally.

But when they realized that it’s not about just building, it’s about improving it, making it user friendly to your business teams, and then kind of continuously improving it, and so on. So then they realized a lot of advantages of like, not building internally, but leveraging the best in class solutions out there.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 29:32
Would you remember some of the milestones, let’s say, when did you hit your 1 million ARR?

Raviteja Dodda 29:39
Yeah, I think we, it took like 24 months. So 27, 16, 2016, more than 24 months. So end of 2016 is when we hit our first million.

So it’s from the standpoint, it would take nine, eight to nine years from 1 to 100.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:00
Yeah. And then from 2017, how much time it took to reach 10 million?

Raviteja Dodda 30:07
So I think so we hit our 10 million like end of 2019, or start of 2020. And then 2020 was obviously COVID. Everything was like, I mean, it was a slow year.

So in fact, so yeah, so we did, we grew 10x in the last five years.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:25
Wow.

Raviteja Dodda 30:26
Yeah. So the most, in fact, like last four years since start of 2021 is basically the biggest part.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:32
And when did you cross 50 kind of ARR?

Raviteja Dodda 30:36
50? I don’t remember. But sometime in the last two years, yeah, two years ago or something.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 30:41
10 to 50 was quite significant, like three to four years.

Raviteja Dodda 30:45
Yeah. So I think, I think even just from 2020, right? So 2020 was a slow year.
And then we started putting the foundations for multi-geography expansion as a company. And I’ll talk about that geography space, but 2021 was like big growth for everyone. So we grew like, I would say 130% in that year.

And then 2022, in second half 2022, things started becoming pretty slow as for everyone. I mean, because like, as far as we have some indexation to the venture capital ecosystem and the funding, because we serve a lot of these, we serve a good mix of digital native businesses, which are like high growth startups, as well as traditional enterprises, which are undergoing this transformation. So we have a good mix of those customer segments.

And 2022 second half was from there it started, it was slow. And then so it kind of like, and so but we made a lot of investment in 21 and early 22 in terms of all the international markets. And we almost went from like, minus 100% EBITDA in the last two years to now minus 9% EBITDA in the last quarter that we have.

So a lot of it is driven by growth of the business. But it, it, it wasn’t easy. Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 32:11
What’s the customer split across revenue? Like how many customers would be above 100k ACV today above half a million and 1 million ACV today?

Raviteja Dodda 32:23
Yeah. I think so broadly, if you look at it like we are, as a company, we are more enterprise and mid market. So customers who pay at least 100k contribute to almost 70% of our revenue.

And customers who pay an average in mid-market like 60k, they contribute like 20, 21% of their revenue and then the remaining is SMB. So far as SMB is also like fast growing companies, more like series A, series B funded companies, we like to because our space is, in our space, it’s hard for customers to just switch platforms. So we like to enter early and then grow with them.

So from the standpoint enterprise mid market is a major part of our business. And we have like good number of customers who are like half a million dollar players, million dollar players ACV as well. Our largest customers is upwards of 3 million dollars ACV as well.

Yeah, so quite, quite varied from that standpoint.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 33:26
And can you tell more about your GTM playbook, how they have evolved over a period of years? Like what worked initially? And what have you unlearned and learned more?

Raviteja Dodda 33:36
Yeah, there’s that’s, that’s like a lot that I can share on this front. I think I can talk about a lot of mistakes that we did. But I think so for just to kind of give you the background.

So 2014 to 2020, we were primarily doing India.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 33:50
Yeah.

Raviteja Dodda 33:51
And we started doing some bit of Southeast Asia. I mean, we did a decent Southeast Asia in between 2016 to 20. But we were largely not present in the US and EMEA markets.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 34:03
So I can assume you mentioned 2020, you hit 10 million ARR. Yep. Eight would have come from India and two from Southeast Asia, roughly.

Raviteja Dodda 34:10
Yes, yes. There’s a little bit from the US, but it’s very minor.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 34:13
Maybe half a million.

Raviteja Dodda 34:14
Half a million or million. And, and then when we and then it was largely driven by not having enough capital.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 34:23
We just want to before you proceed, want to put a point here. Many people in the ecosystem say that what worked in India will not work in the US.

Raviteja Dodda 34:32
Yes.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 34:33 – 34:39
There’s a different product market fit in India and different in the US. So your product will completely change. Is that true for you also?

Raviteja Dodda 34:39
I wouldn’t say product would completely change. And in fact, like now we operate in like five different regions, right. And we’ll talk about briefly on that.

So in 2020, when we started, when we raised like $25 million of capital, we started investing into like multiple markets. So we expanded into, we started building a team for the US, late in late 2020 sort of timeframe. And then 2022, 2021, we started investing into setting up the team in Europe and Middle East also.

So it’s like multiple markets that we started kind of building out the teams. And as you rightly said, like each of these markets are very different. Like Southeast Asia is very different from Middle East.

