Why Paytm and Tokopedia are going for this marketing startup

Photo credit: Indi Samarajiva

Serial entrepreneurs can get inspiration from the strangest of things, even from a coffee machine. That’s how Ankit Maheshwari, his wife Nandini Rathi, and his brother Arjun Maheshwari came up with their newest venture.

Between them, they could already boast of startups like Instamedia Network (acquired by a Dubai media company), Born Rich, and ContentCloud.

“We (Arjun to be specific) had ordered an expensive coffee machine from one of India’s leading ecommerce sites,” says Nandini. It was delivered in a day’s time. But after a week, they received an email marketing message, offering a 25 percent discount on the same product.

“It was our light bulb moment!” The incident helped them figure out what was wrong with the marketing channels of ecommerce companies.

“There is a clear disconnect between the tools used by them. Sales has no insight about tech. Tech has no insight about customer care. The customer team has no insight about marketing, and so forth,” Nandini tells Tech in Asia.

As a result, ecommerce firms end up sending marketing messages to customers across the board, even to those who have already purchased the product.

The experience led to the birth of Betaout, a cloud-based marketing software provider that enables all the marketing channels of an ecommerce company to work together.

Pushing ecommerce

Noida-based Betaout was founded by Nandini, Ankit, and Arjun along with Raghubir Thakur and Mayank Dhingra in 2014. Some of its prominent clients are Paytm, Goibibo, GOQii, and Tokopedia. “We are working with over 150 ecommerce companies worldwide,” says Nandini.

The Betaout founders.

The ecommerce market in India is expected to double to US$31 billion by the end of this year.

So it’s a good time for a marketing software product that offers a customized set of tools, especially when most marketing tools used by ecommerce companies and B2B sites are generic in nature.

The aim, ultimately, is to lead to higher sales for ecommerce companies.

The trick

Making money