How Netcore Cloud CEO Kalpit Jain grew Netcore Cloud to $136.5M revenue and 5K customers in 2025.

the future of email marketing is and I said no way and he said no it is and I said prove it and then he showed me some some things and I said you have to show that on stage on that note please tell me welcome to Stage Rees Jane from netor did I get that right that's how that's how it happened that's how it happened take a seat so um this guy is if you go to India and you ask around and you say who was like the first big sort of software internet entrepreneur in India many people people will say Rees Jane because you launched India World in '98 launched it in ' 95 95 sold it in '99 this is sorry for doing this how many of you were born after 1995 there there you go the front row there we go all right you sold it then for what 116 million 99 yeah 115 115 million 99 um you then took all that money did you plow a bunch of that right into net core immediately no netore actually I didn't put in too much money because first 10 years we were too small not growing and then we did something right we basically started email and SMS Marketing in India and those just turned out cash so it's just perfect I didn't have to put much money in this was so we're looking at your Revenue graph right now 2003 you get going it was 2008 was that like your first million dollar year maybe yeah around that time around that time what started working really well like 2013 2018 we're going to 15 so two things happened 2013 uh 2018 2008 to 13 basically the email SMS Revenue started growing very rapidly until 20 8 we are doing some random stuff which wasn't making us any money okay um you know when you sell a company you think you can you're like God's gift to the world so you you think anything everything will work didn't happen um and your wife reminded you of that right absolutely yeah um you got that on video somewhere I do I do have that on video 2018 we also did around that time we did two things first is to the email SMS and we sell to b2c companies um mid to large sized companies we added marketing automation with a customer engagement piece and then we also started growing internationally mhm so we started expanding from India to Southeast Asia Middle East uh not yet the us at that time but that helped us essentially diversify both the product side and the Geo side spend a minute talking about your product strategy then the net core marketing Cloud so actually if you think about it the the real problem that businesses have is if you ask why are b2c businesses not more profitable and the real answer is that most of those profits or some of those profits are basically on the balance sheets of big adtech Google and meta I mean in many cases they're in a CA trap where the cost of customer acquisition is going up much faster than their revenues so where netor comes in is basically saying that look we can help you do more with your existing customers so it's a full stack where we have the communication channels email SMS WhatsApp RCS and all of that and then you also have the marketing automation piece the customer engagement so the journeys Etc the personalization bit and then we added search and product Discovery to it through an acquisition MH so full stack hopefully you guys are sort of grounded now on what Rees is building netc core.com if you want to follow along on your laptops we tried to map this full space right so I start off by just saying let me just do the bottom left of what you see on the screen here but then when I posted it on LinkedIn people said no no no you can't just talk about newsletters if you talk about email marketing I talk about cpass and Omni Channel and walk me through are mean are these the right buckets how do you think about email marketing in general see email marketing has been around for 20 25 years now there are different types there is the API based email marketing so C pass bottom C pass just use the API and send things out uh newsletters use so substack Etc they will send out uh anyone running a Blog will have newsletters going out upper upper right right campaign monitor clearly there then you have for smbs uh basically the the sort of integrated marketing stack like MailChimp yeah essentially for the small midsize businesses um then you have the Omni Channel which is where sort of netcode plays yep mid to large sized companies so brace sort of clavio U message bird CCH all of them are there uh and then you have sort of the Omni Channel and the CRM bit where email fits in as part of a multi Channel communication strategy because the customers are on different channels this is the bottom right here these are the big guys right these are the m&a players in the space yeah and but they are all Legacy you so Oracle Etc they had bought these email esps about 10 years ago mhm so you have now a new age of companies and there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in email of course which we'll talk about which I showed you y uh which I think can be transfered because in the US for e-commerce companies 20 to 40% revenue is coming from email so the push messages that we get that's the only way for pretty much the only way for them other than maybe SMS to bring customers back to their website or app where they do the transactions and that world is about to change MH and the reason SAS open is beautiful is that statement directly contradicts what arena from hoot kicked us off saying jenz is not looking at emails they ignore push notifications right it just tells you there's a way to do there's different ways to do everything and different things work for different people but this is working for e-commerce Brands it's working for you so much so that you said wow over the first I guess 15 years how much how much did your bank balance like cash in your bank did you build up to so we built it up to about 100 million in by 2020 no outside Capital didn't raise outside profits profits okay so you're sitting there looking you know I'm I'm refreshing my Chase account you're like whoa that's a lot of digits uh you say what do I do with all this money and you say you know what let's bet it all let's spend 100 million bucks cash to go acquire unbox why'd you do this deal so so couple of reasons one is we wanted to look at adjacencies we want first we want to do a large deal we done a couple of small tucks where you sort of add on to the tech but that's not as exciting as a larger deal which can do which did two things for us number one is gave us a complimentary product which we can sell into the same uh marketing department so unboxed uh does search and product Discovery so competitors include algolia Bloom reach Constructor so you can sort of place them there and it also gave us a presence in the US market now for a company like ours primarily India southeast Asia Emerging Markets it's very hard building an organic presence uh uh organic base and organic growth in the US and that's where unboxed came in so at one shot we got about 200 plus customers whom we could potentially cross- sell our products to mhm now people can see your m&a strategy going down the left side of the screen you're not just buying companies like unbox you just bought a mtek Services Agency why would a SAS company buy a service these are some of them are just Investments okay so what happens is when we go to our customers in fact this is I think very important in SAS I think and I'm seeing this coming up again and again what at least mid to large-sized companies are saying is we just don't want the platform add a thin Services layer so your platform becomes better and better every day it's what I call sort of Kaizen almost like the Japanese word continuous Improvement now as SAS companies most SAS companies are told not to get into services but the services layer actually can add a lot of stickiness so think of it as 80% SAS 20% services that thin layer I think can make accounts much more stickier especially when you're going to the mid to large- sized businesses and you're getting paid for it and you're getting paid for it this is a good trade and you also learn because customers are more willing to now tell you what are their problems because they want them solved and they don't necessarily have the internal teams I mean look at what is a typical adoption of most SAS platforms 30 40% topical what adoption adop adop 30 40% so that's the big challenge that I think an investment in a Services Company helps us solve that they can basically take over because the DNA is different they can help with Services Revenue keeps growing you know I get you on the phone you say Okay Nathan your six buckets look good for email marketing your team was very nice and then it was supposed to be a 15minute call it turns into an hourong call of you going this amp is the future amp is the future I'm going I don't know what the hell amp is I'm pretty good in SAS what is amp and why is this the future of email Market marketing so amp is let me just hold on so I don't feel stupid raise your hand if you have no idea what amp is please somebody okay all right now teach us so probably many of you all know amp for mobile Pages this is amp for email uh now what amp does so basically it's a Google tech Google and Yao both support it with with Gmail I'm going to give the visual first right this is this is what if you...