Europe is different from the US, quite different from in terms of like how you should look at your customer segments and all that, right. And each of them, like we have a story, I can have a story to tell in each of this.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 35:30
I would love to know, I think because this would be the most valuable to the founders listening to us who are starting at day zero in India. And you are a great example because people say that once you scale to 10 million ARR, the company is almost formed and you cannot change the DNA of the company.

Raviteja Dodda 35:47
Yeah. I think, yeah. So I think we, that’s a great point.

I think, I mean, at the end of the day, like in SaaS, one thing I’d keep telling people is that if you want to keep growing at a higher growth rate, whatever that goes, that drives next year, you need to start investing this year. Right. And I’ll talk to each of these regions.

Like let’s say first day start with Southeast Asia where we start investing in like 16, 17. And we went to Southeast Asia when we saw that, like we went to Indonesia. We saw that like Indonesia is like few years behind India.

It’s, it felt like full greenfield market for us. So, and it was tough. First couple of years were tough.

It took like, I would say…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 36:31
because you don’t speak Bahasa.

Raviteja Dodda 36:33
We don’t speak Bahasa. And then we had to build.

And interestingly, I mean, we, so there was a founder I knew who basically joined us at the point of time. And we moved into like Jakarta and then said, okay, start setting up Southeast Asia for us. It took like 18, 24 months to kind of get to a million.

And, but then after that, we scaled up pretty quickly. Right. But the best part is, I mean, because we had much, we were much ahead of everyone when we started off.

And then we were one of the earliest players. So it helped us kind of like expand and then kind of.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 37:11
Did you hire local team there to build trust?

Raviteja Dodda 37:14
Yeah. So we started building the local teams. Now we have like about 25 member team in Indonesia.

So we, just in Indonesia, we have about 150 customers.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 37:25
Okay. Wow.

Raviteja Dodda 37:25
Just in Indonesia. Broader Southeast Asia, we have again, much larger customer base, about 300, I guess. And so that all expansion happened, like, so that, so the difference between like Southeast Asia is unique in the sense that each country is also different.

It’s not just also one country, right? I mean, it’s Indonesia, and then there’s Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and all of these countries. Again, but for now, I wouldn’t say like, there’s an opportunity for every SaaS company, right?

Because like we are serving consumer brands, whether it could be like digital brands, or offline retailers, banks, and so on. So for us, Southeast Asia is a interesting market, right? But it’s also a tough market.

So, I mean, while I can talk about that, the ability to kind of scale, crack these markets, if anyone has the opportunity to obviously kind of crack US, this is definitely a harder mark. I mean, there’s a harder way to kind of keep cracking these Asian markets. But and also at the same time, some of these Asian markets can like, like, you have to invest in kind of crack, I would scaling multiple countries in each of these markets.

It’s not like you just crack one country, and then you just like, okay, you can just keep building a large business, right? But that said, for a lot of, I think I keep speaking to multiple companies. There’s opportunity for a lot of these companies to kind of build sizable businesses across Asia, which is India, Southeast Asia, Middle East, think of it like near shores, there’s a lot of similarities of India as a market.

But there’s also a lot of nuances as well, regional nuances, right? So we went one market after the other, Southeast Asia, we first did cracked Indonesia.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 39:11
And you parallelly build teams in these markets, or you waited one after the other?

Raviteja Dodda 39:15
So we did Indonesia first, that took more time. But after that, we did quickly. We did like we had to put in a few reps in Singapore.

It’s not like a lot of people, it’s like one country, one person in terms of sales. So we put in someone for Philippines, we hired our GM in Singapore. So we started investing and scaling those each of these countries.

And each of these countries, then you need to kind of build some differentiable customers. I think the key is that okay, sign differentiable customers who everyone looks after. So in Indonesia, we signed the largest e-commerce player Tokopedia, we signed the largest travel player travel, Traveloka

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 39:51
That would be the most difficult to get also.

Raviteja Dodda 39:53
Exactly.
That is where the first 18-24 months took to sign some good referenceable customers. Also start hiring local team. It’s hard to hire local SaaS talent in markets.

It’s easier to hire in Singapore, but harder to hire in Indonesia. I think we did all the hard way. And then now obviously, APAC is like a $15 million plus business for us, Southeast Asia plus ANZ.

So a lot of learnings. I mean, we basically had to go one market after the other, one country after the other. So we have our own learnings of which countries to go after and which countries not.

And we also have regrets of not going into Australia much early on.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 40:32
Okay, you think you should have gone earlier into Australia?

Raviteja Dodda 40:33
We should have gone into Australia. We did kind of like did market research. We thought Australia could be an interesting market.

But then we spent more time in the core Southeast Asian region countries. And then last year, also, we have been investing in Australia. And then it’s already a million dollar business now.

But yeah, I mean, those are some things that I would change. So one thing I also my learning in this one learning is that so there is this blue ocean and strategy and then this greenfield and brownfield markets. And so in fact, like if I look back, we should have entered into Europe earlier.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 41:15
Okay.

Raviteja Dodda 41:15
Then we obviously we were a little late to enter in the US market.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 41:21
And you didn’t have the money. So how would you have entered?

Raviteja Dodda 41:24
Yeah, I mean, so we tried to kind of like, sometimes in the US when we basically had a larger competition and a lot of competitive landscape. Europe was kind of like not many people were focusing on it. Actually not.

No one was focusing on the Europe as a market. So it could have been an opportunity for us to grab market share faster. And we let it kind of like one of our competitors kind of take capture that market share it.

I mean, we did that in Southeast Asia. But doing in the market which matters in terms of the scale is obviously has a lot of value, right? Because in Southeast Asia, like certain, I mean, some of these markets like tap after a beyond period of time beyond the scale of the…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 42:12
because the depth is not there.

Raviteja Dodda 42:14
Depth is not there.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 42:14
Europe is much, much bigger than..

Raviteja Dodda 42:16
Like markets like UK, Germany, France, and so on, like there’s a lot of depth. But at the same time can be challenging. But if you are able to do that, it would have a lot of anyways, it would it would yield a lot more.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 42:33
What have been your biggest challenges in the European market?

Raviteja Dodda 42:38
See, Europe, again, is I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, I would say I wouldn’t say like we are still kind of like fully cracked the playbook for Europe. Because it’s a lot more fragmented. There’s UK, there’s Germany, there’s France, and there’s a lot of these countries.

And, and you need to have a localized UTM in each of these countries. And so that that makes it a bit of challenging in terms of how you approach the go to market. And there’s, there’s also a bit of slowness in terms of change that European companies have.

And, and, yeah, I think of all the markets for us, which have been slow, Europe has been the market, it could also be driven by our execution, we did not probably execute that well, when compared to some of our other markets. But in fact, Middle East has been our fastest growing market. It’s a $10 million business for us.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 43:36
And within that 10 million, which contributes the maximum?

Raviteja Dodda 43:39
UAE, UAE is the largest, and then followed by, it’s split between all other countries. Again, and, and there’s some, I think some of these are not necessarily about the market, it also can be driven by the people that we have, the execution rigor that we had, it’s, it’s, it’s all.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 43:57
So you’re saying you never went wrong in hiring?

Raviteja Dodda 43:59
No, no, we did, we did. And, and, I mean, I would say quite a bit, quite a bit of times. I mean, so for example, I mean, Europe, I mean, maybe I think that’s one of the things like we did not probably get the hiring right so far.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 44:18
What’s your learning in hiring for a specific new country? Let’s say, what, how did you have went about hiring in Europe, in Southeast Asia and Middle East?

Raviteja Dodda 44:29
Yeah. Southeast Asia, I think we, I would say a big part of initial growth happened, the first jump happened from a very founder driven person, founder type mentality of the person.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 44:41
So you went there?

Raviteja Dodda 44:42
No, no. So my, so I was mentioning like there was another founder, his name is Sam. So he was founder of another company.

And I met him at the accelerator that I was part of, his company was not doing well, and he was ready to join hands with us. So he moved to Southeast Asia for us and, and, and helped launch Southeast Asia. Then once he brought it to like a million and so we moved someone from India, and then he did that one to five sort of the journey in Southeast Asia for us.

So it’s like, I would say founder type mentality and founder type hustle, sort of people are the people that worked for us. And in fact, the person that who did that scale up in Southeast Asia, to some extent, we moved him to the US now. I mean, two and a half, three years ago, he’s currently the vice president of sales for us in North America.

So I think you, I mean, the idea is that, I mean, when you find, like you try to kind of, I mean, a lot of these, some of these people didn’t have like a lot of experience, in fact, when they started off. But once you see that kind of like, that hustle and the hunger, you kind of like, you should encourage them. And then you’re able to kind of, you should keep giving them challenging, you should give them the freedom and the opportunity kind of scale.

And sometimes it just doesn’t work out right. I mean, we had seasoned leaders in some of the Western markets in the early days. And the so there’s a difference between kind of people who can create playbooks to people who can execute playbooks.

I think in the early on like zero to one, or like even zero to four or five journey of any, any new market, I think we were talking about like every market is, is almost like creating a PMF in every market. So the product can be seen largely same, there could be nuances that you learn as you kind of like speak to customers and then find the gaps and solve for the gaps. But I mean, but the but you still need to do the PMF, you still need to get that first 10 good referenceable customers.

And that takes someone who can kind of figure out like that playbook and create that playbook. Like which segments to go after? What is the pitch that we need to be done?

And everyone, because we are a very mission critical product, everyone would have this challenge. Okay, who do you work with in the US? Who do you work with in the Europe?

And so, and you need to kind of like really kind of build trust with the champion and the buyer and then able to kind of say share like how, like you need to be able to go against all that kind of gaps that you have it, you might not have a referenceable brand, you don’t have a referenceable customers. So you need someone who can kind of hustle through those challenges. And I was obviously personally involved in some of the first 10 customers in many of these markets. Like I obviously have

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 47:35
You used to take a lot of flights?

Raviteja Dodda 47:37
Yeah, quite a bit, even now I travel every quite a bit every two months across. And I figured out my way of travel, I’ll share but I kind of like to like this year, I did like eight cities in 22 days at one go. So I tried to kind of pack all my travel at one place.

But yeah, I think that so just that founder mindset and the hustle kind of people that you need. And US founders need to be very closely involved. In especially in opening up these markets.

And the best part is that like even as my leadership team, my CRO has been with the company for 10 years. He has been in the founding team. So we have multiple leaders like in the overall leadership team, who like, I mean, who are very strong leaders who have been with the company for a while and then have are almost like founders from my standpoint, right?

So yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 48:40
So just to summarize, let’s say, whenever the SaaS company, you’re opening a new country, what worked for you was getting a person of founder mindset to be the GM of that country, acquire 10 reference customers in that. And that helped you take to zero to five million in that country.

Raviteja Dodda 48:59
Yeah, I can just extend to that, like, get someone who can kind of hustle, also have a good customer success counterpart, to make sure that as we sign those customers, so get you when you’re signing your first 10 customers, make sure that you give as much attention to all of them, so that everyone is advocating for you. So that the very happy customers create playbooks to amplify that advocacy. So that’s where your mixers or your events will come where you bring this 10-20 customers and then bring some prospects together.

And then they’re able to kind of share that story and then share how they’re able to kind of see value. And then you kind of obviously kind of put your marketing playbooks. And yeah, so those are some things.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 49:45
So for example, in countries like Europe, you were initially sending your talent from India to these countries to be the GM, right?

Raviteja Dodda 49:52
Yes. No, I think Middle East also we hired locally over.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 49:56
The first hire was a local?

Raviteja Dodda 49:57
Yes. I mean, I would say like, we are signing a few customers from India traveling. But then when we are serious in 2021, we hired a sales leader, a customer success leader, after which is when the whole growth happened.

Europe, we always hired locally. But initially, we signed some of the European customers from India. We were selling into those customers from India itself.

So we in fact, like Deutsche Telekom, which is the largest telecommunications giant in Europe, we signed them from India. Travelodge, which is a large hotel aggregator in UK and broader Europe.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 50:36
So how did you build trust? Because they were all European customers. How did they trust that an Indian company would not break down?

Raviteja Dodda 50:43
I think so that’s where I mean, that I mean, that’s a I mean, in fact, I mean, that’s the big, big part that you need to address if you look at all the enterprise customers. A big part of it is like one like the trust building or the de-risking the overall decision, right? So one, your product definitely need to excel better than your competition, who might have a larger presence.

I think that’s something that we were able to because we were operating in India, and then we built like very strong product, serving some of the largest players. I think it really helped us kind of build a very good product. The second is trust building is the key.

I mean, like we were able to sign Deutsche Telekom, because we were we had customers like Airtel, which is a very large telecommunications player. So we showcase that we were able to understand their needs better than any other people in the concentration set. So which requires that so basically, your product and your sales process need to really excel better than out there, someone in your other competition.

So if you just do your normal average sales process, it would not work. You might need to travel there, build that trust, build a champion, showcase similar referenceable customers might not be Europe, but we’re able to use our global references, right? And yeah, I mean, those first 10 customers, you need to kind of do a lot more in terms of your ability to understand their business, so that they feel that okay, hey, this is the right company to kind of like for us to kind of take a bet on.

It’s not like we will be able to sign everyone. But we I mean, you just need to kind of sign some good ones, right?

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 52:33
And how do you spot early adopters in each of these markets?

Raviteja Dodda 52:37
I think our journey has not been like through growth with early adopters. I would, I mean, again, each market was different for us. Southeast Asia, we entered like, in the early part of the growth, growth of the overall category in the market.

US and Europe, like when we started entering in 2020, 21, it was late. So the early adopters are already using some of the competitors, right? So it meant that I mean, we actually won more harder enterprise customers.

And so in fact, one of the pivotal points, I mean, some of the key customers that we signed in the US early on were like McAfee, Ally Financial, which is a large bank in the US. And there it just that, I mean, it was less of an early adopter motion. I mean, and that’s something that I think it might not be the right left a lot of startups.

I mean, early adopters in the Bay Area, for example, are probably the best place to kind of start off, right? We ended up having to take a more harder route of like going through the RFPs and just really kind of putting a lot more hard work than your average sales rep on a, of your competitor. Here on our side, it would be me, myself, and like a lot of us kind of putting a lot more attention to how we are pitching, how we are serving, how we are understanding the needs.

I think the product was always our strong, strongest weapon. But then we were able to show that we were able to kind of solution and able to understand the needs better. So we had to kind of in the US, it was less about early adopters, we had to kind of sign.

I mean, some of the obviously some of the signups were also driven by our mobile strengths. Like we obviously have a very strong mobile product. So that obviously, like some of the customers that we were able to sign initially were like, driven by our mobile strengths.

And so that helped us. And then then we kind of executed the playbook that I mentioned, like, more referenceable customers doing more of the events. So it was in the US, it’s our growth has been largely driven by large enterprise RFPs, which and people always say that, hey, if you haven’t built the RFP, you haven’t helped to build the RFP, it’s hard to win.

But we have actually had a good experience. So we were able to win in multiple RFPs, which we did not help build. I mean, obviously, there are also RFPs that we might have lost, because we were just in the, we were just a checkbox, or we were just too late in the consideration set.

But yeah, but we are learning has been the don’t ignore RFPs just come to you, we were able to win, it obviously needs a lot more effort. But so that helped us kind of obviously.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 55:39
Can you tell to more of our audience, like which are young SaaS founders, RFP requests for proposals, how do they operate in the US market? Like, how did you yourself learn about them?

Raviteja Dodda 55:51
I think it comes down to the category also. So I think when we started going into the US and Europe and some of these markets in 2020, 2021, it’s already messed up quite a mature category. So we call it cross channel marketing or multi channel marketing category.

It’s a it’s it’s been a quite a mature category. So, so it meant that companies were floating are companies are floating RFPs to kind of take a to buy a product in the category, right? But not might not be the case for every category, because like a lot of now new age AI tools, these are like new categories or new budget investments.

So that’s that when we can be different, but obviously, there are people who are going after like established categories as well, right? Whether it is in the service management, like Atomicwork and some of the people that we know of. Now, like, one of the one of the things that has worked for us is like we are, we have invested in analyst relations, like in 2017, 18 itself.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 56:56
What do you mean by investing in analyst relations?

Raviteja Dodda 56:58
In terms of the focus. So Gartner..

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 57:01
you signed up with Gartner for the pay package and everything.

Raviteja Dodda 57:05
It’s not necessary to kind of pay. I mean, I would say to be it’s not necessary to be a customer of Gartner or Forrester to be actually invest into, into the analyst relations. So Gartner, Forrester, all of them have the ability to kind of for you to kind of request a briefing with any of the analysts for free, by the way.

There’s no need to pay. I mean, there are obviously advantages of being a customer. I’m not denying this.

So, so we, so Gartner, so we started, we started engaging with the analyst in the mobile engagement space, which was the initial category that we started off. And, and engaging in the sense that, okay, we were briefing with them, hey, here is our product. And then we also brought someone for analyst relations in the US.

And he has been with the company for now, like six and a half, seven years. And, and then, and then kind of like, we were able to kind of get a very good placement in the Gartner magic quadrant for the mobile marketing platforms. Actually, we are probably the first Indian company to be a leader in the Gartner MQ.

So it was like 2017, when we were a leader in the Gartner MQ, right? Then we continue to invest in Forrester and Gartner. And, and we were, we got very good recognition in terms of on the both the wave reports and magic quadrants.

And that helped us kind of be part of the consideration sets when some of these enterprise RFPs that happen, like they basically look at, okay, who are the people that I should invite to the RFP. So that helped us. So that’s, that’s one of the things I would add, like, okay, what helped us kind of get into RFPs.

And once you’re in an RFP, then don’t take those lightly. I mean, if, if you, obviously, if you haven’t helped to build the RFP, then you need to put in a lot more effort and basically kind of like, and have a good win rate. Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 58:52
And one important part that I want to touch upon is, right, how would you categorize MoEngage today among the, this AI, you know, in this AI world? Would you call MoEngage an AI core company, AI enabled company or no AI at all?

Raviteja Dodda 59:10
I would call us AI core. Okay. So we have been investing in our AI engine since 2016.

So it’s been like over nine years. So if you look at, at a broad level, right, I mean, we are helping brands kind of serve personalized engagement, it’s hyper personalized engagement at scale at most of our customers have anywhere from millions of users to hundreds of millions of users as well, right. And that’s only possible to kind of with automation and AI.

And, and we’ve been making investments over the last nine years. And initially started with kind of like, optimizing that. I mean, the core part of marketing automation is like, okay, how do we help brands deliver the right offer offering to the right customer at the right time or the right channel and, and also with the right frequency, right.

So we, these are all the components of marketing automation, right. So then we start solving each of them, like we started solving for the timing of messaging, hey, how can we move it from a rule based approach to a more intelligence based approach, where we are automatically figuring out what is the right time of engagement for each customer, instead of having like a specific defined time for every customer, right. So similarly, then we solve for channel, then we solve for recommendations, like what what products should be recommended to each customer, then like which customers have propensity shown.

And then also, then we did a lot more decisioning capabilities. So it’s been and then obviously, with the advent of generative and reasoning AI in the last two years, we started investing more in terms of, I think we thought content will be the hardest. And then with generative AI, it basically helped us kind of like invest into the content generation, or generating more variants of contents and all of that. So we’re investing more into agents now. So broadly, I think, our thought was has been that, okay, either it should, this AI capability should help companies drive more lifetime value, or should be make their life significantly easier.

So one of our biggest value points has been that our product is very easy to use, and very user friendly. And that’s, that’s been a very strong aspect. And yeah, so and then we, we always try to make sure that our AI capabilities kind of clearly show the impact to customers, like, okay, what is the impact that a given AI capability generated for them so that they’re able to kind of see the value, right?

So so those are all some things that have helped us.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:01:34
And, you know, if you have to advise a B2B SaaS founder building right now from zero, and the goal is to build a 10 mil ARR company, which geography would you advise today to go in?

Raviteja Dodda 01:01:48
See, if anyone can build, if anyone can target and crack the US, they should go and crack the US market, right? It’s a large software spend market.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:02:01
And how much investment is required to go to 10 mil in the US market versus India market?

Raviteja Dodda 01:02:06
I mean, there’s always a lot of nuances in terms of whether you’re, it’s a self-serve, PLG.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:02:12
Let’s talk about enterprise.

Raviteja Dodda 01:02:14
Enterprise, right? So enterprise is always the mid market enterprise where you want to get some good early adopters who are like your digital native businesses, because those are the generally the early adopters, right? Like digital native businesses, and then then you can scale.

So to get to like a 10 million dollar kind of ARR, I think, I mean, so there are two ways to look at, right? First, like thinking about like this breakup, like, okay, what does it take to kind of get to a million or so? I would say it will take at least like a few millions of investment, just in sales and marketing to get get there.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:02:52
So wouldn’t you say, like, if you have to put a approximate number, it could take like 10 to 20 million to reach 10 mil ARR in the US market?

Raviteja Dodda 01:03:00
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think more like 20 plus.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:03:03
And to reach that in the India market, how much would it take? Between 5 to 10 mil?

Raviteja Dodda 01:03:09
See, I think, firstly, you need to look at the category that you need to operate in, because it’s not, see, for us, our category helps us kind of have large ACVs, even in India.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:03:20
Let’s say large categories like ITSM.

Raviteja Dodda 01:03:22
ITSM Or even like, maybe if it is like something on the customer service standpoint. So there, I mean, yes, I mean, it obviously has a lower spend.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:03:32
In India, it would take between 5 to 10 mil kind of?

Raviteja Dodda 01:03:35
Yes.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:03:36
Isn’t it better to give a counterintuitive view to founder that hey, scale to 10 mil ARR in India in three to four years by spending 5 to 10 million dollars, and then raise large amount that you did, and then go to the US market? Why is it the entire ecosystem is saying one thing, go to the US on day zero?

Raviteja Dodda 01:03:54
See, I think there are two multiple ways to look at this, right? If you do that, I mean, so if you’re able to, if you’re seeing what it would mean that if you’re seeing traction in India, and you’re able to kind of do that, it firstly, it will take a meaningful amount of time, right? By the time, so there’s someone in the US who is doing something similar to you, and is also kind of scaling it.

So they would have captured larger market share. So when, when you then have to kind of go to the US market. So firstly, I mean, yes, in India, you can get to 10 million, or even 20 million, or even 30 million.

In, it depends on what kind of company that you’re building, if you’re building a venture backed company. So that means that you’re, you’re basically kind of looking at, okay, how can I build a hundred million dollar or multi hundred million dollar ARR company, right? Which means that, like you might, you would kind of like, your growth would come down at some point, if you’re just focusing on Indian market.

So that’s where I mean, if you’re in the US, if you’re able to kind of even get to like 10, you’re able to still maintain, because the same market that you’re, you just need to kind of continue to invest more into the sales engine and marketing engine. And because it’s a larger market, right? So yes, you, you again need to put in a lot more hard work at the point of time, once you have scaled up in India, and then US, but there are some, but, but what you could do is that sometimes it might be harder for people to kind of access US market and then or like rather, they just need to first get the product market fit, right?

Okay, I have a product, whether it’s a value or not, but I have access to good network in India, right? So that kind of sort of initial PMF, like a zero to half a million dollar business or zero to $1 million business, you can try to do it in India, and then quickly kind of focus on the US market, if there is clearly different opportunity in the US market, right?

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:05:47
But then it’s harder because the founder won’t get money to get if the founder has gone from zero to $1 million ARR, they will not get VC money to do it in the US market, because they would have to prove the zero to one again in the US market to get serious VC money.

Raviteja Dodda 01:06:01
So you need to get those sort of investors who kind of understand, you need to do that find that one investor who understands that, hey, this product that I have done in India, it works in a lot of opportunities similarly in the US, and I can invest. Yes, there are like, and that’s where for us like there has been hard choices and hard challenges, right? The problem is like once you take VC money, like you need to keep showing growth.

Yeah, but at the same time, so that means that you need to keep making investments in your core market. And at the same time, you still need to do the new market. And which requires both require founders attention.

And that’s been a shot that’s been the biggest challenge for me in the last 10 years. Right? Because you want to keep growing, you need to keep getting a number sticking.

But at the same time, you need to get your new markets happening, right? And that’s where you you alone can’t do it. So that doesn’t you need people who can be like, act like founders and work like founders and can take that baton for you.

So that’s, and the lesser the number of markets, the lesser that challenge. I mean, but at the same time, and I was speaking to like one more startup founder recently, and he built already like a $1.5 million business just in India. And he’s like, I mean, I just want to keep building in India.

And he’s able to kind of raise capital. And he’s raising more capital as well. I think it just comes down to the category.

But obviously, he’s like, okay, let me get to 20-30 million. And at that point of time, I’ll start kind of growing into other markets. So I think there is definitely opportunity across overall Asia, which is like India plus the near shore of Asia.

But which means that you need to crack a lot of markets. But in any space, the US market is very noisy and very tough. So there’s that nuance, right?

Is your category in the US? What is the stage? And, and that also kind of defines whether you should just focus on outside the US.

I mean, there’s enough opportunity, but it’s going to be more challenging and more fragmented markets. But still, there’s a lot of opportunity outside the US as well. Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:08:24
What timeline do you think about MoEngage going public in any market?

Raviteja Dodda 01:08:31
Yeah, I think so. As a company, like that’s the direction that we’re working towards. Firstly, we believe, firstly, if you look at the overall go to market for us has been that we have been a multi geo multi product company.

We did all the hard work of scaling up four different or four or five different regions, grounds up. And, and that helped us kind of with a lot of predictability for us. Every quarter, we are able to kind of like drive a lot of predictability because of that multi geo presence.

And the multi product is also been a big part of our growth now and then also will be a big part of our growth over the period of time. So our space, we believe that there’s an opportunity to build a multi billion dollar revenue company. And, and we believe and we want to build a long term sustainable business and we are also turning profitable by end of this fiscal year.

So, so that helps us like we’re getting ready towards, towards kind of building a company that can go public in the next, yeah, near near timeframe, somewhere between in the next two to four years sort of timeframe.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:09:43
And which are the companies today in the Indian ecosystem building like MoEngage for the global markets, especially in enterprise, between zero to let’s say five or 10 that you are the most excited about? Any four, five companies?

Raviteja Dodda 01:09:55
Yeah, I mean, there’s, I think the good part about a lot of the recent SaaS companies in the last three, four or four, five years, one is that I mean, we all like MoEngage, some of the other companies in our time period, I mean, all of us had to take a very hard path because there was not of SaaS, like SaaS was not a darling for venture capital during the time period of 2016 to 2018, 2020. So we, I mean, we had to take a very hard path of like raising capital. And then that’s been not been easy.

But I think for a lot of SaaS companies in the recent last three to four years, I think they have had better access to capital. And yeah, so I’m excited about multiple companies, like, like one of the companies that I invested in is Rocketlane, which we just, which is doing well, and taken a very US first approach. And I’ve known like Atomicwork, Vijay of Atomic Work, as one of the companies.

Yeah, I mean, and there is GreyLabs, is it GreyLabs? I think that’s a company that I recently interacted with. They’re doing very interesting stuff in India.

So I think there’s this lot that’s happening, like spend flow and multiple companies in the together fund that I invested in. So it’s a lot, I think great to see a lot of these companies came out from like the second generation or, or mafia of some of the SaaS startups. And I think they, they are significantly reducing the kind of the reinvention cycle, like a lot of us like had to reinvent and figure out a lot of things.

They are basically kind of doing it much faster time frame and very happy to see a very vibrant SaaS ecosystem actually in India.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:11:40
But do you see companies from India sell the 1 million ACV faster to their customers?

Raviteja Dodda 01:11:48
See, I think, see, the biggest challenge for SaaS companies had been the distribution or go to market, right? We always knew how to build good products. I think distribution was the biggest challenge.

I think that’s the part, a lot of us have, I would say, hustled and figured out. And I think there’s a lot of playbooks that we all established that if you are doing enterprise in the US, you need to operate like almost like you need to operate as an US company. Whether you have a lot of teams in India, there’s a lot of advantages of operating that cross-border teams.

You need to operate with, with a lot of sales and marketing investments and customers, local customers investments in the US or, or even markets, right? I think a lot of those playbooks are now a lot more, and I think people have figured. And there is a lot of advantages of our India-based teams, right?

I mean, the cost structures. And there’s, there’s now a lot of talent also in sales and marketing in India, not just like product engineering. So, so those are all I think, I would say, like, big drivers.

I think, I’m sure there’ll be a lot, the next generation of public companies, even in Indian markets, one of the next generation of companies will be SaaS companies, beyond obviously the IT services that happened, and also the consumer internet that happened. I think I’m very excited about, to see few SaaS companies in, scaled SaaS companies in the Indian markets.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:13:12
Any particular names that you think can go public in India in the next two, three years?

Raviteja Dodda 01:13:16
I know of some companies that are working on it. I mean, I think, I think Amagi, I think it’s public, it’s, they kind of converted to a limited company as well. I think you see the news of Capillary also.

So, so those are some names that’s public. I’m sure there are more names that will come out. Yeah, very excited about that.

And there’s a lot of interest from public market investors from, from my recent interactions as well. And they’re all looking forward to seeing more scaled real SaaS companies in the Indian equity markets.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:13:50
And Ravi, one last thing that I want to cover in the podcast is your org structure. Yep. What, how has that evolved over a period of time?

Raviteja Dodda 01:13:58
So firstly, I’m, I think I, and so I’m fortunate to have very strong C-level leadership. So my, my CFO and board member is my classmate at like high school and my CRO is my classmate at IIT Kharagpur. And we have had our product leaders, our engineering leaders, all of them have kind of spent a significant amount of time at MoEngage.

So I think, so the way I see it is that, I mean, all of them are actually operate like almost like founders, right. And then at the same time, we brought like some seasoned leadership in the recent past, like our chief customer officer and so on. I think our uniqueness is that because we operate in like five, six geographies or five, six regions.

So we needed to have a functional as well as a regional, regional approach to go market. So functional in the sense that, I mean, we have all the sales leaders for each region and marketing leaders for each region, all of them reporting into the functional leadership. But at the same time that we have all of our, like I would say, like we have boards or you can call it like mini startups, which are regional, regional, regional units.

So we have a separate team for India, separate team for the US, separate team for Middle East, Europe, Southeast Asia, and also even LATAM. And all of them have separate teams across marketing, sales, customer success, implementation, and so on. And then they operate as like a startup in itself.

And so, so that, so basically, that means that like, if you take any regional unit like US, we have a sales leader, we have a marketing leader, we have a customer success leader, we have an implementation leader. And all of them kind of like you work in unison as like a, as a, as a mini startup in itself. And then we have a plan differently for each region and all of that, right.

But at the same time, all of the sales leaders report into this global sales leader, marketing leaders for each region, they put into the global marketing leader. So we kept that sort of a org structure, which is both functional plus regional. And our operating cadence, which is like, we set targets for each region, we don’t do like a separate review for like sales globally or marketing globally, we do regional reviews, and we operate as a regional region unit site.

So, and that way, whether it is a region small or big, each region gets the right amount of focus. And, and we make sure that each region leaders are like, have that hustle and the ownership.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:16:29
And what has worked for you in fundraising, you mentioned that, you know, fundraising is one thing that clicked for you after 2020. So what are your learnings on that?

Raviteja Dodda 01:16:40
Yeah, I think a lot of our investors are the ones who actually kind of probably missed out in the previous round, or did not, or passed us on the previous round, and then ended up coming on the next round. Which meant that the investors like to see progress, like to see that I mean, so a lot of our fundraising happened just by really showing the proof. Simple.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:17:10
How important is storytelling?

Raviteja Dodda 01:17:12
Storytelling was important. Maybe I wasn’t too good at it in the in the in the first. So, and also like our category was is also a bit more difficult category, right?

I mean, everyone, when you go and pitch marketing automation, whether it is 2014, or 2015, or 2018, everyone say, hey, this is a very highly fragmented category. There are so many players. Like, how do you break out?

So then the only way to kind of answer that question is just by showing, actually by actually doing it. So we just kind of kept on executing and then kept on breaking out and kept on winning each market. So it just that’s that’s been the one that’s been the bigger I mean, bigger reason why kind of like we were able to attract venture capital from the right type of investors also, it also meant that we should be speaking to investors when we are not actively raising.

So we kept on interacting with investors in terms of like just sharing the updates and continuously kind of having those engagements. And that’s where my, my CFO and board member also helped me that okay, where I don’t need to spend myself be spending a lot of time, he was able to kind of offload some of those things. So that’s where your leadership team comes into picture that okay, your revenue leader key needs to keep hitting the numbers, your customers leader need to help ensure that your net revenue retention is of a very high number.

So all of these need to kind of have make happen in unison to be able to kind of do that. And yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:18:40
Thank you so much Ravi, it’s been such a pleasure learning from you. I think this is a very exhaustive podcast that we covered minutely small details of your MoEngage journey. And thanks for building it for India.

You have a playbook for many Indian founders and thanks for sharing it very candidly on the podcast today.

Raviteja Dodda 01:18:58
Yeah, same. I mean, I know, with the time that we had, we only can cover so much. But I think it was great to share a lot of things that we I never shared in the past.

And yeah, I mean, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of cross border SaaS companies with India roots that will happen and that will be large businesses, like the like the HubSpots or the Salesforce of the world. I think I’m sure you will see a lot. We’ll see a lot more of this.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:19:23
I’m looking forward to see the first truly $1 billion company in revenue come out of India.

Raviteja Dodda 01:19:29 –
Yeah, I think we have Zoho. And then I’m sure like Freshworks will be the next and there’ll be a lot more that will follow. Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 01:19:36
Thanks again, Ravi.

Raviteja Dodda 01:19:38
Thank you for hosting me.
Yeah.